Q. Having just returned home to the US, you seem to be the right person to turn to for information on a strange little word we heard while we were visiting in your country: loo, meaning a bathroom or restroom. Where could this possibly come from?
A. There are many theories about this word but few firm facts and its origin is one of the more celebrated puzzles in word history. The one thing almost everybody agrees on is that it’s French in origin, or at least has French connections, though opinions differ on what these might be.
A lot of the theories can be disposed of by checking the known first dates of use. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first firm entry is dated as recently as 1940:
I suppose it is unreal because we have been expecting it for so long now, and have known that it must be got over before we can go on with our lives. Like in the night when you want to go to the loo and it is miles away down a freezing cold passage and yet you know you have to go down that passage before you can be happy and sleep again.
Pigeon Pie, by Nancy Mitford, 1940. The thing that must be got over is the Second World War, which, alas, caused the book to fall dead from the press.
However, the Oxford English Dictionary cites earlier examples, one from a letter of 1936 that refers to ‘a lu-lu’, which might from context be a toilet, and another from a previous work by Nancy Mitford:
His correct and slightly pompous manner combined with the absence in his speech of such expressions as ‘O.K. loo’, ‘I couldn’t be more amused’, ‘We’ll call it a day’, ‘lousy’, ‘It was a riot’, ‘My sweetie-boo’, and ‘What a poodle-pie’ to indicate the barrier of half a generation between himself, Paul and Bobby; a barrier which more than any other often precludes understanding, if not friendship, between young and youngish people.
Christmas Pudding, by Nancy Mitford, 1932, a high-spirited story of love and larks among the young and fashionable. Like the book’s modern readers, the Oxford English Dictionary’s editors can only guess at the meaning of loo here.
The comparatively recent eruption of the expression requires us to dismiss entirely the old story that it comes from the habit of the more caring and thoughtful Scottish housewives, in the days before plumbing, of warning passers-by on the street below with the cry Gardy loo! before chucking the contents of their chamber pots out of upstairs windows. (It’s said to be a corrupted form of the French gardez l’eau! or ‘watch out for the water!’) And equally the late date refutes the suggestion that it comes from the French bordalou, a portable commode resembling a sauce boat carried by eighteenth-century ladies in their muffs. Some writers have suggested a connection with Waterloo, neither the London railway station nor the battle site but supposedly a trade name in the early twentieth century for cast-iron lavatory cisterns, a joke or play on the older standard term water closet; this idea is principally based on its enigmatic appearance in James Joyce’s Ulysses of 1922: ‘O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset.’ One proposed non-French origin is that loo was a modified form of lee, for the side of a ship away from the wind (largely on the grounds that leeward was often said as looward), supposedly the side used to relieve oneself in the happy expectation that the results wouldn’t make a return visit. The fact that ships had places for the purpose right at the bows, hence called heads, is enough to put the suggestion out of consideration.
Yet another theory, rather more plausibly, has it that it comes from the French euphemism lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’ (it’s always plural), known from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This might have been picked up by British servicemen fighting in France in the First World War, who would have inevitably shortened it and pronounced lieux as ‘loo’.
As matters stand, unless some earlier example turns up, we’re all left guessing.
Q. Lord love a duck: is it a long-winded rhyme for an expletive that has to remain unuttered in this polite company, or is there a story behind it?
A. Not a lot, I’m afraid. It’s a mild expression of surprise, once well known in Britain and dating from the early twentieth century. It has been used a lot in inoffensive situations, so I very much doubt that it’s a euphemism for the F-word.
This remark impressed Stump as an exquisite joke. His rage yielded to a rumble of hoarse laughter. ‘Lord love a duck!’ he guffawed. ‘If only I’d ha’ knowed, I could have told my missus. It would have cheered her up for a week.’
The Wheel O’ Fortune, by Louis Tracy, 1907. Mr Tracy was a British journalist and prolific author, who also wrote under the pen names Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser. He was fond of the expression and used it in at least two other novels.
‘Well, Lord love a duck!’ replied the butler, who in his moments of relaxation was addicted to homely expletives of the lower London type.
The Coming of Bill, by P. G. Wodehouse, 1920. Wodehouse’s butlers were usually ultra-dignified and intimidatingly formal, so it’s good to get a rare glimpse of one with his linguistic guard down.
But why should aristocrats dally amorously with anatine animals? And why should their proclivities be turned into an exclamation? It might have been a fake Cockney version of ‘Lord love us!’ never uttered in real life. Or it might be a line from some music-hall sketch long gone from memory. Perhaps the whole point about it is that it doesn’t make sense?
Q. This question was posed on the US television programme, The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, ‘Who is Luke and why does he have his own temperature?’
A. I presume no good answer was given, which is why you’re turning to me? That’s the trouble with these smart lines, they’re fun for a moment but leave you unsatisfied and wanting more. As it happens, lukewarm has an intriguing history.
The word has been spelled in all sorts of different ways down the centuries, including lew-warm, loo-warm (desirable in any house), lewke-warm and luckwarm. The first part was mainly in dialect use and transmitted orally, so the spelling only settled down to our modern version in standard English in the eighteenth century, though it hasn’t entirely vanished in these other forms.
But the solid quantity of cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display; and when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound egg was little more than loo-warm.
An Inland Voyage, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878. This was Stevenson’s first book, in which he recounted a canoe trip in Belgium and France that he made in 1876 with a friend from university days, Sir Walter Simpson.
Luke has, of course, nothing whatever to do with the given name. It comes from an Old English adjective hléow that is linked to hlēo, shelter or lee (a word that has frequently been spelled lew in British dialects), and to another Old English word meaning debilitated that developed into lew, weak or wan. To be lukewarm is to be only weakly warm, tepid.
An odd sidelight is that from the thirteenth century, luke by itself could mean lukewarm, as could lew (the English Dialect Dictionary reported a century ago that it was then still being widely used in various spellings throughout England, Scotland and Ireland). So you could argue that lukewarm means ‘warm warm’.
Q. Can you enlighten me about the origins of mad as a hatter? Why were hatters thought to be mad? Was it through having to deal with whiny rich women all day long?
A. It’s an intriguing idea, but no, nothing like that.
These days we associate mad as a hatter with a bit of Victorian children’s whimsy:
‘In that direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: and in that direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’
Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, 1865. Though the Cheshire Cat describes the hatter as mad, neither mad as a hatter nor mad hatter appears in the text. Carroll expected his readers to make the connection without spelling out the expression, by then well known.The earliest example known was discovered by Stephen Goranson of Duke University in Blackwood’s Magazine of Edinburgh; a section called Noctes Ambrosianae featured imaginary conversations among the local wits of the time. In the issue of June 1829 this exchange occurs: ‘ “He’s raving.” “Dementit.” “Mad as a hatter. Hand me a segar.” ’ The vocabulary (dementit for demented; segar for cigar) suggests an attempt at projecting a North American vernacular.
Father he larfed out like any thing; I thought he would never stop – and sister Sall got right up and walked out of the room, as mad as a hatter.
The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville, by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, 1836. You will note that Haliburton doesn’t feel the need to explain the saying. This, coupled with the language of Blackwood’s Magazine, suggests it may indeed be of North American origin.
We were talking about it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing Derby Oaks – until he was as mad as a hatter.
Pendennis, by William Makepeace Thackeray, serialised between 1848 and 1850. Curiously, the character of Captain Shandon in this work was modelled by Thackeray on William Maginn, one of the creators of the Noctes Ambrosianae.
Note, by the way, that mad is being used in both these cases in the sense of anger rather than insanity, so these examples better fit the sense of phrases like mad as a wet hen, mad as a hornet, mad as a cut snake, mad as a meat axe, and other wonderful similes, of which the first two are American and the last two from Australia or New Zealand. But Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, used it the same way that Lewis Carroll was later to do: ‘He’s a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter’.
Few people who use the phrase today realize that there’s a story of human suffering behind it; the term derives from an early industrial occupational disease. Felt hats were once very popular in North America and Europe; an example is the top hat. The best sorts were made from beaver fur, but cheaper ones used furs such as rabbit instead.
A complicated set of processes was needed to turn the fur into a finished hat. With the cheaper sorts of fur, an early step was to brush a solution of a mercury compound – usually mercurous nitrate – on to the fur to roughen the fibres and make them mat more easily, a process called carroting because it made the fur turn orange. Beaver fur had natural serrated edges that made this unnecessary, one reason why it was preferred, but the cost and scarcity of beaver meant that other furs had to be used. Whatever the source of the fur, the fibres were then shaved off the skin and turned into felt, which was later immersed in a boiling acid solution to thicken and harden it. Finishing processes included steaming the hat to shape and ironing it. In all these steps, hatters working in poorly ventilated workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate the metal in their bodies.
We now know that mercury is a cumulative poison that causes kidney and brain damage. Physical symptoms include extreme trembling of the hands (known at the time as hatter’s shakes), loosening of teeth, loss of co-ordination, and slurred speech; mental ones include irritability, loss of memory, depression, anxiety and other personality changes. This came to be called mad hatter syndrome.
It’s been a long time since mercury was used in making hats, and now all that remains is a relic phrase that links to a nasty period in manufacturing history. But mad hatter syndrome remains in the medical literature as a description of the symptoms of mercury poisoning, not least because it was later suffered by dentists filling teeth with mercury amalgam.
Q. A story in the Guardian on 15 January 2008 suggested an origin for the term man of straw: ‘[It] stems from the days when mostly private prosecutions were brought with bribed witnesses. They used to stand outside court with straws in their shoes to signify their testimony could be bought.’ Why do so many explanations for English phrases seem so incredible? Why would someone stand outside a courtroom with straw in their shoes? And wouldn’t the simple fact you had, itself make you an unreliable witness? I suppose what I’m asking is, is it true?
A. Not a hope. It’s a popular etymology. There’s no trace anywhere in legal history of straw-shod bribable false witnesses. The idea of standing with straw in your shoes outside a court to indicate you’re available to take part in an illegal act for money is so funny only someone with a commonsense bypass could seriously put it forward.
Let’s go back to the early days of man of straw, at the very end of the sixteenth century. It then was a sham or dummy, like a scarecrow stuffed with straw. It evolved quickly into the specific sense of a sham argument, an invented adverse argument put up by a debater, only to be triumphantly refuted.
In the first place, Mr. Choate assumes that there are certain deluded persons who affirm that all compromises in politics are wrong. Having stuffed out his man of straw, he proceeds gravely to argue with him.
Atlantic Monthly, August 1858. Rufus Choate was an eccentric Massachusetts lawyer, who was described in one biography as having ‘a brilliant legal mind and flamboyant oratorical skills’, said to be the first lawyer (and one of the few ever) to successfully argue that a client had committed his crimes while sleepwalking. He was active in politics: the writer, a Republican, was commenting on a speech Choate gave on 4 July 1858 to the Young Men’s Democratic Association of Boston.
The idea of a man of straw being one without money is a nineteenth-century extension:
‘But the costs, my dear Sir, the costs of all this,’ reasoned the attorney, when he had recovered from his momentary surprise. ‘If the defendant be a man of straw, who is to pay the costs, Sir?’
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, 1837.
This is now the most common British sense, especially in legal contexts – in which it refers to a person not worth suing or otherwise pursuing for money because he has none – though the older meanings also survive.
My guess is that the Guardian writer was instead thinking of straw bail, a once-common term for a particularly notorious practice among unscrupulous lawyers. A person who had no money but who dressed and acted respectably would be engaged to swear that the accused was known to him and of good character and would then stand bail for him. The criminal would abscond; the person bailing him could not be dunned for the bail surety, as he was a man of straw with nothing. I’ve found a reference to men sticking straws in their shoes to indicate that they were available to bail a defendant, though it seems to have been a nineteenth-century version of the folk tale you quote.
Q. For years, I was curious about the line ‘So I will take the Marley Bone Coach / And whistle down the wind’ in the song ‘Whistle Down The Wind’ by Tom Waits. Later, I discovered that Marylebone was an area in central London. Is this the origin?
A. Many people have queried this line but to little useful effect. There’s no slang expression Marley Bone Coach or Marylebone Coach that I can find. There was, however, Marylebone stage, where stage refers to a stagecoach. Tom Waits may have had this in mind. Your asking the question gives me the chance to expatiate on this item of utterly defunct British slang.
To go by Marylebone stage meant to go on foot.
‘The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now,’ thought Mr Sheldon; ‘but I don’t think they’ll try it on with me. And if they do, there’s the Marylebone stage. I’m not afraid of a five-mile walk.’
Charlotte’s Inheritance, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1868. This was her twentieth book in seven years, during which she also bore three children. She became famous for her first two novels, Lady Audley’s Secret of 1861 and Aurora Floyd of 1862, two early examples of what became known as sensation fiction, featuring such everyday domestic themes as adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder. She uses the phrase again in Belgravia in 1875, ‘There is something awful in the idea of being left high and dry on the Logan Rock, with no means of conveyance but the Marylebone stage back to Penzance.’
There was indeed a stagecoach by that name which ran (‘idled’ would be a better term – a contemporary writer said it ‘dragged tediously’) the four miles from Marylebone to the City of London, taking two and a half hours to get there and three hours to come back. The slow journey was partly accounted for by the extremely bad roads of the period but mainly by an unnecessarily long stop at an inn along the way. The earliest reference I can find to it is in a court case at the Old Bailey in 1822, in which a young man was found guilty of stealing two handkerchiefs from a passenger, for which he received a whipping and six months in jail.
It was quicker to walk. This may have been part of the allusion, since Marylebone stage was either a joke based on the dilatoriness of this literal slowcoach, or perhaps a corruption of marrowbone stage, a phrase known from the 1820s. Marrowbone was a figurative term meaning a shinbone, hence a leg. So marrowbone stage has the same meaning as Shanks’s pony or Shanks’s mare, a personification of shank for the lower part of the leg. The first two expressions are equated in a book by George Augustus Sala, Twice Around the Clock, dated 1859: ‘The humbler conveyances known as “Shanks’s mare”, and the “Marrowbone stage” – in more refined language, walking.’
Linking marrowbone and Marylebone was made easier because Marylebone in earlier times had often been written as Marrowbone – Samuel Pepys wrote in his Diary on 31 July 1667: ‘Then we abroad to Marrowbone, and there walked in the garden, the first time I ever was there, and a pretty place it is.’
Both forms are now vanishingly rare. The only example in modern literature I’ve found is this one:
The Horse Guards clock chimed seven o’clock, and the first of that peculiarly urban phenomenon – commuters – appeared on their way to work, conveyed by ‘the Marrowbone stage’; that is, on foot.
The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton, 1975. The usage here is historical and correct in context, since the robbery in question was set in 1855.
Q. In an American novel I was reading recently, after a guard dog was drugged to put it temporarily out of action, a Southern man commented ‘Somebody slipped the dog a Mickey Finn’. The context makes the meaning obvious, but do you know the origin and derivation?
A. A Mickey Finn is usually taken to be knockout drops, given to render someone insensible so they can be robbed. The drug has varied – the one most commonly mentioned is chloral hydrate, though an article in American Speech in April 1936, The Argot of the Underworld Narcotic Addict by David W. Maurer, claimed that it was often cigar ashes in a carbonated drink, a surprising concoction that we can hardly believe was effective. But the drug has sometimes been said to have been a purgative or emetic, this being a quick way for staff to get an obnoxious drunk or violent patron out of a bar.
Another reason for slipping someone an emetic became a notorious case in 1918:
Chicago, June 22 – State’s Attorney Hoyne, acting on information as to coercive measures used by waiters to compel the giving of tips, arrested 100 waiters, members of Waiters’ Union, Local No. 7, today. Mr. Hoyne had a report that waiters used a certain powder in the dishes of known opponents to the tipping system. The powders, according to Mr. Hoyne, produced nausea and were known as ‘Mickey Finns.’ It is thought that many cases of supposed ptomaine poisoning reported after meals in downtown cafes and hotels may have been caused by the ‘Mickey Finns.’
Washington Post, 23 June 1918.
The ‘certain powder’ was later reported to be tartar emetic. So far as we know, this scandal is the first time that a drug is mentioned in print under the name Mickey Finn. The case was widely reported and it seems to have been the stimulus for the term’s becoming generally known.
So was there an eponymous Mickey Finn? He may have been the man of that name who ran the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden in Chicago from 1896 to December 1903:
Finn was the lowliest and by far the toughest of the princes of Chicago’s Whisky Row. This terrible little man – he was only five feet and five inches tall and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds – was the veritable Mickey Finn whose name became synonymous for a knockout drop.
Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld, by Herbert Asbury, 1940. Mr Asbury also wrote The Gangs of New York, from which the Martin Scorsese film of 2002 was adapted.
The establishment seems to have been a dive of the lowest kind, in which Finn fenced stolen goods, supervised pickpockets and ran prostitutes. He had a sideline, as Mr Asbury tells it, by which he drugged patrons with chloral hydrate, robbed them, and dumped them in an alley.
This is all rather circumstantial, not least because of the big gap between Finn’s supposed activities and the first recorded use of the term in 1918, not to mention the further twenty-year gap before Mr Asbury wrote his account of events. However, Mickey Finn certainly existed and his activities were recorded in the local press at the time. The Chicago Daily News reported on 16 December 1903 about ‘ “Mickey” Finn, proprietor of the Lone Star saloon’, which it reported as ‘the scene of blood-curdling crimes through the agency of drugged liquor’ and the following day the Inter-Ocean, another Chicago newspaper of the period, headed a report: ‘Lone Star Saloon loses its license. “Mickey” Finn’s alleged “knock-out drops”… put him out of business.’
Mr Asbury suggests that Mickey Finn, once involuntarily separated from his bar, sold the trick of making Mickey Finns to others, who continued the tradition. The Chicago locale for the 1918 waiters’ scandal certainly suggests that the concept – and the term – might have been circulating in the city underworld in the intervening years.
Mickey Finn is not an uncommon Irish name. From 1885 Ernest Jarrold, a reporter on the New York Sun, had written stories about a naughty boy of that name. They were widely syndicated and became very popular; a book of them was published in 1899 under the title Mickey Finn Idylls, which was turned into a highly successful comic musical in 1903. So the name would have been in the air at the time the real Mickey Finn was running his illegal business, and the combination of the two might have caused it to stick in people’s minds.
Q. A friend of mine used the word mollycoddle the other day and I’ve also come across it in sports reports about pampered England cricketers. Can you tell me where this bizarre-looking word originated?
A. Let’s take its two parts separately. The second comes from the verb to coddle, meaning to treat somebody in an indulgent or overprotective way.
Growing up in the era of cater-to-kids politics, the V-Chip, and helicopter parenting, they were the most coddled generation ever, infused with their elders’ belief that they possessed unique abilities.
Business Week, 9 January 2008. A helicopter parent is one who hovers over their children, rushing to prevent them suffering any harm or letting them learn from their own mistakes. The V-chip in US television receivers allows parents to control what their children watch according to ratings for violence, sex and language broadcast by the network.
The verb in this sense is recorded early in the nineteenth century – its first appearance is in Jane Austen’s Emma: ‘Be satisfied with doctoring and coddling yourself’. It looks very much as though it comes from an older sense of the verb that meant to boil gently, to parboil. That sense is linked to caudle, an old word for a warm drink of thin gruel mixed with sweetened and spiced wine or ale, which was given chiefly to sick people. Hence, by association of ideas, coddle took on its modern sense.
The first bit is on the face of it easy enough, since it is from the pet form of the given name Mary (as in Sweet Molly Malone, whom we met earlier). But Molly has also had a long history in several different but related senses associated with low living. It was popularized in The Roaring Girl of 1611, a play by the two Thomases, Middleton and Dekker, which featured a criminal called Moll Cut-purse. As either molly or moll, from the early seventeenth century on it was often used to describe a prostitute, hence, much later, the American gangster’s moll. As molly it was also an eighteenth-century name for a homosexual or effeminate man.
He behaves himself more like a Catamite, an Eunuch, or one of those Ridiculous Imitators of the Female Sex, call’d Mollies, than like a Son of Adam.
The London Terræfilius: or, the Satyrical Reformer. Being Drolling Reflections on the Vices and Vanities of Both Sexes, by Edward Ward,1708. Ned Ward was a well-known satirist in prose and verse. Terrae filius was a Roman tag that literally meant ‘son of the earth’ but which actually referred to a man whose parents were unknown. At Oxford University in the seventeenth century the name was given to public orators, playing at being jesters or buffoons, who were required by statute to perform (in Latin) at the annual ‘act’ in July at which candidates discussed their theses and were granted their degrees. More generally, a terrae filius was a good-for-nothing or shady character.
It appeared a little later in the form Miss Molly, particularly for an effeminate young man, and a molly house was a meeting place for male homosexuals, as in Mark Ravenhill’s play, Mother Clap’s Molly House.
It’s sometimes said that the molly in mollycoddle comes from the prostitute sense, but the usage evidence shows it was actually linked to the gay one. The noun mollycoddle, which came first, was used particularly of a man who had been over-protected in childhood and so considered to have been made effeminate or a milksop.
You have been bred up as a molly-coddle, Pen, and spoilt by the women.
Pendennis, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1849. This is the first recorded use of the noun.
The verb came along later in the nineteenth century and was used much as we do now.
Q. I wonder if you can shed some light on the phrase a monkey’s wedding? When I was a child growing up in South Africa, my mother would use the saying when we had rain and sunshine at the same time. My wife tells me that she knows the saying from her family, which is mainly of Irish blood.
A. It’s certainly a well-known South African expression. A related word taken from Afrikaans also exists, jakkalstrou, a jackal’s wedding. The South African English version may be a translation word for word of the Zulu umshado wezinkawu, a wedding for monkeys. It’s also suggested it may be from the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, a vixen’s wedding, with the animal changed to suit the African situation.
What is extraordinary about this expression is that there are variations on the same theme throughout the world to describe this meteorological phenomenon in cultures and languages as widely separated and diverse as can be imagined. It may be that it is the paradoxical and contradictory nature of sun occurring with rain that makes people think of a joining of opposites, sometimes with supernatural overtones.
A great many of them have animal associations, often to do with marriage – or, at least, that activity for which the word marriage may be considered a suitable euphemism. In Arabic, the term is the rats are getting married, while Bulgarians prefer to speak of bears doing so; in Hindi it becomes the jackal’s wedding; Koreans refer to tigers likewise; an ancient Spanish saying has it that when it rains and the sun shines, the snail mates; in Calabria it is said that when it rains with sun, the foxes are getting married, for which there’s a similar phrase in Japanese.
A similar expression is known in the UK:
After a thunderstorm, when the black clouds were rolling away and the sun was at least peeping out from behind them, bathing the freshly-washed countryside in a lurid, yellow light, my mother would exclaim, ‘Oh, look! The Fox’s Wedding!’ It was, she explained, that contrast between darkness and light, the blending of sunlight and shadow.
The Fox’s Wedding, by Ralph Whitlock, in The Blackmore Vale Magazine, 1994.
A rhyming example appears in Richard Polwhele’s The History of Cornwall of 1814: ‘When clouds and sunshine are together given, the piskies dance and cuckolds go to heaven.’ Here’s a closely related version:
On all things there came a fair, lovely look, as if a different air stood over them. It is a look that seems ready to come sometimes on those gleamy mornings after rain, when they say, ‘So fair the day, the cuckoo is going to heaven.’
Precious Bane, by Mary Webb, 1924. The delightful gleamy is now rare; it refers to weather that mixes showers with bright intervals. Which came first in the saying, I wonder, the cuckold or the cuckoo? But then, cuckold comes from cuckoo, because of the bird’s habit of laying its eggs in other birds’ nests.
Among other British examples, monkey’s birthday is recorded from the south-east of England. In Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation of 1738, a dialogue that satirizes the hackneyed and clichéd speech of contemporary society, appears this exchange: ‘Colonel Atwit: It rained and the sun shone at the same time. Neverout: Why, then the devil was beating his wife behind the door with a shoulder of mutton.’
There’s a closely similar equivalent known in the American South, at least among older people: The devil’s behind his kitchen door beating his wife with a frying pan, usually shortened just to The devil’s beating his wife. In Quebec French-Canadians have exactly the same saying. Several other languages also invoke the devil, such as the Turkish phrase the devils are getting married; in Belgium there exist two versions, it is the devil’s fair and there’s a fair going on in hell.
Perhaps the most delightful one, though more literal than any of the others, is the American sunshower. I’ve never heard this, and it appears in few dictionaries, but it’s common in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and also in parts of Britain.
Slate clouds rowed forward over the sun, its light dappling the hill and then the sunshower was a storm.
Virginia Quarterly Review, 1 October 2005.
Q. Have you heard the expression there’s more than one way to skin a cat? Is there anything interesting about it?
A. To an earnest student of language history, all phrases are interesting, it’s just that some of them are more interesting than others. This one lies somewhere around the middle of the spectrum of interestingness.
The saying suggests that there’s always an alternative approach to getting something done or more than one way to get what you want from somebody. There are lots of different versions.
There are more ways of killing a cat than choking her with cream.
Westward Ho!, by Charles Kingsley, 1855. There’s a place in Devon with the name of the title, which was created as a watering place, a sea resort, by a commercial company that built a hotel and a golf course and named it after Kingsley’s book. Westward Ho! is actually an ancient boatman’s cry to attract potential passengers by shouting out the direction in which he will be travelling.
An earlier example in the same form is in John Smith’s Letters of 1839. You might instead choke your cat with butter, which appears in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, 1936. Dogs also featured, in expressions such as there are more ways of killing a dog besides hanging him, of which other versions were choking him to death on fresh curds and choking him with pudding.
Your version seems to be American and to date from the nineteenth century.
She was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain, 1889. In an early example of the time-travel tale, Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic, awakes to find himself transported to medieval England.
This is a money digging world of ours; and, as it is said, ‘there are more ways than one to skin a cat,’ so are there more ways than one of digging for money.
Way down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life, by the American humorist Seba Smith, 1854. The author clearly knew this as a well-known existing proverbial saying. In fact, it appears rather earlier, in the Hagerstown Mail of Maryland on 1 April 1836, ‘At any rate, thought I, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, as a butcher would say.’
The hint that the expression might have once been literal chimes with what some writers have suggested, that in the southern states of the US more than one way to skin a cat refers to the catfish, frequently abbreviated to cat, which has a tough skin and must be skinned to prepare it for cooking. From the many versions of the saying, their wide distribution and their age, this looks like a local application of a long-standing proverb.
Q. The designation of robes for academic dress clearly comes from its origin with the clergy in the Middle Ages. But what about mortarboards? The best I could find was its origin in the twelfth- or thirteenth-century clergy cap, but that was not square-shaped. Does mortarboard refer to the guilds or is its origin more ancient?
A. The academic cap often called a mortarboard is indeed ancient. However, that word for it only dates from the middle of the nineteenth century and so has no link to the medieval craft guilds.
It was slang to start with, deeply deprecated by the academics who wore them, who would have identified the headgear as a square. Earlier generations might have called it a corner-cap or a catercap (from French quatre, four). An older popular term was trencher-cap or trencher, named after the flat square wooden plate on which meat was once served and cut up (hence trencherman for a hearty eater).
The literal mortar board is the wooden plate, usually with a handle underneath, on which bricklayers carry small amounts of mortar to work with. A similar tool is used by plasterers, but they call it a hawk, for unknown reasons.
The similarity in shape between the brickie’s board and the academic cap led some wag to apply the name of the one to the other, as an earlier generation had with trencher. Our first recorded use is this:
I will overlook your offence in assuming that portion of the academical attire, to which you gave the offensive epithet of ‘mortar-board’; more especially, as you acted at the suggestion and bidding of those who ought to have known better.
The Further Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, by Edward Bradley, 1854. Mr Bradley, at the time he wrote this book a curate in Huntingdonshire, used the pen name of Cuthbert Bede (from the two patron saints of Durham, where he went to college). The book was illustrated with ninety sketches by the author, a talented artist who is also credited with creating one of the first Christmas cards, in 1847. The book recounts the adventures of Verdant Green, a sort of undergraduate Pickwick. After a slow start, the book became a huge success, selling more than 200,000 copies in the next twenty years. Whether Mr Bradley invented the slang term we may never learn, but his book certainly popularized it.
Q. I came across the word mufti in one of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books. Can you tell me the origin?
A. There are two senses of mufti in English. One is a Muslim legal expert empowered to give fatwas, rulings on religious matters, the other is a member of the armed forces or some other uniformed occupation who is currently not in uniform. I’d guess it’s the latter sense you have in mind because it was common in the British Army in the nineteenth century, the setting of the Flashman novels. It is now not so often encountered, but you can find examples from throughout the English-speaking world.
The grizzled old fisherman looks up from his bowl at the parade of military officers in mufti and says in perfect English: Welcome to another world.
Esquire, 1 July 2007.
In British English I’d guess this is currently the most likely way you’ll encounter it:
The money was raised through quiz nights, fetes, bazaars, mufti days and discos.
The Northants Evening Telegraph, Kettering, 20 July 2008. A mufti day is one in which school pupils pay a small sum to some good cause to wear their own clothes to school.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Muslim and plain clothes senses are intimately connected. It seems to have originally been a jokey term among officers in the British Army and is first recorded early in the nineteenth century. Much later, it was explained thus:
A slang phrase in the army, for ‘plain clothes.’… It was perhaps originally applied to the attire of dressing-gown, smoking-cap, and slippers, which was like the Oriental dress of the Mufti who was familiar in Europe from his appearance in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, by Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell, 1886.
We have to presume that army officers wore this garb while relaxing in the mess. Yule and Burnell record the Muslim sense of mufti, but add, ‘One might safely say that it is practically unknown to any surviving member of the Indian Civil Service, and never was heard in India as a living title by any Englishman now surviving.’ This suggests that the plain-clothes sense didn’t originate in India but was taken there by British Army officers.
Q. Reading the Economist here in the US often presents me with interesting new words, but I’m confused by its reference to the British entertainer Bruce Forsyth: ‘The jokes he makes in his high-camp nasal voice are too naff for reproduction in an upmarket newspaper.’ Is naff an odd way to spell naif?
A. No, it’s a word in its own right, though one with a mysterious and intriguing history. Something naff is inferior and lacks taste or style. I’d not describe Brucie’s jokes quite in that way myself.
Many attempts have been made to explain the origin, which are made more difficult by the adjective and verb appearing to be from different sources. The latter usually appears as the impolite instruction to naff off!, which Chambers Dictionary defines as ‘a forceful expression of dismissal or contempt’ and which is an obvious euphemism for fuck off!
The adjective famously and frequently featured in a BBC radio comedy series:
I couldn’t be doing with a garden like this… I mean all them horrible little naff gnomes.
A line from a sketch featuring the camp gay couple Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, in an edition of Round the Horne from 1966. The script was written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman.
The verb became famous when Princess Anne was reported to have told photographers to naff off when they snapped her coming off her horse and taking a ducking at the Badminton Horse Trials, though a reporter who was there at the time told me some years ago that she actually used a more forceful expletive. It’s recorded some years earlier than the adjective:
Naff off, Stamp, for Christ sake!
Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse, 1959. This may simply be a variation on eff off, where eff is a written version of the letter F for fuck, as in the British expression to eff and blind, to use vulgar expletives; here blind refers to the imprecation blind me!, which became blimey!
Some hold that naff is an acronym based on some phrase, either Not Available For Fucking or Normal As Fuck, though if either ever actually existed it was a post-hoc reinterpretation. Some dictionaries, such as Collins and Chambers, suggest that it was formed as backslang from fan, a short form of fanny in the British sense of the ‘front bottom’ or female genitals. Another idea is that it comes from dialect, either from the northern English naffy, naffhead or naffin for an idiot or simpleton, or Scots nyaff, a puny or insignificant person. The idea that it derives from NAAFI, the Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes, who provide canteens and shops for British service personnel, is a risible stretch too far.
The most plausible origin takes us back to Julian and Sandy, whose sketches were without doubt responsible for making the adjective widely known and popular. Their patois was Polari, the centuries-old showmen’s cant language that had been taken up by homosexuals (both Williams and Paddick, themselves gay, used it in private life). If naff is indeed from Polari, where it is used in phrases like naff omi, a dreary man, it’s most probably from the sixteenth-century Italian gnaffa, a despicable person.
Q. What is the origin of the phrase in the nick of time?
A. It’s definitely one of the stranger idioms in the language, especially as language experts are sure that nick here is the same word as that for a small cut or notch.
Sometime round about the 1560s the phrase in the nick or in the very nick began to be used for the critical moment, the exact instant. The idea seems to have been that a nick was a precise marker, so that if something was in the nick it was precisely at the point it should be. Users of the expression soon found that this association of ideas needed some elaboration, so started to add of time to the expression, and that’s the way it has stayed ever since. These days, it more usually refers to something that only just happens in time, at the last possible moment:
The 28-year-old artist was lucky to receive the award as he was late for the ceremony. Mr Binns thought the award was being announced later in the day, but after a few hurried phone calls and a quick cab ride, he arrived just in the nick of time.
Northern Star, Goonellabah, Australia, 26 June 2008.
There are a number of other expressions involving nick, as in a name for the devil (this time from the personal name Nicholas and often as Old Nick). There are the British slang terms for theft (‘my car’s been nicked!’), a police station (‘the nick’), the act of being arrested (‘you’re nicked!’) or for maintaining something in a specified condition (‘you’ve kept the car in good nick’). There’s also an American sense of defrauding a person of money by cheating or overcharging, and the Australian ideas of moving quickly or furtively or of being naked (‘in the nick’). Most of these, except perhaps the last, come from senses of nick that may derive from an old and defunct colloquial sense of seizing an advantage or grabbing an opportunity, which isn’t far from the idea of being in the nick of time.
But the history of the word is confused and complicated (there’s also the animal breeders’ sense of a mating that has had excellent results, for example, as well as the old gaming sense of a winning throw at dice or the sporting one of the junction between the floor and side walls in a squash court) to the extent that you’d need half a book to explain them all.
Q. A dog came to visit my work today. He was very excited at being in a new place with lots of people to greet. This was evident in his bobbed tail wagging so fast it became a blur! One of our clients, a polite elderly Brit, commented, ‘Oh look at its tail! It’s going forty to the dozen!’ She was unable to give an explanation of the meaning of that phrase. And it’s certainly one that isn’t used in northern Arkansas, USA. Any ideas?
A. I’ve never encountered forty to the dozen before, though the British writers J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley recorded it in Volume 3 of Slang and its Analogues Past and Present in 1893. They also noted walk off forty to the dozen, which means to ‘decamp in quick time’. This is one of the rare appearances of forty to the dozen in print:
Not only does his mind make mole-hills of grievance assume the aspect of mountains of villainy, but with his pen going forty to the dozen, he sets down in wounding words the tale of his griefs.
Memories and Impressions, by Ford Madox Hueffer, 1911. Though in a work by an American writer, it’s generally said that this version of the expression, like the others, is mainly British. A US newspaper in 1931 included a column filler about forty to the dozen, asserting that this most curious expression was definitely from the UK and that it meant ‘to chatter incessantly and senselessly, to gabble, to talk piffle’. Hueffer, by the way, had not then changed his surname to Ford, the one by which we know him better, which he did after the First World War.
Other counts are not uncommon. I’ve come across twenty to the dozen several times (for example, Patrick O’Brian uses it in four of his Captain Aubrey seafaring tales). Thirteen to the dozen appeared about 1800, perhaps growing out of a tradition of supplying an extra item in a dozen by way of good measure. It’s commemorated in the phrase baker’s dozen, though there are also records of knives and other items being sold in this way. I’ve also read of people being figuratively packed thirteen to the dozen in a crowded railway carriage.
Even the standard version, nineteen to the dozen, is a little old-fashioned, though you can find examples in newspapers and daily speech. The usual meaning, as you have gathered, is to do something at a great rate, especially talking. The idea is that when other people say merely a dozen words, the speaker gets in nineteen.
He was excited, almost like a kid, chattering nineteen to the dozen with the media and with the gathering at Iskcon during the launch of Appu’s film.
Deccan Herald, India, 11 January 2008.
It’s also sometimes used to describe rapid heartbeat in times of danger, and to refer to other fast-moving or fast-changing things, such as dogs’ tails.
Yet another version, which has appeared in print in the past couple of decades, both in Australia and the UK, is ten to the dozen. This is a head-scratcher. Logically, one would expect something going at that rate to be slower than usual, though all the examples show that it’s intended to mean exactly the same as nineteen to the dozen. A correspondent to World Wide Words told me that it’s common in Lancashire: ‘I was a veterinary surgeon in Colne and clients always said of their dog on the table “Ee, its heart’s goin ten t’dozen.” I’ve never dared tell any local how daft it sounds to a southerner!’ It’s a weird example of the way that people can use phrases without caring what the individual words actually mean.
Nobody seems to have the slightest idea why nineteen is the standard number, but it’s been in that form ever since the eighteenth century. There is a story about it which associates it with the efficiency of Cornish beam engines. It is said that such engines in the Newcomen era of the eighteenth century could pump 19,000 gallons of water out of a tin mine while burning only twelve bushels of coal. This is surely a folk tale, as an origin so specific and arcane would have been unlikely to generate a popular saying. It’s more likely that the figures were quoted in some treatise and were then picked up as a way to explain the origin of this puzzling phrase. But nobody can know for sure because its early history is obscure.
Q. An impatient colleague in the office today accused me of nit-picking when I pointed out a grammatical error in what he’d written. Can you tell me where the expression comes from?
A. As a professional pedant, my view is that drawing attention to a grammatical error can never be regarded as petty or overzealous fault-finding, which is what we mean by the phrase:
‘There must be fifty rooms in this heap.’ The house was big, but fifty rooms was the sort of exaggeration that expressed Dicky’s pleasure or excitement; or merely relief at not having to spend the night on the road. ‘At least fifty,’ I said. It was better not to correct him; Dicky called it nit-picking.
Hope, by Len Deighton, 1995. This novel, second in the trilogy Faith, Hope and Charity and the ninth featuring the veteran British spy Bernard Samson, is set in the closing months of the Cold War before the Berlin Wall came down.
Anybody who has had the distasteful job of removing the tiny eggs of lice (nits) from a child’s hair will know that it’s a tedious activity that requires close attention and care, as well as a fine-tooth comb, an implement that has given us the related figurative expression to go through something with a fine-tooth comb, meaning undertake a thorough investigation or scrutiny, though without the negative implications of nit-picking.
The word nit, which could also refer to the eggs of other insect parasites such as fleas, has been around in the language for as long as we have records. It appears in Old English around 825 as hnitu, but it has relatives in most European languages and has been traced back to an Indo-European root, so ancient has been the association of such pests with human beings.
In view of the long history of such infestations, it’s remarkable that nit-picking and its relatives are so recent.
Two long-time Pentagon stand-bys are fly-speckers and nit-pickers. The first of these nouns refers to people whose sole occupation seems to be studying papers in the hope of finding flaws in the writing, rather than making any effort to improve the thought or meaning; nit-pickers are those who quarrel with trivialities of expression and meaning, but who usually end up without making concrete or justified suggestions for improvement.
Collier’s Magazine, 24 November 1951. This is, as I write, the earliest known use of the phrase. Though fly-speckers has died out, nit-picker and its relatives have become common, taking on much of the meaning of the former.
What’s even more remarkable is that there’s no record of anybody ever using nit-picking in its literal sense, only the figurative one. Perhaps we had to wait for a time when the memory of the task was still current, but the need for it in industrialized countries had been greatly reduced through better hygiene and insecticides, for people to be able refer to it without too great a shudder of distaste. The distaste was there, though, which is why it has proved so effective as a derogatory term.
Q. You used the phrase no names, no pack drill in one of your newsletters. What does this mean? I can’t find it in any of my dictionaries.
A. That phrase bubbled up from my subconscious. The immediate source of the expression was my father, who served in northern France throughout the First World War. I realized at once that it might not be understood, but left it in from a mischievous desire to learn whether anybody would query it.
When it turns up today, which it doesn’t all that often, it’s a humorous indication that a person’s name has been withheld to spare them the pain of publicity, or otherwise to avoid unfortunate consequences:
Well, obviously if we are a famous person we need to sign autograph books, though there is one celebrity (no names, no pack drill) who actually carries round a rubber stamp and an ink pad wherewith to stamp his name into autograph books.
Independent, 24 April 2007.
Pack drill was a common military punishment that had been introduced in the nineteenth century. Rudyard Kipling gave a description in Soldiers Three in 1890: ‘Mulvaney was doing pack-drill – was compelled that is to say, to walk up and down in full marching order, with rifle, bayonet, ammunition, knapsack, and overcoat.’ Pack drill was often done at the double, at twice the normal marching pace, which Arthur Guy Empey mentions in Over The Top (1917): ‘Then comes “Pack Drill” or Defaulters’ Parade. This consists of drilling, mostly at the double, for two hours with full equipment. Tommy hates this, because it is hard work.’ You may know Kipling’s poem with the lines, ‘O it’s pack drill for me and a fortnight’s CB / For “drunk and resisting the Guard”.’ (CB: Confined to Barracks.)
The full expression no names, no pack drill seems to have been of First World War origin, but has survived the punishment itself. The original idea was that if everybody kept quiet about who was responsible for some infraction, then nobody could be punished for it. The broader sense grew out of that.
Q. What’s the origin of noggin for a person’s head? Is it regional slang? I do not see it in my compact Oxford English Dictionary (which is the edition of 1933, I believe). My Webster’s Dictionary gives it only as the third definition with no etymology.
A. The Oxford English Dictionary’s come on a bit since then. The Second Edition of 1989 suggested, on the basis of the early examples then known, that it was US slang. A revision published online in June 2008 has taken the origin back a century and is able to say that it started out as British sporting slang, originally from boxing.
Noggin has been in the language since the late sixteenth century. The first sense was that of a small cup or other sort of drinking vessel. This may well have been regional to start with, but became established as a standard term. It’s much better known, though, as the name for a small quantity of alcohol, usually a quarter of a pint, in which the name of the container has been transferred to its measure and its contents.
‘Chancy,’ he said, ‘I’m going down to Sugar Camp and drink a noggin of whiskey with my brother Bill. Then, along about dark I’m going a-hunting alone.’
Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You, by Fred Chappell, 1996, a series of linked stories based in the Appalachian mountains in North Carolina, the area in which Fred Chappell grew up.
It seems to have been the idea of a container that gave rise to the fresh sense of a person’s head, which came into the language in the eighteenth century. The first known example is this:
Giving him a stouter on the noggin, I laid him as flat as a flaunder.
The Stratford Jubilee, by Francis Gentleman, 1769, a farce intended to be performed at Foote’s theatre in the Haymarket, but which seems never to have been staged. It mocked the festival of that title which was organized by the actor David Garrick in Stratford-upon-Avon on 6 September 1769 to commemorate William Shakespeare (during which, by the way, the British weather did not co-operate – it bucketed down with rain). A stouter is a stout blow; flaunder would now be spelled flounder.
Noggin is a good example of that rare and memorable phenomenon, a long-lived slang term, since it has stayed in the language, always as slang, for two and a half centuries and is now widely known throughout the English-speaking world.
Q. In an article on the BBC News website about a campaign to kick racism out of football, the sentence ‘You can see how well it is received by the changing attitudes of people but the job is not done by a long chalk.’ How did long chalk end up being usable in this kind of context?
A. This mainly British expression means ‘by no means’, ‘not at all’, so the writer is saying that the work of changing attitudes is a long way from being complete. Here’s another example:
The wicked should be made to suffer, not only hereafter but now, and they would be. She wasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk. She’d have her own back on that big gormless Irishman, if it took the last breath she breathed.
The Lord and Mary Ann, by Catherine Cookson, 1956.
It goes back to the days in which a count or score of almost any kind was marked up on a convenient surface using chalk. At a pub or ale house this might be a note of the amount of credit you had been given (often called the chalk in the early nineteenth century):
There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and had grown more than I had.
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, 1861. Young Pip is sent by his sister to fetch Joe Gargery the blacksmith from the village pub.
However, the expression almost certainly comes from a different set of chalk marks in such establishments – to note the score in a game, a habit which survives in British pubs mainly in the game of darts. A chalk was the name given a single mark or score:
Thirty-one chalks complete the game; which he who first obtains is the conqueror.
Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, by Joseph Strutt, 1801. He’s describing a game called half-bowl, played indoors with a wooden ball chopped in half, with which you had to try to knock down fifteen pins. The extreme bias on the ball made the game interesting.
If your opponent had a long chalk, a big score, he was doing well. So not by a long chalk indicates a gritted-teeth intention to continue, though matters are going against you. Your opponent may have a long chalk, but you’re by no means defeated.
This is the earliest example I know:
Might your name be Smith, said a lout to that oddest of odd fellows, I, after a rap at the door loud enough to disturb the occupants of the church-yard. Yes, it might, but it ain’t by a long chalk.
The Age, Augusta, Maine, 11 December 1833.
That may suggest it’s American, but the use of chalk to mean scoring goes back so much further in the language that it’s more than likely long chalk originated in oral use in the UK and was taken across the Atlantic by settlers.
Q. I’ve come across on a wing and a prayer in my newspaper. What does it mean?
A. It means you’re in a desperate situation and you’re relying on hope to see you through.
There’s a wing and a prayer feel to warnings that bluetongue, should it reach Cumbria, would be infinitely more devastating than foot and mouth disease ever was. It’s almost as though fingers are being crossed in frail hope as farmers and Defra officials together discuss the effects of this sickness which threatens to send every business it touches to the wall.
Cumberland News, Carlisle, 25 February 2008.
Congratulations on getting the expression right, by the way. It’s one of the more commonly mangled phrases in the language, frequently being said and written as ‘on a whim and a prayer’. Believe me, there’s nothing capricious about it. Anyone who can write it that way is surely too young to know the source, the Second World War US patriotic song of December 1942, ‘Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer’, words by Harold Adamson and music by Jimmy McHugh. It tells the story of a plane struggling home after a bombing raid and instantly became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, so much so that the phrase almost immediately entered the language:
He did not elaborate on the five Axis planes he and fellow gunners aboard his ship knocked out of African skies, but he remembers one trip coming in ‘on a wing and a prayer’ with their ship shot full of holes and a buddy of his nursing a wound that ‘scared us to death.’
Amarillo Daily News, Texas, 23 April 1943.
Q. I used the phrase, on one’s tod, which means to be on one’s own, and then realized I didn’t know its derivation. Might it be rhyming slang?
A. It is, though it also involves horse racing and British royalty. It’s still in use, though less than formerly. Here’s a recent example:
In his peripheral vision he could make out a blur – yellow dress, slim body – but couldn’t escape her gaze long enough to bring it into heart-aching focus. ‘Here on your tod?’ she asked.
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, by Christopher Brookmyre, 1999. The former pupils of a Glasgow high school join a class reunion on a holiday resort converted from a North Sea oil rig. Events heat up when a group of mercenaries arrive bent on blackmail, resulting in what the blurb almost said was rekindled passions meeting machine-guns.
The tod here is an American. He was born in 1874; his real name was James Forman Sloan, but he later let it be known that his middle name was Todhunter and so is remembered as Tod Sloan. He was an inventive and highly successful jockey who pioneered what was called the monkey crouch or perching on the animal’s ears – riding with short stirrups, lying low with his head almost on the horse’s neck. He was a colourful and difficult individual, who earned and squandered vast sums of money. In 1896 he crossed the Atlantic to Britain to become a rider for the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII.
He fell disastrously from fame in 1901 when the Jockey Club, which controls British racing, denied him a licence because of some unspecified ‘conduct prejudicial to the best interests of the sport’ (a newspaper report in 1903 said it was because its upper-class members found his arrogance and impertinence too offensive to put up with, though others said it was because he was suspected of betting on races in which he had competed). He then lost his American and French licences.
His fall was tragically quick:
Tod Sloan, the former champion jockey, is reported to be working as a chauffeur at Paris for a paltry salary and to lack clothes and a place to sleep.
Stevens Point Daily Journal, Wisconsin, 29 October 1903.
After a chequered later career, which included attempts at film acting and running a bar in Paris, he died alone in poverty in Los Angeles of cirrhosis of the liver in 1933 – though he was well enough remembered for his death to be widely reported – and it was at about this time that the rhyming slang to be on your Tod Sloan, to be on your own, first appeared. Like many such phrases it became shortened and so, though the short form on your tod is still around, hardly anybody remembers the American jockey who inspired it.
Q. Can you tell me what the expression on your uppers refers to? I saw it used to signify someone in dire straits. Wouldn’t being down be more appropriate than up?
A. The uppers here are the upper parts of a boot or shoe. The implication is that the soles have worn out and that the person so described is reduced to a pair that consists mainly of the uppers – quite useless, of course – and that he or she is too poor to replace them.
The first form was walking on one’s uppers, which gives the sense behind the saying more clearly than the later abbreviated version. It appeared in the US in the 1870s:
At all events, Van Horn pocketed his ill-gotten gains, and started for the Big Horn mountains, but Stevens remained, and addressing himself to faro lost his wealth, and is now walking on his uppers.
The Butte Miner, Montana, 10 July 1877, reporting a story about crooks in New York. Faro was a favourite of gamblers, a card game whose name was originally Pharaoh, borrowed from French, in which it was supposed to have been the nickname of the King of Hearts.
To judge from a lot of the early examples, it may have originally been actors’ slang – hardly surprising, as acting is a notoriously uncertain profession, more full of people down on their luck than almost any other.
The incongruity between being down and being on your uppers must have been a large part of the inspiration for the saying and for its subsequent popularity. One early appearance makes the joke explicit:
If you believe in immortality of the soul, you will try a pair of our shoes, as the souls last – well almost forever. Another strong feature is that no man who is wearing our shoes can easily ‘get down on his uppers’.
Sack the copywriter. An advertisement in the Syracuse Daily Standard, New York, 28 May 1890.
Q. While visiting England recently I went to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. While I was there I was told that the red ball on the observatory was raised each day. In the old days the ships’ captains in the Thames would look for it in order to set their timepieces. I have no problem with that. We were then told this is the origin of the expression on the ball. Far be it from me to question an actor dressed as John Flamsteed, but I thought I would check with you. Can you confirm or deny this information?
A. I deny it, vehemently. It’s sad that someone who works for a famous scientific institution like the Royal Observatory should go so badly wrong when it comes to a simple matter of looking up a phrase in the dictionary and checking a bit of history, but that’s the way it so often is.
Details first. The red ball is what’s called a time ball. The one at Greenwich was – still is – used to signal 1 p.m. local time. At 12.55 the ball is raised halfway up its mast and at 12.58 it is sent all the way to the top. At 1 p.m. exactly, it falls. Time balls were common in the nineteenth century before easy access to radio time signals made them redundant. They were especially important to seafarers, who needed an accurate time reference to check their navigational chronometers.
The Greenwich time ball was first used in 1833. The first recorded appearance of the phrase on the ball is from the early years of the twentieth century. By itself, that’s not enough to disprove your costumed interpreter’s thesis, but the written evidence shows it was originally American and that it came from sport, in particular baseball.
One early form was to put something on the ball, meaning that the pitcher gave it deceptive motion or unusual speed.
Donlin is liable to hit any kind of a ball, and the pitcher must keep working with him and have ‘something on’ the ball all the time.
Dallas Morning News, 12 April 1908.
An example that had appeared two years earlier shows how the expression had developed:
Hahn’s case is no different from that of many other good pitchers. He has simply arrived at the stage which all good pitchers dread. Ball players do not attempt to explain why these things are. They say: ‘He’s got speed and a curve, but, there’s “nothing” on the ball.’ This vague ‘nothing’ is the thing. It means that the pitcher has lost that little ‘jump’, or some peculiar deceptive break with which he has fooled batters. If he loses that, he is gone.
Washington Post, 12 July 1906. A modern US equivalent of nothing here might be stuff.
By the 1930s, it had broadened its application and appeal to mean somebody who was especially alert or capable. This was presumably because it had been amalgamated with an earlier expression that advised budding sportsmen to ‘always keep your eye on the ball’. On the ball was later still exported to Britain.
Q. I’m trying to find out the origin of the phrase, on the QT, meaning off the record or in confidence.
A. In January 2007, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, the former chief of staff to the US Vice President Dick Cheney, was on trial on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, testified that Libby had said to him, ‘This is hush-hush, this is on the QT, not very many people know this.’ One commentator joked that Libby was ‘the last person in America’ to use the expression. That’s not quite true, though it’s hardly heard these days, either in the US or the UK. It might be that Libby was unconsciously rephrasing the publicity tagline from the 1997 film LA Confidential, set in the 1950s, in which Danny DeVito, playing the editor of a magazine called Hush-Hush, repeatedly said ‘off the record, on the QT and very hush-hush’.
This is a recent British example:
There are even suggestions on the qt that he may soon become a permanent member of the Test Match Special team.
Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2007.
Like a lot of slang terms, its origin is lost in the mists of time and oral transmission. We’re not even sure what country it comes from, with some experts arguing that it’s British, while others suggest it’s American. Its genesis, on the other hand, is simple enough – it’s an abbreviated spelling of quiet, using the first and last letters only, the mild obfuscation also suggesting its meaning. Many early examples were in the form on the strict QT.
Its early history is confused because of a red herring dragged across the path of researchers by the slang recorders J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley. In Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present in 1902, they claimed that the first written reference appeared in a British broadside ballad of 1870, which contained the line ‘Whatever I tell you is on the QT’. This origin has been cited by many slang dictionaries since and quoted as fact in books on word history. Unfortunately, despite a great deal of work, nobody has been able to track that ballad down, including the researchers for the Oxford English Dictionary when they were revising the entry for QT recently.
Not having that, the Oxford English Dictionary points to this as its first example:
‘Mr. Lennox will be here on Monday. I’ve just got a letter from him.’ ‘Oh, I’m so glad; for perhaps this time it will be possible to have one spree on the strict q.t.’ Kate was thinking of exactly the same thing, but Miss Hender’s crude expression took the desire out of her heart, and she remained silent.
A Mummer’s Wife, by George Moore, 1885. Moore was an Irish writer who revolutionized the English novel with this naturalistic work; it broke away from stultifying Victorian literary conventions to deal with alcoholism and the tawdry side of the theatrical world.
It’s on the basis of this example that QT is said to be a British expression. However, modern electronic databases allow us to range both more widely and more deeply into writing of all places and kinds. This turned up in a search of American newspapers:
My house-keeper, Mrs. Brown,
Is the greatest saint in town,
As tee-total as it’s possible to be,
It’s only by her nose
I know where my whiskey goes,
She tipples on the strict O. T.
The Cambridge Jeffersonian, 4 September 1879. This has the feel of a vaudeville song. The various verses satirize our superficially pious world, which is actually full of hypocrites who are constantly undertaking immoral actions, but always on the strict Q T.
To have two examples so close together in time from opposite sides of the Atlantic with no other evidence is puzzling. We’re left with no idea who created it or in which country.
Q. In one of those collections of spurious word origins that friends perennially send each other by e-mail, I found the following: ‘Why do we say something is out of whack? What’s a whack?’ It seems a valid question. Can you supply an answer?
A. Not with a totally convincing show of certainty, no. But some pointers are possible.
Whack started life in the early eighteenth century as a verb meaning to vigorously beat or strike. It was probably an imitative noise, or perhaps derived from the older thwack, also imitative.
The noun developed a number of subsidiary senses. At one time, it could mean a share in a distribution, a portion of money; this was originally thieves’ cant – Francis Grose, in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785, has ‘Whack, a share of a booty obtained by fraud’. British English has a couple of phrases that retain a monetary meaning. One is pay one’s whack, to pay one’s agreed contribution to shared expenses. Another is top whack, or full whack, for the maximum price or rate for something (‘if you go to that shop, you’ll pay top whack’). There’s also the American wacky, for somebody or something that is odd, crazy or peculiar in a mildly funny way, which may come from whack, in that somebody who was crazy behaved as though he had been hit about the head.
There are some other old figurative senses, including a bargain or agreement, which evolved out of the idea of a share, and an attempt at doing something (‘I’ll take a whack at that job’). These are mostly American, and it was in the US that the sense you refer to first appeared, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The precursor phrase in fine whack, itself puzzling, is known during that century, meaning that something was in good condition or excellent fettle.
The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once.
In a letter by John Hay, President Lincoln’s amanuensis, dated August 1863. Tycoon, the Japanese word for a great lord or prince, was used by the Japanese to foreigners to refer to the shogun, the hereditary commander-in-chief in feudal Japan until 1868. It was first borrowed into English as Lincoln’s nickname and only later shifted sense to mean a wealthy, powerful person in business or industry.
To be out of whack would then have meant the opposite – that something wasn’t in top form or working well. It was first applied to people with ailments (‘My back is out of whack’). In the early years of the twentieth century it started to refer to mechanisms. It might be that the sense was influenced by the idea that faulty mechanisms respond to a smart blow, a technique that’s sometimes called percussive maintenance.
Q. Can you tell me what the expression over the moon means? I can’t find it anywhere, yet it seems to be a popularly used expression.
A. Someone who says this is delighted or extraordinarily happy.
Cllr Harding, who is married to Lesley and lives in Hawthorn Way, said he was ‘over the moon’ to be selected as the next mayor by his fellow councillors.
Bury Free Press, 7 March 2008.
These days in Britain it’s closely linked with football and has long since become a cliché. It became very popular in the 1970s as one of a pair of opposing phrases that were often on the lips of players or managers at the end of a game. If the team had lost, the speaker was as sick as a parrot (in a state of deep depression, not physically ill; see the item on sick as a dog). If the team had won, he was over the moon.
But the expression is much, much older – there are examples of it that go back nearly 300 years:
Tis he! I know him now: I shall jump over the Moon for Joy!
The Coquet, or the English Chevalier, a play by Charles Molloy, which ran at a theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in April 1718 for three performances only.
This fuller version, common in the expression’s early years, gives the clue to where it comes from, which must surely be the nursery rhyme Hey diddle, diddle, / The Cat and the Fiddle, / The Cow jumped over the Moon. In the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes Iona and Peter Opie called it ‘probably the best-known nonsense verse in the language’. The reference to it in The Coquet pre-dates the first recorded use of the rhyme by about half a century, since that appears in print for the first time around 1765. But, of course, it was a traditional verse that might have been in the oral culture for a very long time.
Q. Do you know the meaning and origin of the phrase when the sun has crossed over the yardarm? I have heard it said when it’s lunch time and okay to have an alcoholic beverage.
A. That’s the usual meaning among landlubbers, though I’ve heard of some who use it for the early evening, after-work period from about 5 pm onwards. It turns up in various
forms, of which the sun’s over the yardarm is probably the most common, but one also sees not till the sun’s over the yardarm as an injunction, or perhaps a warning.
This brings me by natural progression to the great drink question. As you know, of course, the American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He snuffs for ten minutes thrice a day. Also he has no decent notions about the sun being over the yard-arm or below the horizon. He pours his vanity into himself at unholy hours, and indeed he can hardly help it.
From Sea to Sea, by Rudyard Kipling, 1899, a collection of articles he wrote for an Indian newspaper, The Pioneer of Allahabad. This extract is from a piece he wrote in 1889 under the title In San Francisco. He visited that city on his way home from India to Britain (he went the long way). You might not guess from these tactless and rather snobbish remarks that Kipling liked the US and at one point came near to settling there permanently. This is the earliest known use of the expression, though as Kipling was using it expecting that his readers would understand, it must even then have been at least moderately well known.
The yardarms on a sailing ship are the horizontal timbers or spars mounted on the masts, from which the square sails are hung. (The word yard here is from an old Germanic word for a pointed stick, the source also of our unit of measurement.) At certain times of year it will seem from the deck that the sun has risen far enough up the sky that it is above one or other of the yardarms (I’ve never found out for sure whether any yardarm would do, or if it was specifically the topmost one that was meant; I presume the latter). The time it does so will obviously vary with the time of year and the ship’s latitude but the consensus among mariners was that this was somewhere around noon. In the Royal Navy this was by custom and rule the time of the first rum issue of the day to officers and men. It seems that officers in sailing ships adopted a custom, even when on shore, of waiting until around this time before taking their first alcoholic drink of the day.
Though it must have been a saying of sailing-ship days, it didn’t become popular among people in general until the 1930s. The days of sail are far behind us but the expression has a surprisingly wide currency still, especially in North America:
Jud brought him a beer from the fridge, his face still red and blotchy from crying. ‘A bit early in the day,’ he said, ‘but the sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the world and under the circumstances… ‘Say no more,’ Louis told him and opened the beer.
Pet Sematary, a horror story by Stephen King, 1983. This is at the point in the book at which Jud Crandall’s wife has just died.
Q. Who first hit the panic button?
A. We don’t know for certain (I ought to have a rubber stamp made with that on) but the evidence points to US military pilots of the Korean War.
An early example is dated August 1950. A once famous but long-gone builder of military aircraft, the Republic Aviation Corporation of Long Island, issued a jokey guide to the slang of jet pilots in its house magazine The Pegasus as an ‘educational aid’ to civilian pilots who were retraining to fly jets. The only item of interest was panic button, defined as a ‘state of emergency when the pilot mentally pushes buttons and switches in all directions’. Examples are known from other aviation magazines of the time, one of which referred disparagingly to some MiG pilots during the Korean War as panic-button boys who bailed out at the first sign of action.
What’s uncertain is the exact origin. To judge by a short article in a language journal in 1956, even the flyboys weren’t sure at the time. The writer suggested four possible origins, but plumped for this one:
The actual source seems probably to have been the bell system in the Second World War bombers (B-17, B-24) for emergency procedures such as bailout and ditching, an emergency bell system that was central in the experience of most Air Force pilots. In case of fighter or flak damage so extensive that the bomber had to be abandoned, the pilot rang a ‘prepare-to-abandon’ ring and then a ring meaning ‘jump.’ The bell system was used since the intercom was apt to be out if there was extensive damage… The implications of the phrase seem to have come from those few times when pilots ‘hit the panic button’ too soon and rang for emergency procedures over minor damage, causing their crews to bail out unnecessarily.
Which Panic Button Do You Hit?, by Lt Col. James L. Jackson, in American Speech, October 1956. Col. Jackson said that to hit the panic button was used to mean that ‘the person spoke or acted in unnecessary haste or near panic’.
This is supported by a quote from The Lowell Sun of Massachusetts, dated December 1950, that refers to US troops in Korea (‘But they have a phrase to describe this senseless gossip mongering. They call it “ringing the panic button”.’), by one in the Daily Review of Hayward, California, on 3 January 1951 (‘The expression stemmed from the signal given by the pilot of a plane which is in serious trouble. He pushes a button sounding a buzzer which means everybody is to bail out.’), and by a note in The New York Times Magazine on 13 May 1951: ‘Someone remembered the “panic button” in an airplane that is pressed when time comes to abandon ship.’
The year before Colonel Jackson’s article, another reference appeared in the same journal:
There is a switch called the ‘panic button’ in the cockpit of a jet aircraft which jettisons objects, including extra fuel tanks, in order to lighten the plane. Conditions under which this switch is used are usually quite desperate. In case of a power failure, for example, when all the prescribed remedial procedures fail, the pilot might in desperation ‘push everything that’s out and pull everything that’s in,’ in the hope that he might accidentally do something helpful.
A Glossary of United States Air Force Slang, by Leo F. Engler, in American Speech, May 1955. This was compiled from information provided by pilots at the Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas.
This fits the definition that appeared in another glossary, in the 20 November 1950 issue of Pacific Stars and Stripes: ‘The Panic Button automatically drops the wing tanks, rockets, and bombs when a pilot has to jettison weight to keep flying.’
I’m not totally convinced about Col. Jackson’s dating, despite his note that ‘[d]iscussion with Air Force officers and airmen reveals that the phrase to hit the panic button was in use during the Second World War’. There’s no example of the phrase on record before 1950, at least that I can find, but on the other hand there are lots of them in the years that follow, early ones all linked to the Korean War. The Daily Review article also noted that ‘It’s a new phrase which blossomed in the Korean war. And now you hear it on all sides. It’s always uttered as broad humor. Whenever an outfit makes a routine move, the big joke is that “somebody pushed the panic button.” ’ It may be, of course, that the phrase had been around earlier but had been limited to the oral culture of military pilots until it leaked out around 1950.
Whatever the precise origin, there’s no doubt that the phrase was popular among flyers in the Korean War and that it filtered back to the US civilian population and from there to the whole English-speaking world. It has proved a most useful term for any button or switch that operates some device in an emergency or which raises an alarm.
Q. Somebody warned me the other day that there was a risk that a project I was working on might go pear-shaped, an expression new to me whose meaning wasn’t at once obvious (though he did explain). What’s the story behind this meaning of pear-shaped?
A. It’s mainly a British expression that refers to an activity or project that has gone badly awry or out of control.
They are in chaos. The Government is paralysed, the economy is going pear-shaped and they are going to make matters even worse in the months ahead.
Sunday Telegraph, 27 July 2008.
There are plenty of things that are literally pear-shaped, of course, such as a person’s outline, a particular cut of a diamond, or the shape of a bottle, anything in fact that’s bulbous at one end but narrow at the other, like a pear. Singers talk about full-bodied or resonant sounds as being pear-shaped. None of this explains how your sense came about.
A common explanation, the one accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary, is that it comes from Royal Air Force slang. However, nobody there or anywhere else seems to know why. Some say that it may have been applied to the efforts of pilots to do aerobatics, such as loops, because it is notoriously difficult to get the manoeuvre even roughly circular, and instructors would describe the resulting distorted route of the aircraft as pear-shaped. I’ve not seen firm evidence to convince me of this explanation, which sounds a little far-fetched. But the first recorded example certainly links it to aerial warfare:
There were two bangs very close together. The whole aircraft shook and things went ‘pear-shaped’ very quickly after that. The controls ceased to work, the nose started to go down.
Air War South Atlantic, by Jeffrey Ethell and Alfred Price, 1983, an account of the air actions during the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina in 1982, in which the authors interviewed many of the servicemen involved and disputed several of the claims made by the government for the success of British surface-to-air weapons systems.
Others suggest it’s a graphic description of the lower side of a rectangle oozing downwards into the shape of a pear, which would make it a relative of ‘the bottom dropping out’.
Sorry, that’s the best I can do!
Q. Is there an opposite to misogynist?
A. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘opposite’. Since a misogynist is a man who hates women, you might be wanting the word for a lover of women.
Misogynist is from Greek. If you split it into its constituent parts, you find there are three elements. The first is miso-, hate, a prefix that turns up in English in a number of rare or facetious words, including misopaedia for a hater of children and misocapnist for someone who hates tobacco smoke but most commonly in misanthropy, a dislike of mankind. The second part of misogynist is gyn, woman (derived from Greek gynē), as in gynaecologist. Stuck on the end is -ist, which indicates an agent noun.
So we can replace the first element with philo-, love, to get philogynist instead. Though rare, this is listed in most larger dictionaries, with the abstract noun given as philogyny, love of women. It’s rare enough that it seems to have been reinvented at need by writers down the centuries. The first citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a work of 1651 called the Hermeticall Banquet.
But you could argue that another way to look at the opposite of misogynist is not a woman-lover, but a man-hater. The easiest way to create this is to replace the gyn middle part with the Greek word for a man (anēr, in compounds andr-), which is in words like androgen, a male sex hormone. That makes misandrist, though it’s hardly common and appears in only a few dictionaries, with the noun for the concept being, as you’d expect, misandry.
The Oxford English Dictionary includes a quotation that points out a problem you might experience using either word:
Strictly speaking, neither misogynist nor misandrist specifies the gender of the person who hates: you should be able to be both female and to hate women.
Guardian, 3 December 1993.
So you can use either philogynist or misandrist, depending on which idea you want to convey. Or, you could just try English instead.
O. Hi. My debating team is now in the semi-finals and we have been given the topic, ‘we would rather have jam in the hand than pie in the sky.’ We agree with the sentiment but are puzzled by this strange expression pie in the sky.
A. It refers to an unattainable prospect of future happiness:
People love the fact he’s going to be competitive. But we all realise that any idea of him winning a gold medal is pie in the sky and even getting near the podium will be a fantastic result.
People, 20 July 2008.
It derives from the work of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, the anarchist-syndicalist labour organization formed in the US in 1905 whose members have been called the Wobblies. The IWW concentrated on organizing migrant and casual workers; one of the ways in which they brought such disparate and fragmented groups together was by song. Every member got a book when he joined, The Little Red Song Book, containing parodies of many popular songs or hymns. One of the early ones, pre-dating the IWW, was ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’.
One IWW member was Joe Hill, a Swedish-born seaman and hobo (one of the martyrs of the union movement: he was convicted of murder on dubious evidence and executed in 1915; you may recall a folk song about him, sung memorably by Joan Baez). He wrote several popular pro-union parodies for them, such as Coffee An’, Nearer My Job to Thee, The Rebel Girl and The Preacher and the Slave.
This last song, dating from 1911, was aimed directly at the Salvation Army, a body anxious to save the Wobblies’ souls, while the Wobblies were more interested in filling their bellies. The Wobblies hated the Sally Army’s middle-class Christian view that one would get one’s reward in heaven for virtue or suffering on earth. The song was a parody of the Salvation Army hymn In the Sweet Bye and Bye:
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
By 1911, other expressions using pie had already been in use for some time, such as nice as pie and easy as pie and it had begun to be used for a bribe or political patronage (of rewards being distributed like slices of pie) so pie was already around in a figurative sense, ready to be borrowed. It certainly struck home and has been in the language ever since.
Q. I was arguing with my husband the other day about the fact that we needed a new car. He rather rudely and sarcastically responded that in our financial circumstances we would get one as soon as pigs started to fly. Where does this idea come from?
A. There are several variations on sayings associated with the idea of flying pigs, as examples of some event that is extremely unlikely to occur.
Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd says he expects Labor to take a pasting in the polls over the controversy surrounding his wife’s job placement business. Mr Rudd has played down a poll analysis predicting a Labor landslide at this year’s federal election, saying ‘pigs might fly’.
The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 28 May 2007.
We have to go back a long way to find the original of this idea. It looks like an old Scottish saying that was first written down in 1616 in an edition of John Withal’s Dictionary of English and Latin for children. This had an appendix of proverbs rendered into Latin, of which one was the usual form of the saying in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: pigs fly in the air with their tails forward. This was intended to mock credulous people – if they could indeed fly, it seems to argue, flying backwards would seem a small extra feat.
Another version is more famous:
‘Thinking again?’ the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin. ‘I’ve a right to think,’ said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried. ‘Just about as much right,’ said the Duchess, ‘as pigs have to fly.’
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, 1865.
Other forms that have appeared at various times include pigs could fly if they had wings, and pigs may fly, but they are very unlikely birds.
Q. Trying to explain the phrase play it by ear to my Japanese students is difficult, especially when they ask you why the word ear is used. What is the origin of this phrase?
A. The phrase by ear goes back a long way in a figurative sense – the first example is in a book of 1521 which notes that it’s necessary to have a good ear when singing the psalms.
It’s a rhetorical trick called metonymy, the substitution of an idea by another that it’s closely linked with, in the same way that we might use Downing Street when we really mean the British government. It’s in much the same style as Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’. He meant this figuratively, asking his audience to lend him the thing their ears contained, their function – to listen to him, to hear him out.
In phrases like by ear the implication is one stage further removed: not merely the function of hearing but also being able to accurately reproduce a melody from memory without needing to have it written down. So we have phrases like he has a good ear for music and she can play anything by ear.
The saying has been taken yet another step further away from anything literal when people use it to mean responding in a pragmatic or extempore way to events as they arise, without planning. This is much more recent, a creation of the twentieth century.
The captain shook his head doubtfully. He ran his hand over the black iron filings of his crew-cut. ‘This is one hell of a situation, Commander. We’ll just have to play it by ear.’
Thunderball, by Ian Fleming, 1961, in which Commander James Bond faces the evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of the terrorist organization SPECTRE.
If this is the sense in which your Japanese students encounter it, I’m not surprised they find it puzzling.
Q. While viewing some of the entries on an encyclopaedic website, I came across the word plonk, a Britishism for cheap wine. Here in the good old US of A, plonk is a word unknown to us, save perhaps as an onomatopoeia. Where did the term originate, and how did it come to be synonymous with cheap wine?
A. Plonk, as a disparaging term, especially for cheap red wine, is widely known in the UK and – despite your comments – to some extent in the USA. The term is also used humorously but without the negative undertones:
Shrewd investors who piled money into plonk to pick the perfect portfolio have been toasting another year of soaring profits. In some cases, the money made on cases of upmarket claret has more than trebled in the past three years.
Glasgow Evening Times, 1 February 2008.
It’s so fixed a part of British English that many people are surprised to hear that it was originally Australian. In that country you may at one time have encountered references to plonk bar and plonk shop for a wine bar or shop, especially a cheap and cheerful one, to plonk-up for a party and to plonked-up or plonko for intoxicated, though I am told these are all rather dated. There’s also plink, which was once a joking variation, which has led some writers to guess that plonk is an imitative invention from the sound of a cork being pulled from a bottle.
However, the evidence indicates instead an origin in the fighting in France in the First World War, when troops from various British Empire countries who spoke only English came into contact with the French language. The result was weirdly transmogrified expressions, such as napoo from ‘il n’y en a plus’ (‘there is no more’), or san fairy ann from ‘ça ne fait rien’ (‘it does not matter’). Plonk is a tortured form of blanc, as in vin blanc, white wine.
Several humorous or mangled versions of that phrase are recorded in Australia in the decades after the end of the war, such as vin blank, von blink, plink plonk, point blank, and plinketty plonk. By the 1930s the word had begun to settle down into our modern form, though to judge from one newspaper report it was then referring to some sort of rotgut or moonshine, possibly a mixture of cheap wine and spirits:
The man who drinks illicit brews or ‘plonk’ (otherwise known as ‘madman’s soup’) by the quart does it in quiet spots or at home.
The Bulletin, Sydney, 11 January 1933.
Soldiers in France certainly drank local wine. Frank Richards published a memoir of the Great War in 1933, Old Soldiers Never Die, which notes: ‘Ving blong was very cheap… a man could get a decent pint and a half bottle for a franc.’ It’s easy to see why the term didn’t thrive in the UK after the First World War, since there was no tradition of wine drinking except among the upper classes or cosmopolitans. Australia produced wine at this period, nearly all of it consumed in the country, and so I would guess there was more opportunity for the term to be taken up by civilians.
Plonk started to become known in the UK only in the 1950s, partly because ordinary Brits started to drink wine, and in part because of increased exposure to Australian English, and perhaps in particular its appearance in Nevil Shute’s well-known novel about Australia, A Town Like Alice, of 1950.
Q. A friend and I have been trying to work this one out. Dropping off the twig and kicking the bucket are fairly obvious, but what could possibly be the origin of popping one’s clogs as a euphemism for dying?
A. Pop one’s clogs is mainly a British English slang expression:
Hurray for the man who has made a career out of comebacks. Lazarus had nothing on old Frank. When the announcement finally comes that he’s popped his clogs, I for one won’t be surprised if he suddenly revives during his own funeral service and starts belting out Abide With Me.
Birmingham Post, 28 January 1998.
Clogs were once standard workers’ footwear in several trades in the industrial towns and cities of Britain, for women as well as men, now rarely seen but at one time an icon of midlands and northern working-class life.
Numerous cotton factories then abutted on this street [Oxford Road, Manchester], and I shall never forget my first experience of the one o’clock thunder caused by the clatter on the pavement of the thousands of wooden clogs, worn by men and women alike, who swept all before them.
A contributor to Notes and Queries in 1900 was recalling life in the 1850s.
The verb to pop may be the old term for pawning goods. The implication is that someone would only want to pawn his clogs when he had no further need for them, that is, when he was about to die. But it’s also just possible it’s linked to the idiom to pop off, to die, which is surprisingly old – it appears first in Samuel Foote’s play of 1764, The Patron: ‘If lady Pepperpot should happen to pop off.’ Later this turned into pop off the hooks, which also meant to die.
The first example on record of pop one’s clogs is from the publication Pick of Punch in 1970. It’s used humorously in the main, frequently in connection with journalism, show business and television (‘Which Coronation Street stalwart is due to pop his clogs?’). The written evidence suggests that it’s a modern fake-archaic form, unrecorded from the times when workers did usually wear clogs to work and did pawn small items each week to tide them over cash shortages. One correspondent, however, has told me that he clearly remembers it being used in Lincolnshire fifty years ago, so it may just be a folk expression that has existed for generations without being recorded in print.
Q. I’ve been trying to find the etymology of potboiler (‘a usually inferior work, as of art or literature, produced chiefly for profit’, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary) for so long that I’ve forgotten what brought it to mind in the first place. I suspect it’s strictly an Americanism, but can’t find the answer to that, either. Can you help?
A. Those among us with an interest in archaeology will know of potboiler in a more literal sense. It was a stone heated in a fire and dropped into a container of water to boil it. This was a useful technique in the days when pottery wasn’t available or was too fragile to be exposed directly to a fire. However, this is a comparatively modern term of science, dating only from 1872; the figurative sense you mention is actually rather older, an intriguing example of an inversion of the usual order of development.
An artistic potboiler served the not unrelated function of bringing in cash to keep the home fires burning and the cooking pots boiling. It was a work produced for strictly commercial reasons rather than from an artistic impulse. It often referred to one that had been rapidly executed to make a quick buck, one therefore that was likely to be poorly done. In the more elevated arenas of artistry such financial motives were considered demeaning, even though Dr Johnson had rebuked these ivory-tower attitudes with his magisterial comment that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’.
There seems also to have been a strong feeling that to keep one’s reputation alive before the public one had to originate new works regularly, a view that’s summarized in the modern academic’s mantra of ‘publish or perish’. One had to keep the pot figuratively boiling in order to stay in the game.
This is the earliest example of the term so far known:
I am no stranger to the merit of the fine portrait of Mr. Abel at his desk, in the act of composing; of Mr. Hone, with his face partly shaded by his hat; of a primate walking in the country; and of some others which appear now and then, and in great measure compensate for the heaps of inconsequential trash, or pot-boilers (as they are called) which are obtruded upon the public view; this may be lamented but cannot be helped, as an exhibition must be made up of what the painters are employed about.
An Account of a Series of Pictures, in the Great Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, at the Adelphi, by James Barry, 1793. Barry was a noted painter of the eighteenth century, who had the year before been elected as professor of painting at the Royal Academy. Despite his waspish comments, the main purpose of his pamphlet was to describe the six big paintings he had completed for the Society in the Great Room. The primate was presumably an archbishop, not an ape.
A closely related expression exists, variously written as to boil the pot, to keep the pot boiling or to make the pot boil, which meant to make a living, to provide one’s livelihood. Though the Oxford English Dictionary traces it back as far as 1661, this example is contemporary with Barry’s usage:
As learning, though I have the proper respect for it, won’t serve to make the pot boil, you must needs be glad of more substantial fuel.
Camilla, by Fanny Burney, 1796. Jane Austen was much struck with this, Burney’s third novel, which has some finely drawn characters and sly satirical wit at the expense of the social limitations of marriage. Of this she had direct and recent knowledge, having only three years earlier married a penniless French emigré, Alexandre d’Arblay. The novel made enough money that they were able to buy a cottage, which they named after the book.
So the expression is definitely British, not American.
O. In the UK, we say someone is pulling your leg when they are joking. We even have pull the other one, as a way to acknowledge that one’s leg is being pulled. But why should tugging on an extremity mean teasing or having a joke with someone?
A. Oh, dear, I wish we knew. People keep asking me this, but there’s very little evidence on which to base a sensible reply.
It used to be confidently asserted that the term arose in Britain, since this was for long the first known example:
You can send me word by some of the boats, if you can’t come yourself. I shall be very anxious until I know, then I shall be able to pull the leg of that chap Mike. He is always about here trying to do me.
‘Blackbirding’ in the South Pacific, or the first White Man on the Beach, by William Churchward, 1888. Blackbirding was the recruitment of South Sea islanders to work on cotton and sugar plantations in Fiji, Samoa and Australia. It was officially voluntary, but often amounted to kidnapping or enslavement.
But an earlier example has now turned up, from an American newspaper:
There’s Colonel Goshen, the giant, you know; he got struck on little Daisy Henry, who isn’t much higher than his knee. She’s the freak that married General Whatman, a dwarf, who is ugly enough to sour milk. The Chinese giant once told me he had half a dozen wives at home, but I think he was pulling my leg.
The Wellsboro Agitator, Pennsylvania, 20 February 1883. The article, reproduced from the Philadelphia Times of the day before, ostensibly focused on the marriage of R. R. Moffitt, a tattooed man, and Miss Leo Hernandez, the Spanish bearded lady; however, that was an excuse that allowed prurient enquiries into people regarded as abnormal or monstrous.
Some writers suggest the expression may have had something to do with tripping a person up as a joke, or figuratively tripping him by catching him out in some error to make him seem foolish. Others prefer to link it to street thieves, who might trip their mark up to make it easier to steal from him. But why either activity should be likened to pulling a person’s leg is unclear. It’s often ghoulishly said that it derives from the days of public hangings, in which friends of the condemned person would pull on his legs to speed the process of asphyxiation and so ensure a quicker death; but it’s hardly possible to equate that with a jape or deception, or indeed the date of the first appearance of the phrase.
None of these have any appeal except as stories. The truth is out there, but it’s keeping itself well hidden.
Q. I’ve always been puzzled by the phrase pushing the envelope; it’s an incongruous image that doesn’t seem to have any relationship to its meaning. Can you tell me where it comes from?
A. It’s an excellent example of the way that a bit of specialized jargon known only to a few practitioners can move into the general language. It comes from mathematics, specifically as it is used in aeroplane design. It was popularized by a well-known book:
One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was ‘pushing the outside of the envelope.’ The envelope was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. ‘Pushing the outside,’ probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first, ‘pushing the outside of the envelope’ was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979. This bestselling example of the New Journalism, Wolfe’s own term for journalists who adopted literary styles that incorporated fictional elements and subjective responses, told the story of the test pilots of the Mercury and Apollo space programme, focusing especially on the psychology of the pilots. The right stuff of the title was an elusive quality of courage and skill allied to a willingness to take risks.
In mathematics, an envelope is the enclosing boundary of a set or family of curves that’s touched by every curve in the system. It’s also used in electrical engineering for the curve that you get when you connect the successive peaks of a wave. This envelope curve encloses or envelops all the component curves. In aeronautics, the flight envelope is the outer boundary of all the curves that describe the safe performance of the aircraft under various conditions of engine thrust, speed, altitude, atmospheric conditions and the like. It’s taken to be the known limits for the safe performance of the craft.
Test pilots have to test (or push) these limits to establish exactly what the plane is capable of doing, and where failure is likely to occur – to compare calculated performance limits with ones derived from experience. Tom Wolfe was using an older form of the phrase, pushing the outside of the envelope; it also appears as pushing the edge of the envelope.
Following his book and film, the phrase began to move into the wider world, in the process frequently being shortened to just push the envelope, which completely loses the sense; the first recorded use in the more general sense of going (or attempting to go) beyond the limits of what is known to be possible came in the mid 1980s. This is an early example:
We all agree that the use of chemicals and dope is an inappropriate and potentially dangerous practice; it is a practice that should be condemned. Yet serious athletes will continue to push the envelope to gain more efficiency, shorter times, better stamina. The will to win is fearsome.
Alton Telegraph, Illinois, 23 September 1985.
Q. In English words, the letter q is always followed by u – the only such mandatory letter pair I can recall. But it is also used in words transliterated from other alphabets (such as the Arabic qat for narcotic leaves), where the letter k would presumably work just as well. How did it achieve its rather odd status?
A. It all started long before English even existed. The Phoenicians had two symbols in their alphabet for k, for the very best of reasons – they had two distinct k sounds, only one of which we have in English. (Other Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, have three k sounds.) The one we don’t have – a guttural sound at the back of the mouth – the Phoenicians represented by a symbol a little like our modern q that they called Qōf (their word for a monkey, perhaps because the tail of the letter reminded them of a monkey’s). This was used in particular before vowels that are also sounded at the back of the mouth, especially o and u.
The Greeks took the Phoenician symbol over as qoppa or koppa. This isn’t in the classical Greek alphabet – it was dropped as unnecessary around 400 BC, because Greek, from a different language group, has never had the sound it represents. However, a version of the Greek alphabet that did still contain koppa was borrowed by the Etruscans, whose language is from yet a third language group (they probably got it from Greek colonists who settled in the region of Italy now called Campania). The Etruscan alphabet had three symbols for the k sound – gamma was used before e and i, kappa was used before a and koppa before o and u (gamma was available because Etruscans had no hard g sound in their language).
In turn (you’re still following my trip around the Mediterranean, I hope), the Romans took their alphabet from the Etruscans; like the Greeks, Latin had only the one k sound. As a result, over time kappa was dropped, koppa evolved into q, and gamma into c (these changes explain why Greek words spelled with k have their Latin equivalents spelled with c). The Romans used q only before u, to represent the kw sound that was common in the language. However, the combination was actually written as qv, since the Roman alphabet didn’t have a u and v was a vowel in classical Latin.
If we move on about a thousand years, we find that Old English had the same kw sound, but represented it by cw, since q wasn’t in their version of the alphabet (so, for example, queen in Old English was spelled cwen). French, however, continued the Latin qv. After the Norman Conquest, French spelling gradually took over in England, eventually replacing the Old English cw by Latinate qv and then qu when u came into the alphabet, though this change took about 300 years to complete. As many writers have since pointed out, the change was unnecessary, as we don’t need qu in the alphabet any more than the English before the Norman Conquest did – cw would work as well most of the time. In those situations in which qu is said as k, as in words from French like antique, we could use c or k instead. It’s just one example of why English spelling is such a mishmash.
After all this, the reason why versions of Arabic words written in English use q without a following u is easy to understand – it’s a neat way of transcribing that guttural k sound (the Arabic letter qaf) that’s faithful to the way the alphabet has evolved over several millennia.
Q. I was struck by the phrase to queer the pitch when I used it the other day. What game? How did one queer the pitch?
A. As the phrase isn’t so much used as it once was, perhaps I should explain that when you queer someone’s pitch you spoil their chances of success, usually deliberately:
Carl’s finally managed to escape the smothering grasp of one feuding family empire but, just as he’s about to become ruling head of the De Souza dynasty, along comes long-lost daughter Anna to queer his pitch.
Mirror, 9 July 2008. Aficionados will recognize a plot summary from the ITV soap Emmerdale.
It came originally from the argot of nineteenth-century market and street traders.
The word pitch here is closely related to the other British sense you give of an area of ground marked out for a sporting purpose, such as a cricket pitch or football pitch. But it’s a different meaning of the word. It was the name given – then as now – to a position in a street market or the like where a trader set his barrow or stall or a place where a busker performed. And for at least 300 years queer had been a slang term for anything wrong, nasty, bad or worthless. (It’s thought this usage was the source of queer for homosexual, which, however, doesn’t appear until the last decade of the nineteenth century.) It’s surely closely connected with the standard English queer for anything strange, odd, peculiar or eccentric, but exactly how we’re unsure. The verb is first recorded from 1812, but is probably rather older.
Putting them together, we have to queer one’s pitch, which originally meant to do something to spoil the success of a market or street trader. Perhaps a nearby rival shouted louder or had better patter, or an officious policeman ‘interfered’ with trade by moving on an illegal trader.
Later in the century, it was taken over by theatrical people, who used it to refer to something that spoiled the performance of an actor:
The smoke and fumes of ‘blue fire’ which had been used to illuminate the fight came up through the chinks of the stage, fit to choke a dozen Macbeths, and – pardon the little bit of professional slang – poor Jamie’s ‘pitch’ was ‘queered’ with a vengeance.
Stage Reminiscences: Being Recollections, Chiefly Personal, of Celebrated Theatrical & Musical Performers during the Last Forty Years. By An Old Stager (Matthew Mackintosh), 1866. Mackintosh was a stage carpenter and stagehand in Glasgow.
Today, this sense of pitch is most common in sales pitch, originally the spiel of a trader from his market pitch to encourage people to stop and buy.
Q. In your explanation of hairy at the heels in your newsletter you quoted from John Buchan’s Huntingtower, ‘It’s quite likely he’s been gettin’ into Queer Street.’ Surely you are going to define Queer Street? From context it looks like being in debt, possibly to a loan shark.
A. Glad to help. You’re almost there with your definition. It’s now a rather dated British and Commonwealth phrase. Queer Street is an imaginary place where people in difficulties, in particular financial ones, are reputed to live.
Salaried public officials are, of course, not the only ones who have landed in queer street. More and more people are having trouble settling their credit card bills. The number of bankrupts has also risen.
New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur, 31 December 2005.
That seems not to have been its first meaning. It appeared in print initially here:
QUEER STREET. Wrong. Improper. Contrary to one’s wish. It is queer street, a cant phrase, to signify that it is wrong or different to our wish.
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.
It was used in a different sense ten years later:
Mother Mapps dropp’d her pipe, and d-d the weed, it made her sick, she said. Limping Billy was also evidently in queer-street.
Real Life in London, or, the rambles and adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and his cousin, the Hon Tom Dashall, through the metropolis; exhibiting a living picture of fashionable characters, manners, and amusements in high and low life, by an Amateur, 1821.Queer Street became restricted to financial embarrassment only some decades later; as late as 1902 J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley gave three meanings for the phrase in Volume Five of Slang and its Analogues Past and Present: to be in a difficulty, to be wrong, and to be short of money.
Where it comes from is open to much doubt. Despite the energetic adoption of the phrase by a few modern queer theorists, it has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality. It has often been claimed that it was a variation on or corruption of Carey Street, the former location of the London Bankruptcy Court, the idea being, perhaps, that one reached Carey Street by way of Queer Street. As the Oxford English Dictionary comments, the court was established in Carey Street only in 1840, so it couldn’t have been the inspiration for Queer Street; the Oxford English Dictionary might also have noted that Carey Street as an allusion to bankruptcy isn’t recorded until the twentieth century:
THE YOUNG BANKRUPT, by Sampson Waterstock. An exhaustive treatise on the right mismanagement of one’s affairs, with hints on the best method of bringing about a meeting of creditors. Among the chapters are the following: ‘The Way to Carey Street’…
Punch, or the London Charivari, 17 June 1914. There was presumably some satirical reference in the name of the purported author, but if there was, it’s now lost in time.
The experts discount the suggestion in the 1894 edition of E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable that it comes from a person being marked in a tradesman’s ledger with the Latin verb quaere, to query or question, meaning that it would be desirable to make inquiries about his solvency. However, quaere does appear in English use and queer, taken from the Latin verb, is recorded in English dialect in that sense.
All in all, a most mysterious expression.
Q. Somebody in the office said he was going to read the riot act to another member of staff over a minor transgression. What did he mean? There was certainly no riot going on, though a couple of us did remonstrate gently.
A. These days, it’s just a figurative expression meaning to give an individual or a group a severe scolding or caution, or to announce that some unruly behaviour must cease.
The men were read the riot act and warned about safety breaches – weeks before the £32-million nuclear submarine smashed into an underwater rock in the Red Sea.
Sun, London, 3 June 2008.
The naked truth is that editors will read the riot act to any Tom, Dick, and Harry that uses clichés; avoid them like the plague.
Successful Scientific Writing, by Robert W. Matthews, 2007, quoting William Safire. Read the riot act is indeed a cliché these days.
Originally it was a deadly serious injunction to a rioting crowd to disperse. The Riot Act was passed by the British government in 1714 and came into force in 1715. This was the period of the Catholic Jacobite riots, when mobs opposed to the new Hanoverian king, George I, were attacking the meeting houses of dissenting groups. There was a very real threat of invasion by supporters of the deposed Stuart kings – as actually happened later that year and also in 1745. The government feared uprisings, and passed a draconian law making it a felony if a group of more than twelve persons who were ‘unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled together’ refused to disperse within an hour after they had been told to do so.
To invoke the law, one of a long list of officers (such as a justice of the peace, sheriff, under-sheriff, high or petty constable, mayor or bailiff or anyone acting for them) had to carry out a specified set of actions:
The justice of the peace, or other person authorized by this act to make the said proclamation, shall, among the said rioters, or as near to them as he can safely come, with a loud voice command, or cause to be commanded silence to be while proclamation is making, and after that, shall openly and with loud voice make or cause to be made proclamation in these words, or like in effect: ‘Our sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.’
From the Act for preventing Tumults and Riotous Assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the Rioters, 1 Geo. 1,1714. It must have needed more courage than local worthies often possessed to stand before the mob and do this, though the provision about not coming closer than was safe must have been reassuring. The pains (using the word in the original Middle English sense of suffering inflicted as punishment for an offence, from Latin poena, a penalty) were severe – convicted persons were automatically classed as felons and so subject to the death penalty, although this was later amended to transportation for fifteen years.
The Act remained in force for a surprisingly long time, finally being repealed only in 1973 in the UK, though it had been effectively defunct for decades, had only rarely been used and was often unsuccessful in quelling riots even when it was. Similar laws still exist in Australia, Canada, the US and other countries.
Q. I was watching a program about the history of English on the History Channel last night. This segment dealt with the slang created during the westward migration before the US Civil War. The rivers were the superhighways of the period and the moderator, an English gentleman, said that the well-to-do used steamboats and the less fortunate built rafts. The steering oar for the raft was called a riff and hence the term riff-raff came about for the less well-to-do. I can’t verify this, but it seems plausible.
A. It’s nonsense, a sad commentary on the state of television programme-making. I can find no example of riff used for a steering oar. The riff-raff are not just people without money, they’re disreputable or undesirable, typically the scum or refuse of the community, a member of the rabble, the sort of people your mother probably warned you not to associate with.
The theory was spread that these wretched beings were the result of secret systematic race-pollution by riff-raff immigrants, and that they deserved no consideration whatever. They were therefore allowed only the basest forms of employment and the harshest conditions of work.
The Star Maker, 1937, by Olaf Stapledon, who despite his Scandinavian name was a British philosopher. This is an extraordinary work in which the author attempts nothing less than the complete story of human existence over billions of years, about which one historian of SF has said ‘even the most extravagant superlatives are insufficient’. In the end, the Star Maker turns out to have created many universes, of which ours is one of the less successful and is about to be discarded.
To trace this one, we have to start in medieval French. There was then a set expression rif et raf, everything. These words are from the verbs rifler, to rifle through, ransack, spoil or strip, and raffler, to carry off, and would seem to have referred in particular to the plundering of the bodies of the dead on a battlefield and carrying off the booty.
The French phrase moved into English in much the same meaning of everything in the forms rif and raf or riffe and raffe. It was abbreviated to riff-raff in the fifteenth century – it can be found in William Gregory’s Chronicle of London of about 1470. It seems to have taken some decades longer for it to have gone even further downhill and for it to be associated in particular with the dregs of society.
We’re familiar with descendants of both of the original old French words in English, by the way. Rifler is the origin of our riffle in the card-shuffling sense, amongst others, and of rifle, for searching hurriedly through possessions for something to steal. It also gave rise to the firearms sense, since a rifle takes its name from the spiral grooves cut in its barrel to spin the bullet and improve its accuracy; this comes from a different sense of the French word, meaning to graze or scratch. Raffler lent its name to a game played with three dice, perhaps because the victor carried off the winnings. In English the game was called raffle, and the word was much later applied to another form of gambling, a lottery.
And in the early nineteenth century raffish appeared. This adjective originally referred to somebody who was disreputable or vulgar. Only later did it acquire the undertones it now has of a person who is attractively unconventional. This may have come from the second half of riff-raff, or from raff, which had survived by itself in dialect usage in much the same sense of the lowest class of the population.
Q. What is the meaning and origin of the phrase, right as rain? Is it an aesthetically pleasing but essentially meaningless alliteration, or is rain really correct in some way?
A. An interesting question. Perhaps surprisingly, there have been occasional expressions starting right as… for many centuries, in the sense of something being satisfactory, safe, secure or comfortable. An early example, quoted by John Heywood in his book of proverbs as long ago as 1546, is right as a line. In that, right had a literal sense of straightness, something highly desirable in a line, but it also clearly had a figurative sense of being correct or acceptable. There’s an older example still, from the Romance of the Rose of about 1400: right as an adamant, where an adamant was a lodestone or magnet; used in a compass it signified the right direction, towards north.
Lots of others have followed in the centuries since.
You are right, master, Right as a gun.
Prophetess, a play by John Fletcher, 1622. Here right means true or correct; the mental link with gun was presumably because it shot bullets straight at its target.
I saw another surrounded with a crowd of two sorts of women. Some were young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper, kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man’s thinking.
Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais, in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of 1664. The meaning here is somewhat obscure, though ‘desirable’ would fit the sense.
‘I hope you are well, sir.’ ‘Right as a trivet, sir,’ replied Bob Sawyer.
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, 1837. A trivet was a three-legged stand for a pot, kettle or other vessel placed over a fire for cooking or heating something; it was said to be right because it always stood firmly on its legs without rocking.
The nineteenth century, in fact, seems to have been the heyday of such expressions. About the same time as Dickens was writing, or a little later, people were saying that things were as right as ninepence, as right as a book, as right as nails, or as right as the bank. We have to guess the idea behind some of these: why ninepence, for example, rather than any other sum of money?
Right as rain is a latecomer to this illustrious collection of curious similes. It appeared at the end of the nineteenth century.
Wound? Hang it – it’s only a scratch, man! I’ve stuck a lump of wadding out of your dress coat on the place – the muscle under the arm, don’t you know – and I shall be as right as rain after supper.
Out of the Jaws of Death, by Frank Barrett, 1892. Barrett was a British writer of sensational novels in the last half of the nineteenth century, though one about whom few facts survive. In a review in September 1892, The New York Times said of the book’s principal character, ‘Frank Kavanagh is a tremendous villain. He is a Russian spy, a posing Nihilist, a kidnapper, a thief, and a murderer.’
He looked, as himself would undoubtedly have said, ‘fit as a fiddle,’ or ‘right as rain.’ His cheeks were rosy, his eyes sparkling.
In the piece entitled A Home-Coming, included in Yet Again, a collection of humorous essays by Max Beerbohm, 1909.
Since then right as rain has almost completely taken over from the others. It makes no more sense than the variants it has usurped and is just a play on words (though perhaps there’s a lurking residual idea that rain often comes straight down, in a right line, in the old sense). But the alliteration was undoubtedly why it was created and it has ensured its survival.
Q. A rum do means a situation that’s a bit disturbing, baffling, odd or not very nice, as far as I can tell. But please put myself and my colleagues here in France out of our misery and tell us the origin. We think it may have some naval Jack Tar type of connection, but if anyone knows, it must be you. We look forward to hearing from you.
A. The books say rum do is an old-fashioned bit of British slang. I would agree with that, except that nobody seems to have told the British journalist, who keeps using it:
It seems a rum do, however, that women must wait for a cavalry of progressive male CEOs to ride to the rescue.
The Times, 6 February 2008. It would be possible to quote many others. However, to be fair, it is now used mostly as a deliberately old-fashioned or mildly humorous term.
The second half is easy enough to explain. A do is an event or happening, a sense that dates from the early nineteenth century.
Her family has a ‘do’ every year on the anniversary of the day her mother’s father died.
People of Ship Street, by Madeline Kerr, 1958, a story about life in a Liverpool slum. Here ‘do’ means an organized entertainment or function.
Ha! That was a bit of a do. That’s when poor old Vince got stabbed.
Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett, 1994, a Discworld novel in which music takes on magical powers to control people. A bit of a do can be neutral in sense, a deprecating reference to an event or entertainment (‘we’re having a bit of a do next week; care to come?’), but it usually refers, as here, to some fuss or commotion.
The first half has nothing to do with the spirituous drink once quaffed in quantity by members of the Royal Navy. Rum began as what the Oxford English Dictionary describes as a canting term, slang from the criminal underworld. To start with it was positive, meaning variously good, fine, excellent or great. So rum booze was fine or excellent drink, a rum file was an expert pickpocket and a rum dab was a dextrous thief (dabs are fingers; see dab hand for more about the word).
Around 1800, for reasons not well understood, rum did a complete flip in sense from positive to negative and started to mean something or someone odd, strange or peculiar.
She had indeed a vague feeling that he was behaving in a very noble fashion and that she ought to admire it; but also she felt inclined to laugh at him and perhaps even to despise him a little. ‘He’s a rum customer,’ she thought.
Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, 1915. This semiautobiographical novel is generally regarded as the best thing he ever wrote. It’s been filmed three times.
Rum customer could, as here, mean an odd or peculiar person, but it could also at one time mean a man who appeared dangerous, whom it would be best to keep away from. There were once a number of slang terms that included rum in this sense of something odd, all mostly obsolete – a rum book, for example, was a curious or strange one, a rum phiz was an odd face (from physiognomy) and so on. Rum by itself could also mean something strange or peculiar. There’s also rummy, from the same source and with much the same meaning.
The Oxford English Dictionary guesses that it came about through one or other of these slang expressions being misunderstood by those unversed in criminal slang. It may have been rum cove (probably from Romany kova, a thing or person), originally meaning an excellent or first-class rogue, but in which rum was mistakenly taken to be derogatory. Other expressions starting in rum also shifted their senses over time: at the end of the nineteenth century the English Dialect Dictionary noted that rum duke was ‘a strange, unaccountable person’, a substantial shift in sense from the original meaning of a handsome man.
Where it comes from is disputed. Some suggest it might have been borrowed from Rome, the city of glory and grandeur, as a term of great approval (there is some slight evidence for this in that this sense of rum could in its early days be spelled rome); others point to the Romany rom, a man. A third group, of which the Oxford English Dictionary and I are members, confess we have absolutely no idea.
Q. Please comment on the over-used redundant safe harbour.
A. Your dislike of it, I presume, is based on the etymological history of harbour, which comes from the Old English her-ebeorg for a shelter or refuge. It’s not unreasonable to argue that harbours are intrinsically safe, which would make the expression a tautology. However, as so often, matters aren’t that simple.
The earliest sense of harbour in English – in the twelfth century – was of shelter from the elements, which might be an inn or other lodgings. (A cold harbour was a wayside refuge for travellers overtaken by bad weather.) It took another century before it began to be applied to a place where ships might shelter. The verb went through much the same developments, with the sense of sheltering or concealing a fugitive coming along in the fifteenth century. The closely related word haven is slightly older and derives from a different Old English source. Its development is the opposite of harbour – the maritime sense came first and the land-based place of shelter evolved from it.
Later on, the concept of safety originally explicit in both harbour and haven became to a significant extent separated from that of the physical place in which ships could dock or lie at anchor. And, of course, you could have good harbours or poor ones. As a result, English speakers began to attach adjectives to both words to show their judgement of the value of a particular anchorage or port. By the seventeenth century safe harbour was being used to describe one with the needful security. The Oxford English Dictionary has an example from 1699 in A Dissertation Upon the Epistles of Phalaris by the classicist Richard Bentley: ‘She must not make to the next safe Harbour; but… bear away for the remotest.’
Both expressions soon began to be used figuratively. It’s hard to be sure quite when, because some early examples aren’t sufficiently clear in their meaning. Here’s an early example:
The bill underwent a great number of alterations and amendments; which were not effected without violent contest and altercation. At length, however, it was floated through both houses on the tide of a great majority, and steered into the safe harbour of royal approbation.
Complete History of England, by Tobias Smollett, 1758. This serious work, edited and partly written by Smollett, was financially successful, easing the author’s money problems.
We retain the idea of a harbour or a haven being a place of safety and security. However, in the law of the sea, a safe haven is a port in which a ship that is damaged or threatened by the weather may take refuge no matter its nationality (the alternative port of refuge is now also common). In the United States safe harbor means a procedure in a law or regulation that affords protection from liability or penalty if followed.
Because of these specialized usages, both safe harbour and safe haven have extended senses that mean they can’t be said to be tautologies, though the journalistic fashion for the latter in the 1990s and early 2000s turned it into a grating cliché. Beyond that, in general usage, the compounds safe harbour and safe haven have been used for so long that they have achieved the status of idiomatic phrases. Phrases, in fact, so firmly fixed in our minds that to rail against them is pointless.
Q. If someone is the salt of the earth they have admirable qualities and in particular can be relied upon. Why is this when salt added to the earth makes it sterile?
A. The expression is Biblical:
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
King James Bible, 1611, Matthew, 5:13.
Salt has always been one of the most prized commodities, essential both for life and for preserving food. Roman soldiers were paid an allowance to buy salt, the origin of our salary. A man worth his salt is efficient or capable. To eat salt with someone was to accept his hospitality and a person who did so was bound to look after his host’s interests. The Bible also speaks of a covenant of salt, one of holy and perpetual obligation. Newborn children were in ancient times rubbed with salt to protect them against evil forces.
To Jesus, therefore, salt of the earth was a great compliment. To understand his comment fully, though, you have to know a bit about where Jews of his time got their salt. Some came from salt pans on the margins of the Dead Sea, but much was obtained from Mount Sodom (Jebel Usdum in Arabic), a ridge of limestone and rock salt at the southwest corner of the Dead Sea, where a pillar of salt is said to have given rise to the legend of Lot’s wife. This rock salt was the literal salt of the earth, a valuable commodity. Because the deposit’s outer layer was exposed to the elements, it became contaminated and its salt content depleted by weathering, losing its taste and value, so becoming good for nothing.
The use of salt to poison the ground is entirely separate.
Q. I know as kids we found ourselves from time to time in precarious positions being goaded into surrender. The magic word was not surrender. Rather, the bullies of the day would only let go if we said Uncle! So my question begins with, why Uncle? And while you’re at it, where does the word come from anyway? By any other measure it’s a funny word.
A. There’s been a lot of speculation about this idiom. As a result of help from several sources, I’m able to provide a clear pointer to where it comes from.
The expression is American, from the early twentieth century:
This Time it is ‘Martie’ Graves and Don Johns who made them say ‘Uncle.’
In an advertisement for Excelsior Auto-Cycles in the Modesto News, California, 11 May 1912. The pair had smashed a total of thirty-eight world speed records at a meeting in Los Angeles a few days before, riding Excelsior motorbikes as you might expect.
The speculations are ingenious. At least two writers have argued that it derives from Irish anacal, meaning mercy; another proposes that it’s a childish modification of knuckle under. If they sound unlikely, try a theory that it goes back to a Latin expression used by Roman youngsters who got into trouble: patrue mi patruissime ‘uncle, my best of uncles’. It may be rather more probable that it’s a requirement that the person should be forced to cry for his uncle in order to be let free. But why uncle rather than father or mother?
The earliest examples – found by Dan Norder – are all part of a joke. This has a number of forms which appeared in various US newspapers from 1891 through to about 1907 and then reappeared in the early 1940s, often on the children’s pages. This is the earliest he has found:
A gentleman was boasting that his parrot would repeat anything he told him. For example, he told him several times, before some friends, to say ‘Uncle,’ but the parrot would not repeat it. In anger he seized the bird, and half-twisting his neck, said: ‘Say “uncle,” you beggar!’ and threw him into the fowl pen, in which he had ten prize fowls. Shortly afterward, thinking he had killed the parrot, he went to the pen. To his surprise he found nine of the fowls dead on the floor with their necks wrung, and the parrot standing on the tenth twisting his neck and screaming: ‘Say “uncle,” you beggar! say “uncle.” ’
Iowa Citizen, 9 October 1891. Later versions make the reason for choosing uncle as the key word clearer by starting the story ‘A man whose niece had coaxed him to buy her a parrot succeeded in getting a bird that was warranted a good talker.’
The vital question is the same as the one about the chicken and the egg: which came first, the joke or the children’s call to submit? The Iowa Citizen attributes the joke to a periodical called Spare Moments, a London weekly, and a British origin is also suggested by some of the language: ‘a gentleman’ and ‘you beggar’ sound more British than American and are deleted in later newspaper versions of the joke. As the idiom say uncle is apparently strictly American, the joke cannot be an allusion to the idiom, and so the idiom must be an allusion to the joke.
Few matters are clear-cut in etymology and there’s room for an unexplained transfer of language between US and British English – we might imagine somebody taking the US expression across the Atlantic before it was first written down, which inspired an English comedian to produce the joke, which was then fed back the other way. But the balance of probabilities is heavily weighted towards the American idiom being from an English joke.
Q. A friend said during a recent discussion on cinema that horror films gave her the screaming ab-dabs. What are ab-dabs and where do I find them?
A. To give someone the screaming ab-dabs (or abdabs or habdabs) is a British expression for inducing an attack of extreme anxiety or irritation in someone. It’s a close relative of the heebie-jeebies.
The interiors have been preserved much as they were found, and though they may delight fans of Victoriana, their combination of the brash, the sepulchral and the twee gives me the screaming habdabs.
Independent on Sunday, 9 October 2005.
It’s first recorded in print in 1946 in the spelling hab-dabs. It seems to have become popular in the 1960s – one earlier name for the rock group Pink Floyd in that decade was The Screaming Abdabs.
There are few certainties about its origin. Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, says that screaming abdabs was a late 1930s expression for an attack of delirium tremens, but he doesn’t provide any evidence and that sense is otherwise unrecorded, so far as I know, though the modern British sense could well be a modification of it. He also claims that two phrases – don’t give me the old abdabs and don’t come the old abdabs with me – were warnings in services’ slang in the Second World War not to try to fool an officer or tell a fictitious story to excuse an action (or as he puts it, ‘don’t tell me the tale’). The version with the added h on the front looks like a hypercorrection, in which users assume an uncultivated speaker must be dropping an h.
One possible pointer to its origin might be the disparaging American slang term, abba-dabba, best known in the South, which denotes a person of such limited intellectual capacity he’s unable to form words properly. This is recorded in print from the 1930s.
It is still too good to be true and I start talking abbadabba language which is double talk with a mouthful of soup.
Kingsport News, Tennessee, 19 February 1943. In a comedy piece, supposedly a letter home from North Africa by a soldier named Oscar Purkey to his brother Luther.
That sent me to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang; its compiler Jonathan Lighter doesn’t mention that sense, but says it’s an American slang term for dessert (Eric Partridge also mentions this as a subsidiary meaning for abdabs, perhaps a humorous transformation of the slangy British afters). Professor Lighter suggests an origin in an old ragtime song whose refrain went:
‘Aba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab,’
Said the Chimpie to the Monk,
‘Baba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab,’
Said the Monkey to the Chimp.
‘Aba Daba Honeymoon’, lyric by Arthur Fields, music by Walter Donovan, published in 1914. In my youth I vaguely remember Debbie Reynolds singing it in the film Two Weeks with Love, which appeared in 1950; it became a hit song in its own right later. The royalties from the film eased the last two years of Fields’s life.
Though it might be a complete coincidence, the similarity between the abba dabba of the title and abdabs is too striking to be ruled out entirely as a possible source. The link between meaningless monkey chatter and the slang term for an inability to speak properly is obvious enough. Jonathon Green proposes in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang that abdabs might have referred to delirium tremens as a result of the spluttering, hesitant speech of somebody so afflicted. It’s possible that abba-dabba was brought to the UK sometime in the 1930s or early 1940s, perhaps by US service personnel, and was transformed into our modern expression.
Q. My friend and I have been trying to figure out the origin of the word scuttlebutt. Do you have any thoughts on this?
A. Scuttlebutt is gossip:
‘Oh, sure, anything the Syndicate is backing turns to gold. But’ – Greenbriar dropped his voice – ‘I hear gossip. Maybe only scuttlebutt, of course. Even so…’
The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner, 1972, a dystopian tale in which the policies of a US government controlled by big business have led to extreme levels of pollution in cities.
The second half is easy enough – butt is just the old word for a large cask (from late Latin buttis, a cask or wineskin). The first half appears in the language in several senses with different origins, so we have to be sure we’ve got the right one. It’s not the flattish open container, made of wickerwork at one time, whose name survives in coal scuttle; that’s Old English, from Latin scutella for a dish or platter (its first sense in English). Nor is it the one that means to move with short quick steps, perhaps like a spider; that comes from an old English dialect word.
The sense we want is the one that refers to a hole cut in a ship’s timbers. That’s been around since the fifteenth century, when sailors called any smallish hatchway or opening in the deck a scuttle, especially if it was covered with a lid of some sort; it was (and remains) the usual term for an opening to let in light or air. It’s of uncertain origin, but might be from the Old French escoutille, a hatchway. The verb to scuttle dates from the mid seventeenth century, at first in the sense of sinking a ship specifically by cutting holes in it – today we use it for doing so by any means.
Sailing ships commonly had a water cask on deck so the crew had easy access to drinking water during the day. To make it easier to scoop the water out with a tin pot or dipper, the head of the cask would be removed or a hole cut in one side. It became known as the scuttled butt – the cask with a hole in it. Fresh water was so precious that in naval ships a guard was posted by the butt to ensure that water was taken only to drink and not, for example, to wash clothes with.
It was the one place where members of the crew on duty in various parts of the ship could meet and talk during the working day.
There is no part of a frigate where you will see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of the scuttle-butt, just forward of the main-hatchway, on the gun-deck.
White Jacket; or The World in a Man-of-War, by Herman Melville, 1850. Today’s office water coolers have pretty much the same ambience, though in an infinitely less arduous and brutal context. The work, based on Melville’s service in the US Navy, was severely critical of every aspect of naval life; in particular, its graphic descriptions of floggings were instrumental in getting the practice banned.
Real scuttlebutts have long since passed into naval history (though the word continues to be used in the US Navy for a drinking fountain) and the word has shifted its meaning to the rumour and gossip itself rather than the place where one exchanged it.
Q. The phrase sea change appears frequently in both books and newspapers, and the only definition I’ve been able to find for it is that it is a transformation. How did the phrase come about and why?
A. It’s a quotation from Shakespeare.
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
This is part of the song that the spirit Ariel sings in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest, 1610. At Prospero’s urging he is falsely telling Ferdinand, son of Alonso, the King of Naples, that his father is dead following the shipwreck on Prospero’s island, though Prospero knows very well that Alonso is safe on the other side of the island. Fade here means ‘decompose’ and suffer, ‘undergo’.
Shakespeare obviously meant that the transformation of the body of Alonso was made by the sea, but we have come to refer to a sea change as being a profound transformation caused by any agency, one that isn’t easily reversed. Writers who think it has something to do with the ebb and flow of the tide and use it for a recurring shift in policy or opinion, or for a minor change, are unjustly diluting Shakespeare’s vision. I wish a figurative full fathom five to such people.
The point at which it stopped being a direct quotation and turned into an idiom is hard to pin down, though it seems to have happened as late as the nineteenth century and in the US, not in Britain. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first allusive use in one of Ezra Pound’s poems from 1917. But examples can be found earlier than that.
In the mean time, a great deal of the more substantial part of Eastford’s prosperity, together with as much of the show of it as could not be kept up to any advantage, had passed away. Like other towns on the Atlantic coast, it had suffered – ‘a sea-change’.
Eastford: or, Household Sketches, by George Lunt, 1855. The author’s real name was Wesley Brooke, a poet whom Edgar Allan Poe described as being ‘of much vigour of style and massiveness of thought’; he was also a Boston lawyer and at one time editor of the Boston Daily Courier.
Everything suffers a sea-change in the depths of Mr. Hawthorne’s mind, gets rimmed with an impalpable fringe of melancholy moss, and there is a tone of sadness in this book as in the rest, but it does not leave us sad.
In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s last major novel, The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni, in the issue of the US magazine Atlantic Monthly for April 1860.
Q. Having heard several clever shaggy dog stories recently, I wondered what the origin of the term is.
A. Today, shaggy dog story refers to a long, rambling joke, full of inconsequential detail and irrelevant asides, which ends in an anticlimax instead of the expected punchline. It’s amusing only because it’s absurdly pointless. Its teller often has more fun showing off his storytelling virtuosity than the audience does in hearing the result. The expected response is not a laugh, but a frustrated groan.
By now the so-called Indo-US nuclear deal has become a shaggy dog story: a prolonged bad joke that goes on and on with no end or punchline in sight.
The Times of India, 19 June 2008.
The first shaggy dog stories seem to have been variations on a tall tale that was indeed about a shaggy-haired dog. In 1953, Eric Partridge wrote a monograph, The ‘Shaggy Dog’ Story, Its Origin, Development and Nature. He wrote, ‘the best explanation of the term is that it arose in a story very widely circulated only since 1942 or 1943, although it was apparently invented in the 1930’s’. He was pretty much spot on with his dating, lacking only the information that the term started in the US; the earliest known use of the term, recently discovered, was in Esquire magazine in May 1937. All early appearances of the term are from US publications, including an obscure collection of shaggy dog stories dated 1946. However, the term soon crossed the Atlantic, as you can judge from the date of Eric Partridge’s book.
There are many candidates for the original, including one that Eric Partridge quoted. A grand householder in Park Lane, London, had the great misfortune to lose a very valuable and rather shaggy dog. He advertised repeatedly in The Times, but without luck, and finally he gave up hope. But an American in New York saw the advertisement, was touched by the man’s devotion, and took great trouble to seek out a dog that matched the specification in the advertisement and which he could bring over to London on his next business trip. In due course, he presented himself at the owner’s impressive house, where he was received in the householder’s absence by an even more impressive butler, who glanced at the dog, bowed, winced almost imperceptibly and exclaimed, in a horrorstricken voice, ‘But not so shaggy as that, sir!’
Not everybody concurs with my definition of a shaggy dog story. And it’s undoubtedly true that the genre, if we may identify it with such a grand term, has evolved down the years:
Perhaps because the original shaggy-dog story involved an animal, the term came to be used for animal stories generally that were by no means long and tedious and that were funny. They had to be a special kind of animal story, however, one that involved an impossibility (usually the attribution of human intelligence to an animal).
Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, Isaac Asimov, 1991. Best remembered as one of the ‘big three’ SF masters, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, he wrote more than 500 books on many themes over a long lifetime. Asimov was also a noted raconteur and this book is both a joke book and a treatise on the theory of humour.
The earliest story I’ve found that’s introduced as being a shaggy dog story is a variation on a traditional tale about a dog that can’t convince anybody he talks. In this version, a trainer of two dogs, desperate for vaudeville work, has them perform an acrobatic routine for a booking agent:
At the end of the act he just grunted. Trainer and dogs were so discouraged. All was silent. Finally the little dog spoke up and said, ‘Well, fellow, how about giving us a break and booking our act?’ The agent sprang to his feet. ‘My God!’ he said, ‘did that little dog talk?’ ‘No,’ said the discouraged trainer, ‘the big dog is a ventriloquist.’ ‘Here, Spot, let’s get the hell out of here, no one appreciates a trained dog act anymore.’
The Ogden Standard-Examiner, Utah, 23 November 1942. This fits Asimov’s definition to a T. The plonking final sentence is appropriately anticlimactic.
Some writers feel that shaggy dog stories should end in an atrociously punning punchline, but SF aficionados argue that a tale of that kind is instead a feghoot, named after a series of such stories that were first published under the general title Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The alternative term shaggy dog tale is also common.