Q. I once read that the origin of the word sharpshooter harks back to the days of the buffalo hunters in the American west. They used the old Sharps rifle and hence became known as Sharps’ shooters. Do you know if there is any truth in this?
A. It’s a story that’s sometimes told and you can understand why, as a connection between sharp and Sharps seems obvious. It has also been said that the term was popularized during the American Civil War of the 1860s. Wrong war, wrong country, wrong rifle. The stimulus was the Napoleonic Wars and the term is British. So the short, sharp answer is that there’s no truth in it.
Doubters may like the facts. The Sharps rifle was designed by Christian Sharps in the late 1840s and made from 1850 onwards by his firm, the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company. But the term sharp shooter was in use in Britain as early as 1801. The Experimental Group of Riflemen had been set up in the British Army in 1800; this led to the creation of the 95th (Rifle) Regiment in 1802 as a specialist sharpshooting force using the Baker rifle. If you’re familiar with Bernard Cornwell’s books about Richard Sharpe of the 95th Rifles, then you will already know this period and milieu.
This Regiment has several Field Pieces, and two companies of Sharp Shooters, which are very necessary in the modern Stile of War.
Edinburgh Advertiser, 23 June 1801, in a report about the North British Militia. This is the earliest example I can find of the term, which quickly became common, appearing in The Times more than twenty times in the next three years.
After performing wonders by his example and coolness, Lord Nelson was wounded by a French Sharpshooter, and died in three hours after, beloved and regretted in a way not to find example.
A letter from Sir Henry Blackwood to his wife Harriet, written at 1 a.m. in the morning of 22 October 1805, the day after the Battle of Trafalgar. He began his letter by reassuring her that she was ‘not a husband out of pocket’. Sir Henry was the naval officer in command of the inshore squadron, who with Captain Hardy witnessed the codicil to Nelson’s will, written in the cockpit of the Victory while Nelson was dying, which unavailingly asked the nation to take care of Emma Hamilton. Note he uses ‘sharpshooter’ unselfconsciously as the term for the rifleman, whom we would now call a sniper.
Bavarian and Austrian riflemen and sharpshooters are recorded earlier. The Tirailleurs (French for sharpshooters) were Austrians who fought on the French side early in the Napoleonic Wars. The German term Scharfschütze for them is recorded in Jacobsson’s Technologisches Wörterbuch of 1781, so it seems certain that sharpshooter was borrowed into English from German as what linguists call a calque or loan translation, in which each element of the word is translated literally.
Q. I’m doing a play set in Elizabethan times, but have come unravelled trying to find out the meaning of the phrase shilling ordinary. The context is ‘a message was brought to me while I was sitting in the shilling ordinary.’
A. A common historical sense of ordinary as a noun was of something ordered, set out by rule or custom, hence usual or ordinary in our modern sense. An early example was the food that was served regularly in a community or that constituted one’s customary daily fare. Both are known from the fifteenth century. A further application of the idea was to a meal in an eating-house or tavern, a sense indeed known from Elizabethan times in the latter part of the sixteenth century. By extension, ordinary was also used for the place where the meal was served and for the company who frequented it.
A shilling ordinary therefore was a meal for that price. Though an Elizabethan might well have described a meal in an inn as an ordinary, he wouldn’t as a matter of course have paid a shilling for it, because that would have been an expensive meal at the time – a shilling was about a day’s wages for a skilled workman. The phrase itself doesn’t actually appear until the latter part of the eighteenth century, though there is one rather obscure reference to a two-shilling ordinary in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man Out Of His Humour of 1598, in whose first performance, incidentally, Shakespeare is said to have played one of the parts.
The meal was of highly variable quality. Sometimes it could be excellent:
We took our seats in a corner, whence we could observe the company. Stow whispered in my ear that this was a shilling ordinary, and one of the best in London, as was proved by the number of guests.
London, by Sir Walter Besant, 1892. The meal began with roast beef with peas and buttered beans, continued with roast capons and ducks and a course of cakes and fruit – a veritable feast. Nothing is said about the cost, but it hardly seems likely it was really only a shilling, even in 1892. It would seem shilling ordinary had become a fixed phrase indicating a set meal irrespective of price.
In the provinces it might be a plain but filling repast, if you were lucky:
There is a ‘shilling ordinary’ – which is rural English for a cut off the joint and a boiled potato, followed by hunks of the sort of cheese which believes that it pays to advertise, and this is usually well attended.
A Damsel in Distress, by P. G. Wodehouse, 1919. By ‘it pays to advertise’, Wodehouse may have been directly satirizing a famous play of 1915 with that title by Roi Cooper Megrue, Walter Hackett and Samuel Field, which became a film in 1931. However, the phrase – still very much around – exhorting businesses to shout about their wares dates back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century and was common in newspapers in the US by the 1880s.
Often it was not just indifferent but dreadful quality. In the nineteenth century, complaints and jokes about the poor fare provided in the cheaper sort of establishment were common:
Outside the London clubs there was only the dear hotel or inn and the cheap chop house, where the steaks and pies might be well cooked, but where the shilling ‘ordinary’ consisted all too often of ‘parboiled ox-flesh, with sodden dumplings floating in a saline, greasy mixture, surrounded by carrots looking red with disgust and turnips pale with dismay’.
Plenty and Want, by John Burnett, 1966, quoting Memoirs of a Stomach of 1853, written by ‘a Minister of the Interior’, now known to have been Sydney Whiting. American readers may like to know that dear means ‘expensive’.
Hungry Customer [trying to carve a joint]. Here, waiter, bring me another carving knife. I can’t cut anything with this villainous thing. Honest Waiter. Beg pardon, Sir, but we never sharpen the knives for a Shilling Ordinary.
Punch, 18 September 1858.
Another term for the meal was farmer’s ordinary.
The coffee-room has in truth fallen away from its former purposes, and is now used for a farmer’s ordinary on market days, and other similar purposes.
The American Senator, by Anthony Trollope, 1877, describing the Bush Inn in the decaying town of Dillsborough in the fictitious county of Rufford.
Q. Shiver my timbers turned up in a story I was reading to my children the other night. Please could you tell us all where the phrase originated?
A. It’s a nautical expression, an exclamation that alludes to a ship striking some obstacle so violently that the timbers of her hull shiver, or break into small pieces. It’s an oath along the lines of ‘May I be dashed into pieces like a ship hitting a rock!’
It is first recorded in 1835 in Jacob Faithful, a novel by Captain Frederick Marryat of Coral Island fame: ‘I won’t thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do’. It also appears in the same year in a short story from the other side of the Atlantic:
‘A thousand thanks, generous man, for the kind treatment of the homeless orphan – but happy she cannot be – life is to her a burden. Oh, let me die. ‘Shiver my timbers if I do!’ said he bluntly. ‘What should I do if you were gone to the sharks? I love you with all my soul, and if you will just look kindly on a poor sailor, you shall not be desolate, while there is a spar afloat or a shot in the locker.’
Huron Reflector, Norwalk, Ohio, 15 September 1835.
These two appearances suggest that it might originally have reflected a genuine sailors’ oath that was old enough to be known in both Britain and America, though we have no record of it other than in fiction. It often appears today in the ungrammatical form shiver me timbers!
Though it can only be used jokingly, it has gained a continuing place in the language, almost entirely because of its many repetitions in one book:
Cross me, and you’ll go where many a good man’s gone before you, first and last, these thirty year back – some to the yardarm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes. There’s never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a’terwards, Tom Morgan, you may lay to that.
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883. Long John Silver makes his views plain.
Since then, it’s mainly been the preserve of the writers of second-rate seafaring yarns or humorists looking for an easy line.
The thing that the stage sailor most craves in this life is that somebody should shiver his timbers. ‘Shiver my timbers!’ is the request he makes to every one he meets. But nobody ever does it.
Stage-land: The Curious Habits and Customs of its Inhabitants, by Jerome K. Jerome, 1889. Better known for his Three Men in a Boat of the same year, Jerome had been earlier a jobbing actor in London, recent memories of which fuelled this work; though humorously intended, it’s actually a good source of information about the theatre of the period.
Q. Eric Partridge says that to shoot oneself in the foot dates from the 1980s and means a person has made a self-defeating, counter-productive blunder. I remember the expression much earlier. In the post-Second World War days it meant to take a self-inflicted, relatively minor wound in order to avoid the possibility of death or greater peril, essentially an act of cowardice. When and how did this change to the modern meaning?
A. In the sense of a self-inflicted injury for the reasons you give, it is certainly older still. My erratic memory suggests it was a well-known tactic in the First World War, rather too well known to officers and medics even then to be easily carried off.
The fellow who had the bed next to mine had shot himself in the foot to avoid going into a battle. A lot of them did that, but why they picked on their own feet that way is beyond me. It’s a nasty place, full of small bones.
Death in the Woods and Other Stories, by Sherwood Anderson, 1933. An American is describing his experiences as an aviator in the British Army in the First World War, during which he crashed his plane and was taken to hospital. A soldier who suffered a wound, from whatever cause, that was sufficiently serious for him to be sent back to Britain was called a Blighty Boy and the wound was a Blighty.
The technique has continued into modern times. Hearings held in November 1969 into the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War were told that one soldier had ‘shot himself in the foot in order to be medivac-ed out of the area so that he would not have to participate in the slaughter.’
As a literal expression describing an accidental injury it is earlier still, from the middle of the nineteenth century. I would expect that such accidents have been happening ever since firearms became portable enough for men to be careless with them. The image that at once comes to mind here is the Wild West gunslinger who tries to be the first to draw in a gunfight but who in his haste pulls the trigger before his gun is clear of the holster, inevitably shooting himself in the foot. The first example that I can find, however, is this sad report:
Mr. Darriel S. Leo, Consul to Basle, accidentally shot himself through the foot, four or five days ago, in a pistol gallery at Washington, and died on Sunday of lockjaw.
The Appleton Post-Crescent, Wisconsin, 29 August 1857.
A search of US newspapers found getting on for 200 items between 1960 and 1965 reporting that a man had accidentally shot himself in the foot, usually while hunting or cleaning his gun; it’s no doubt a common injury down to the present day. I’m sure the expression shoot oneself in the foot derives from such accidents, usually the result of incompetence, and has led to our current meaning of making an embarrassing error of judgement or inadvertently making one’s own situation worse. That men have done it deliberately as a way to avoid combat is only a side meaning.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first figurative example, from the US, is dated 1959. It’s in an extended metaphor in William White Howells’s Mankind in the Making: ‘Many a specialist has shot himself in the foot when he thought he was only cleaning a paragraph.’ The Oxford English Dictionary’s next example is from Aviation Week in 1976: ‘Why we seem to insist on shooting ourself in the foot over this issue, I’ll never know.’
So the conversion to the modern figurative sense was in the air in the US from the end of the 1950s (and may indeed, as I suspect, be older). But it became common from the early 1980s and by 1986 had given rise to the shortened allusive description foot-shooting.
Q. I am wondering where short shrift came from? What is a shrift, and why is it short?
A. The first known use of the phrase in English is this:
RATCLIFFE: Come, come, dispatch. The duke would be at dinner. Make a short shrift: he longs to see your head.
Richard III, Act 3, Scene 4, by William Shakespeare, 1597. Lord Hastings has been condemned by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to be taken out at once and beheaded and Sir Richard Ratcliffe is understandably anxious to see the matter ended.
Shakespeare’s meaning for shrift would have been immediately known to his audience. It’s from the verb shrive, the act of confessing to a priest followed by penance and absolution. Hastings has just asked to see a priest; Ratcliffe was telling him to be quick about his confession because Richard wanted him dead as soon as possible.
What’s odd about short shrift is that it then doesn’t appear again until Sir Walter Scott’s poetic romance The Lord of the Isles in 1814: ‘Short were his shrift in that debate’. Scott likely extracted the phrase from Shakespeare’s play – he loved using archaisms. He was so influential in the early nineteenth century that he was probably single-handedly responsible for making it popular. It soon became a standard idiom in the language with the sense first of a brief respite, then of giving a matter brief and unsympathetic attention, especially in the phrase to give short shrift to somebody or something:
With the other men on board she was politely discouraging; one or two of the Army officers whom we took aboard for short stages were disposed to be gallant, and short shrift she gave them – one, I’m sure, had her heel stamped on his instep, for I saw him follow her on to the foredeck one evening, only to return red-faced and hobbling visibly.
Flashman and the Redskins, by George MacDonald Fraser, 1982. One of a famous series, whose main character is borrowed from the bully in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In the first half of the book, Flashman takes a wagon train across America, on the way meeting Kit Carson and Geronimo, ending up marrying the daughter of an Apache chieftain; in the second part he meets Ulysses S. Grant, Wild Bill Hickok, William Tecumseh Sherman and Crazy Horse and ends up at the battle of Little Big Horn with George Custer. Never a boring moment.
Shrive is itself a strange word, since its source is the Latin scriptum, letters or writing, from which we get words such as script. The modern German verb schreiben, to write, comes from the same source, as do similar terms in other European languages. For some reason we don’t understand, shrive took on a special sense in the Old English and Scandinavian languages of imposing a penalty, perhaps from the idea of making a written decree. This led to the specific religious meaning and from there to our idiom for brushing somebody’s concerns aside unfeelingly. Such are the oddities of language evolution.
Q. I would appreciate it if you could help me find the origin of the expression sick as a dog.
A. Can do. There are several expressions of the form sick as a [something], that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them.
Thou knowest he’s as uncertain as the wind, and if instead of quarrelling with me, he should chance to be fond, he’d make me as sick as a dog.
The Confederacy, by English playwright and architect Sir John Vanbrugh. This comedy, of ‘lustful husbands, extravagant and scheming wives, and dishonest young men’ as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes it, was produced in his own theatre, the Queen’s in London’s Haymarket, in 1705. Clarissa here is speaking ill of her husband Gripe; in the language of the play he is a money scrivener, a usurer.
It’s probably no more than an attempt to give extra force to a strongly worded statement of physical or mental unease. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often got the short end of the linguistic stick. They’ve had an incredibly bad press down the years – think of dog tired, a dog’s life, dog in the manger, dog eat dog, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, a dog’s chance and dog Latin.
At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged into the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit (not many people know that); one nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used ‘when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting’.
Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing.
Stop giggling at the back. This strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731 in a book we’ve already met in the entry for monkey’s wedding, whose extended title is A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, According to the Most Polite Mode and Method Now Used at Court, and in the best Companies of England. The work is a series of dialogues, ostensibly as a guide to improve the reader’s conversational skills, but which actually records and mocks virtually every cliché of the high society of his day, which Swift alleges in his introduction he had recorded down the years in a pocket-book. Wants, by the way, here means ‘lacks’.
The modern variation, sick as a parrot, which is recorded from the 1970s – at one time overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of over the moon, a state of euphoria consequent upon some success – refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners, though it has been plausibly suggested it has a more famous origin, in the notorious parrot sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, broadcast by BBC Television in 1969.
Q. A friend told me that the word skive, to get off work, is from the leather on top of a desk where elbows would rest when no work was being done. Is this right and do you know the origin of this word?
A. Interesting. Completely wrong, but interesting.
Skive is rather dated slang for avoiding school or work by staying away or leaving early; it’s often heard in the form skive off.
Not bad for a guy who skived off all his dance classes at stage school because he couldn’t bear the thought of having to don a leotard and some leg warmers.
Daily Mail, 17 December 2007.
It’s mainly British and Commonwealth usage. American readers have only recently been exposed to it:
‘We want to experiment with Doxy venom for our Skiving Snackboxes,’ George told Harry under his breath. Deftly spraying two Doxys at once as they soared straight for his nose, Harry moved closer to George and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘What are Skiving Snackboxes?’ ‘Range of sweets to make you ill,’ George whispered, keeping a wary eye on Mrs Weasley’s back. ‘Not seriously ill, mind, just ill enough to get you out of a class when you feel like it.’
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J. K. Rowling, 2003.
It seems to have been military slang from the time of the First World War, and the common assumption is that the British Army in France borrowed it from French esquiver, to slink away. The usual caveats apply, since that origin is informed guesswork, and there’s another possibility – an English dialect verb of obscure origin meaning to move quickly.
The reason why the story you were told is intriguing is that another well-known meaning of skive has been incorporated into it – to split or cut a material such as leather into slices or strips, or to shave or pare a material to reduce its thickness. The word isn’t that old (only recorded from the 1820s) but almost certainly goes back to Old Norse; it’s common today in – for example – the metals and plastics industries. A person who carries out this work is also called a skiver, though unlike the slang version this is a respectable occupation.
Q. I heard a phrase a few years back from a former colleague. She was telling me about a poem she wrote about a sky-blue pink dress; when I asked about this, she said it was a phrase for a magical fantasy colour that she had always known. Are you familiar with it?
A. Yes, and it was well known to my mother in London in the 1940s and also to my wife’s mother, another Londoner. British people have several elaborations of it, mostly half a century old or more. Examples include sky-blue pink with purple dots, sky-blue pink with yellow spots on, and sky-blue pink with a heavenly border. A form once popular in northern England was sky-blue pink with a finny addy border, in which finny addy is a corruption of finnan haddock, a type of cold-cured smoked fish, named after Findon in Scotland; I’d guess its yellowish colour was the reason for including it.
The expression has been variously used – by exasperated adults to children when pestered about names for colours, as a ‘mind your own business’ off-putting reply to an unwanted question, a sarcastic description of some over-the-top or inappropriate colour, as a hand-waving term meaning ‘whatever colour you want’, or a dismissive comment to the effect that colour doesn’t matter:
The father-of-three is furious that he has been convicted of being racist towards Irish people…. He said the fact that they were Irish had nothing to do with the situation and it would have made no difference whether they were green Martians or coloured sky blue pink.
BBC News, 12 May 2004.
All this might suggest that it’s British, but it turns out to be American. The earliest examples appear in US sources near the end of the nineteenth century:
Brilliant colors in masculine garb are beginning to appear in Paris…. The innovation will be a boon to some of our young men, who will find ample exercise for their faculties in determining whether pea green or sky blue pink would better suit their various complexions.
The Haverhill Daily Bulletin, Massachusetts, 14 July 1881.
‘I can’t tell the colour,’ said Binns. ‘It was like a sky blue pink, with a shade of greeny brown, or something like that.’
Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner, 13 September 1893.
We can only surmise where it comes from, but there are many examples of advertisements both before and after these examples in which the range of colours for some item put sky-blue and pink next to each other (‘Paris cashmere shawls. Cardinal, cream, sky-blue, pink, tan, wine’). You would only have to leave out a comma to create a fictitious new colour.
The reason for its continuing popularity may be linked to a series of US children’s stories about a rheumatic elderly rabbit named Uncle Wiggily:
He splashed around and scattered the skilligimink color all over the kitchen, and when his mamma and Susie fished him out, if he wasn’t dyed the most beautiful sky-blue-pink you ever saw!
Sammie and Susie Littletail, by Howard R. Garis, 1910. Garis was a famous, and prolific, American children’s writer of the first half of the twentieth century. He invented Uncle Wiggily while working for the Newark News, and over four decades wrote one story a day for the paper. He also authored more than thirty stories about the adventures of Tom Swift under the pen name of Victor Appleton (a ‘house pseudonym’ of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, under which other authors also wrote), and lots more under other names – Laura Lee Hope, Lester Chadwick, Roy Rockwood, Clarence Young – some 500 books in total. Don’t ask me about skilligimink, by the way: Garis seems to have been the only person ever to use the word, and where it comes from is unknown.
Sky-blue pink appeared in other authors’ children’s stories in the years that followed. By the 1930s it had crossed the big pond to Britain. Since millions of copies of the Uncle Wiggily stories have been sold, and many of the books are still in print, the expression continues to be introduced to new generations.
Q. Several news items in the press recently have featured financial transactions carried out through a slush fund. How did such an unlikely term become connected with money?
A. These days, references to a slush fund imply some illicit purpose. In particular they refer to a source of money for bribing elected officials, but more generally they can mean any illegal or unauthorized use of funds:
Unfortunately, this absence of control has meant that a very large number of politicians of all parties have regarded their Commons allowance as a gigantic slush fund.
Daily Mail, 5 July 2008.
It was originally a naval term, a wholly legitimate one. As sequences of novels about life in the Royal Navy in earlier times have graphically described, food for the lower deck was pretty dreadful. One staple was pork or beef, preserved heavily salted in casks for long voyages. The cook boiled this up in tubs in the galley as needed. One result was a mass of semi-liquid fat, called slush, which was skimmed off and stored in barrels called slush tubs.
Some of the slush was used on board ship for greasing various bits of equipment, such as the tackle blocks. Some was supplied to members of the crew for frying ship’s biscuit or fresh-caught fish. The rest of it was sold off to tallow chandlers once the ship reached port to make candles. The money received was, at least in the early days, put into a fund to pay for small luxuries for the crew. This was the original slush fund.
This is a very early appearance of the term:
Other iron hoops, greater it is believed in number, were purchased from what is called the Slush Fund, and restored to the ship, to replace those taken as aforesaid, and the Slush Fund was reimbursed this advance by the money received from the owners of the specie which was placed in the kegs.
Connecticut Mirror, 12 September 1825. This was part of a long report fulminating at the large numbers of courts martial in the US Navy, often on minor charges. ‘The whole naval force of the country seems to be divided into two parts; those who are to be tried, and those who form the Court.’ Commodore Stevens had been accused, among other matters, of stealing iron cask hoops.
By the early 1870s, the term was being used in US political circles for an unofficial source of money to be used for what the Glasgow Herald in 1924 explained to its readers as ‘illicit commission, bribery, corruption, and graft’:
The stalwart bosses spent a slush fund of several hundred dollars for purchase of votes.
The Decatur Daily Review, Illinois, 7 November 1879.
Q. When I was a child, my mother used to describe knives or scissors in need of sharpening as so dull you could ride to China on them. In the more than half a century since then I’ve only heard two other people use that expression and both of them were from my hometown of Baltimore. I’d love to know if this phrase is regional as well as getting a hook on the origin of it.
A. Nothing about this strange phrase is in any of my reference books; nor does it appear in any work of mainstream literature that I can search. That it is quite unrecorded shows that it was one of those folk sayings that never made the big time.
I asked my World Wide Words subscribers about it. A fascinating set of responses came in, from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, South Africa, Germany and the Netherlands, showing that phrases like it are widespread. The only significant difference in most cases was that the destination changed to be somewhere a long way from the speaker.
Several replies were from Australia. This one, from Kevin Esposito, was typical: ‘In North Queensland, the phrase was “so blunt you could ride to London on it”, which was frequently used by my Irish granny. It was in common use in that area through the 1940s to 1960s’. Other Australians also recall London as the destination. Michael Grounds said: ‘My mother (born in Australia about 1900), who had a very English heritage, used to say of a blunt knife that you could ride to London on it, and I was delighted to hear the same expression again just recently.’
What was especially interesting was that German, Dutch and South African subscribers also recognized it. Johan Viljoen wrote: ‘In Afrikaans we say: “Die mes is so stomp dat jy op hom Kaap toe kan ry” (“The knife is so dull/blunt that you can ride to the Cape on it”). The Cape refers to Cape Town.’ Ted Friethoff remarked: ‘The funny thing about this expression is that here in Holland my mother used the same expression about dull knives or scissors, with this difference that she used to ride to Rome on them.’ S. Windeisen commented from Germany: ‘The expression reminds me of something my mother says about dull knives – in German, more precisely in our Swabian regional dialect: “You could ride to Stuttgart on this knife without getting a sore behind.” ’
The reference to backsides is echoed by Alistair McCaw: ‘My late father-in-law, who was English, often used the phrase “you could ride bare-arsed to London on this” in reference to blunt tools or knives.’ Cecil Ballantine wrote from Cheltenham to say that a Wiltshire relative of his partner used that form of the expression. Angela Shingler mentioned that her mother, from East Yorkshire, also used it (though she referred to China as the destination).
The rather more pungent version of the saying suggests that it is horse riding that is being referred to, rather than any more modern form of transport. In turn – taken with the wide distribution geographically and linguistically – this suggests the expression is very old.
Q. In the light of all the campaigning in this US election year, I mentioned the term soapbox and got a few strange looks from people who had never heard the term. I refer to politicians using a platform or box to speak or preach. Can you find any other history to the use of soapbox or perhaps soapboxing?
A. Useful things, soapboxes. In quantity, bars of soap are rather weighty and they used to be packed in stout wooden boxes or crates for transport. Once emptied, the boxes were in demand. The indigent turned them into improvised furniture; children loved to put old pram wheels on them and make them into mini-racing cars, so they could run soap-box derbies. They were also just the ticket to stand on so you could be seen more easily when haranguing an audience in the street.
The most recent literal example I can think of is the soapbox, so-called, that John Major spoke from in the 1992 British general election. My journalistic contacts say that it first appeared in Cheltenham on 30 March 1992; it was certainly a wooden box from a supermarket, but as nobody packed soap in wooden boxes even then, it was instead a more flimsy orange box (at least that’s what it looks like in the news photographs, with black gaffer tape wound round it to make sure it didn’t fall apart and precipitate the PM into the crowd). John Major called it a soapbox to reinforce the idea that he was conducting a traditional meet-the-people election campaign.
There’s no way of knowing when public speakers first turned to the soapbox or exactly when it became the term for a strident, in-your-face public tirade or political harangue, the sort long famous at Speakers’ Corner in London:
It is the pulpit of the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soapbox. From it the voice to the city is often a pious one and almost always a raucous one.
Gaslight Sonatas, by Fannie Hurst, 1918. She was a noted Jewish-American writer of the period from about 1910 to 1940 and many films were made from her books. This is the third of four books that featured working girls in New York City and Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side.
An early literal reference appeared in March 1896 in the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel of Indiana: ‘Then the band divided and scattered throughout the town, distributing their pamphlets and occasionally mounting a soapbox or a barrel to make a speech.’ But I suspect it goes back a lot further.
The earliest example of the term used figuratively I can find is in the report of the National Convention of the Socialist Party of America in 1904, which referred to the party’s soap-box orators. Only three years later, Jack London wrote in The Road, his account of his hoboing experiences of 1894, ‘I get up on a soap-box to trot out the particular economic bees that buzz in my bonnet.’
The verb is also known, as is the noun soap-boxer for a person who uses a soap-box, both from early in the twentieth century.
Q. The American institution known as the spelling bee has been getting a lot of attention recently – why is this competition named after a stinging insect? Or is it?
A. It used to be assumed that the bee in this case was the insect, an allusion to its social and industrious nature. The experts now prefer to point instead to the English dialect been or bean. These were variations on boon, once widely used in the sense of ‘voluntary help, given to a farmer by his neighbours, in time of harvest, haymaking, etc’ (as the English Dialect Dictionary put it a century ago, reporting on a word that was even then more than a century older still).
Last Thursday about twenty young Ladies met at the house of Mr. L. on purpose for a Spinning Match; (or what is called in the Country a Bee).
Boston Gazette, 16 October 1769.
It’s likely that the link was reinforced by the similarity in names and by the insect allusion; perhaps also because at one time been was the plural of bee in some dialects (a relic of the old English plural that survives in the standard language in a few words such as oxen).
Despite its English origins, bee is a classic North American word, which developed among farmers in rural areas as the name for various kinds of mutual support at key times of year. Several acquired fixed and standard names, such as sewing bee, quilting-bee, and raising-bee (for barn raisings). These start to appear in print in the US from the 1820s and are common by the middle of the century.
Informal spelling contests among neighbours or in schools had long been held for recreation or instruction or as tests. They were called spelling matches or spelling-schools, names that appear in the 1840s. The basis for many competitions was the Blue-Backed Speller or Blue Speller, Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, a work which sold more than 80 million copies in the century after its publication in 1783.
The blue book isn’t very large, but there’s a good deal in it to be spelled. It contains a host of such words as ‘chalybeate’, ‘phylactery’, ‘erysipelas’, ‘logarithmic’, ‘pharmaceutical’ etc., ad infinitum, to say nothing of orthographical monstrosities of all kinds, the whole compiled for just such occasions.
Inter-Ocean, Chicago, 30 November 1874. This report, reprinted from the Cleveland Herald, appeared under the headline ‘A Spelling Bee: How They Conduct It in the City of Cleveland’. Apart from the headline, throughout it was referred to as a ‘spelling-school’.
In 1874, US local newspapers started to report public spelling matches or spelling contests with an admission fee, in which contestants competed for prizes. They became an enormous craze – often called spelling fever, with the participants described as spellists.
Smith says this spelling school fever is getting to be an intolerable bore. On going home to supper in a hurry, one evening lately, he found his wife sitting in front of the parlor fire, with a spelling book in her hand, and heard an indistinct mumbling, in which he could occasionally distinguish: ‘c-o-m-p-l-a-c-e-nt, s-a-t-i-s-f-i-e-d, h-a-p-p-y,’ etc. ‘Is supper ready, my dear?’ asked he. ‘S-u-p-p e-r,’ was all the answer he could hear. ‘Come, come, I must go up town shortly,’ he said. ‘S-h-o r-t-l-y,’ echoed the lady, moving toward the kitchen door, pausing in the door to take one last look at McGuffey.
The Daily Free Press of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 26 April 1875. The reference at the end is to another famous book, McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader, by William McGuffey, widely used in America to teach reading well into the twentieth century.
The term spelling bee appears for the first time, in Brooklyn, in July 1874. In March the next year the term is recorded for one of these public contests and the term spread quickly and widely:
On Thursday evening last, your correspondent attended the much talked of ‘Spelling Bee’ held in the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and enjoyed it exceedingly.
Bucks County Gazette, Bristol, Pennsylvania, 1 April 1875.
It soon reached British shores:
On Monday evening an entertainment of novel, amusing, and instructive character, was given in the Temperance Hall, Dresden – a spelling match, or what the Americans call a spelling bee.
Staffordshire Sentinel, Stoke-on-Trent, May 1875. The following month, the US journal Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reported that ‘The spelling-bee mania has spread over all England, and attacked London with especial virulence.’ It didn’t survive long. In 1885, The Dictionary of Birmingham, by Thomas Harman and Walter Showell, noted that ‘The first “Spelling Bee” held in Birmingham took place January 17th, 1876. Like many other Yankee notions, it did not thrive here.’
The popularity of the spelling bee was so great that it redefined bee for many Americans to mean a public contest of knowledge. During the craze, other sorts were invented, including the historical bee and the geographical bee. Reformulated as history bee and geographic bee, these are still around, with math bee being added in the 1950s.
The craze didn’t last: as early as May 1875 the Daily Gazette and Bulletin of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, remarked that ‘The spelling fever has almost entirely subsided, and the buzz of the bee is scarcely heard any more.’ This was premature, at least for other parts of the USA, but the evidence suggests it was not a long-lived fashion; spelling bees went back to being popular in a low-key way, as they had been before the craze erupted. The modern national contest dates only from 1925.
As the fashion was subsiding, Bret Harte wrote a comic poem about a spelling bee that took place among bored gold miners in a bar at Angel’s Camp, California, news of this pastime having reached them from San Francisco. It did not go well:
When ‘phthisis’ came they all sprang up, and vowed the man who rung Another blamed Greek word on them be taken out and hung.
The Spelling Bee at Angels, by Bret Harte, 1878. Matters got much worse when they were asked to spell ‘gneiss’. The poem ends, ‘In me you see / The only gent that lived to tell about the Spellin’ Bee!’
It’s hard to think what the miners would have made of appoggiatura, autochthonous, and guerdon – the winning words in the US National Scripps Spelling Bee 2005–08.
Q. I have just been discussing with my son the origin of the word spiv. I am well aware of the meaning of the word – my late uncle Arthur English made his living depicting a lovable spiv in the 1940s and early 1950s – but until now I have never even thought about the origin of the word. My son, who is studying early 20th century history, claims that he had seen a suggestion that it was back-slang derived from VIPs, but I thought that this acronym was more recent than the Second World War. In any case, I couldn’t see that a spiv was necessarily the opposite of a Very Important Person; indeed, I suspect that a spiv was a VIP to many customers during the war and just afterwards.
A. A spiv was typically a flashily dressed man (velvet collars and lurid kipper ties, hence the adjective spivvy) who made a living by various disreputable dealings, existing by his wits rather than holding down any job, and who often supported himself by petty black-market dealings. (Another name was wide boy, with wide having the old slang sense of sharp-witted, or skilled in sharp practice.) He was small-time, living on the fringes of real criminality. He is most closely associated with the Second World War and after in Britain; he always seemed able to get those coveted luxury items such as nylons that were unobtainable during that period of austerity except on the black market. As well as Arthur English, Private Walker in the BBC television series Dad’s Army was a typical spiv; Arthur Daly, the second-hand car dealer in Minder, was a lineal descendant of the breed.
Spiv has lasted well and is still around:
High up the list is combating obesity among primary school children – which would be much easier if councils hadn’t banned competitive games in schools and sold off thousands of playing fields to supermarkets and spiv property developers.
Daily Mail, 30 June 2008.
Until recently, we have had no idea where the name comes from, which has given rise to a lot of uninformed speculation. It has indeed been said that it is VIPs backwards; also that it was a police acronym for Suspected Persons and Itinerant Vagrants. VIP is contemporary with spiv, but it would be very surprising if it were the source. Apart from the sense being wrong, inverted acronyms based on word play are uncommon. The police story is a well-meaning but inept attempt at making sense of the matter.
An early appearance in print was in Axel Bracey’s School for Scoundrels in 1934: ‘Spiv, petty crook who will turn his hand to anything so long as it does not involve honest work’. As a result of an investigation in 2007 by a BBC television programme, Balderdash and Piffle, we have learned that its first known appearance in print is slightly earlier, in a book of 1929, The Crooks of the Underworld, written under the pseudonym of G. C. Gordon; this included a reference to ‘a clique of Manchester “spives” ’.
We also have a better idea of the historical background to the term. The activities of Henry Bagster, a London newspaper seller and petty criminal of the early twentieth century, were widely reported at the time. Bagster’s court appearances for theft, selling counterfeit goods, assault, and loitering with intent to commit a felony were recorded in the British national press between 1903 and 1906. His nickname was ‘Spiv’, recorded from 1904.
We don’t know why he was given that nickname, though it may indicate that the slang term was in use even then. It might have come from the dialect term spiving, smart, or spiff, a well-dressed man. The latter developed into the adjective spiffy, smart or spruce, recorded from the 1850s, and also into spiffed up, smartly dressed. In the Chambers Slang Dictionary, Jonathon Green suggests instead the Romany spiv, a sparrow, which was used by gypsies, he says, ‘as a derogatory reference to those who existed by picking up the leavings of their betters, criminal or legitimate’.
Q. I’ve been told that the man who gave rise to the term Spoonerism never actually said one. Can this possibly be true?
A. There is indeed much evidence to suggest that William Archibald Spooner rarely if ever uttered a Spoonerism, though the legends, mischievous inventions and simple errors that have accreted around the term and his life obscure the truth.
A classic Spoonerism is the swapping of the initial sounds of two words, as in these famous but surely apocryphal examples: ‘young man, you have hissed my mystery lectures and tasted your worm and you must leave Oxford by the town drain’; ‘let us raise our glasses to the queer old Dean’; ‘which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?’
Spooner spent all his adult life at New College, Oxford, joining it as a scholar in 1862 and retiring as Warden (head of college) in 1924. The term Spoonerism began to appear in print in Britain in the 1890s:
The proofs were there; they could be seen;
It drove me nigh to pessimism,
This fruit of lawless rights between
A Malaprop and Spoonerism!
Punch, 7 April 1894. A poem to the anonymous author’s lost love, Angelina, is mangled in the printing as a result of her spite, so that ‘lover’s ills’ turned into ‘liver pills’ and ‘Cupid’s pinions’ changed to ‘Cupid’s bunions’.
The genial public orator (Dr. Merry), the author of many a Spoonerism, brightens things up now and again with his witticisms.
The Windsor Magazine, January 1896. The classical scholar William Merry was a fellow of Lincoln College from 1859 onwards – he became rector (head of college) in 1884 – and the public orator of Oxford University between 1880 and 1910. So he must have known Dr Spooner well. As the public orator’s pronouncements are always in Latin, the thought of classical Spoonerisms is intriguing.
However, the Oxford English Dictionary records that it had been known colloquially in Oxford since about 1885. It reached the US in 1902:
There are two Spooners, our own ‘Badger’ Spooner of Wisconsin, and Rev. Dr. Professor William Archibald Spooner of Oxford University, and both are guilty of some famous ‘Spoonerisms,’ writes Victor Smith in the New York Press. My old friend, William Braddon, knows the professor very well, and tells some funny stories of that eccentric genius, whose fame as a ludicrous word twister has spread all over Europe.
The Montgomery Advertiser, Alabama, 25 June 1902.
Stories about Dr Spooner’s strange verbal mannerisms became good copy for syndication:
Oxford students have lately adopted the fad of going mountaineering at midnight on the roofs of the college buildings. One of these adventurers was recently caught on the roof of the house occupied by Dr. Spooner, from whose funny mistake in speaking comes the term ‘Spoonerism.’ Dr. Spooner is reported to have said ‘shoving leopard,’ when he meant ‘loving shepherd.’ Already, no doubt, he is credited with rejoicing that, in the case of the student who was captured on his house, he had ‘rotted him on the spoof.’ Dr. Spooner once made a disastrous confusion of the names of two undergraduates, Bell and Headlam, turning these words into ‘Hell’ and ‘Bedlam.’ And it is said that he once wasted hours at Greenwich asking for the ‘Dull Man’ inn, when what he really wanted was the ‘Green Man’ at Dulwich.
The Lincoln Daily Evening News, Nebraska, 4 April 1906.
It has to be said that virtually every example on record, including these and all the other famous ones, including the hymn he supposedly introduced in chapel as ‘Kinkering Kongs Their Titles Take’, is an invention by ingenious members of the university who, as one undergraduate remembers, used to spend hours making them up.
Spooner did transpose items, but not like this – his inversions were more often of whole words or of ideas rather than sounds. A reliable witness records him repeatedly referring to a friend of a Dr Child as ‘Dr Friend’s child’. One day he passed a woman who was dressed in black and told his companion that her late husband was a very sad case, poor man, ‘eaten by missionaries’. He did things backwards sometimes. One story – well attested – recounts how he spilled some salt during a college dinner and carefully poured some claret on it to mop it up, a reversal of the usual process. He is also said to have remarked on the poor lighting of some stairs and then to have turned off the lights and tried to lead his party downstairs in the dark.
Wordplay of the type that we now call Spoonerisms was rife among Oxford undergraduates from about the middle of the nineteenth century:
Will you poke a smipe, Pet?’ asked Mr. Bouncer, rather enigmatically.
The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, by Cuthbert Bede, 1854. This is an earlier work by the author we have already met in the entry on mortarboard.
Spooner was well known in the small community of Oxford. He was instantly recognizable, since he was an albino, with the pale face, pink eyes, white hair, poor eyesight and small stature that is characteristic of his type. Some writers have suggested that his verbal and physical quirks may have been linked with his albinism, perhaps a form of what is now called dyspraxia. Spooner later became famous for his verbal and conceptual inversions, so it’s easy to see how his name could have become linked to products of undergraduate wordplay. This seems to have been from affection rather than malice, since Spooner, known as the Spoo to undergraduates, was kindly and well liked.
Spooner was an excellent lecturer, speaker and administrator who did much to transform New College into a modern institution. But he was no great scholar, and it’s a cruel twist of fate that he is now only remembered for a concept he largely had foisted upon him.
Q. Recently, while reading an old book, I came across this: ‘After a while we sauntered away into the crowd and were delighted with its resemblance to a good-natured British rabble on St. Lubbock’s Day.’ I can find no reference to any such saint. What’s going on here?
A. You might describe Lubbock as a secular saint, which he was to the British working classes near the end of the nineteenth century.
He was John Lubbock, later the first Baron Avebury, a banker who in 1871 as Liberal MP for London University drafted what became the Bank Holidays Act. This established four public holidays, the first time any holiday beyond the common law ones of Christmas Day and Good Friday had been established by statute and the first in history with pay. By our standards today, they were somewhat limited, consisting only of Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day.
All of these were referred to from the 1880s on as St Lubbock’s Day, though the title was applied particularly to August Bank Holiday, the only summer holiday of the four and the one on which people might most easily get out and have some fun. To judge from the date of this story, the name appeared almost contemporaneously with the first year’s holidays:
There was one thing I can truly say about our office, we were never serious in it. I fancy that is the case in most offices nowadays; at all events, it was the case in ours. We were always chaffing each other, playing practical jokes, telling stupid stories, scamping our work, looking at the clock, counting the weeks to next St Lubbock’s Day, counting the hours to Saturday.
The Open Door, by Charlotte Riddell, published in her collection Weird Stories in 1882. She was a well-known writer of the period, best known later for her ghost stories.
Not everybody approved:
Our Bank holidays; of which very many of our superfine classes do not at all approve, and shut themselves up in elegant, but sulky seclusion on the festivals of St. Lubbock, highly indignant in their own superfine manner because their tradespeople have shut up their shops, and they, the superior ones, have some difficulty in procuring new-laid eggs and hot rolls at breakfast.
London Up to Date, by George Augustus Sala, 1895. Sala prided himself on his productivity, honed by a period writing 3000 words of Daily Telegraph leaders every day. His journalism had really taken off when he was employed by Charles Dickens to work on Household Words, in the process, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says, ‘establishing a reputation for drunkenness, quarrelsomeness, and financial and professional unreliability, which he never completely lost’.
St Lubbock’s Day was recorded in a different sense by J. Redding Ware in Passing English of the Victorian Era of 1909, in which he said it referred particularly to August Bank Holiday but defined it as ‘an orgy, a drunken riot’. It seemed that holiday celebrations had been getting out of hand. Or was this a censorious comment by the superfine classes on the unconstrained enjoyment of the lower classes?
The term is long since defunct.
Q. I remember learning the difference between stationary (not moving) and stationery (letterhead, envelopes, etc.) and even figured out a mnemonic device – the e is for envelope. But is there actually any significance to the similarity of the two words – is there something stationary about stationery?
A. There is indeed. Both words come from the same source, the Latin stationarius, for a person who was based at a military station. In medieval times a stationarius was a trader who had a fixed station – a shop – rather than travelling from fair to fair, a pedlar. These were usually booksellers (whose stock was too bulky and diverse to be easily carried about) and were mostly linked to the medieval universities, which is why an elevated Latin word came to be attached to them. It became stationer in English, a form that’s recorded from the fourteenth century.
Such traders dealt in everything to do with books, not merely selling them but copying and binding them and selling related materials such as paper, pens and ink. This was before the days of printing from movable type, remember: every book had to be copied by hand. So the materials for doing so were as important to the trade as the finished article. Inevitably, the introduction of printing caused the stationer’s business to change substantially over time. By the seventeenth century the term bookseller had come in for the trader in finished books, leaving stationer for the seller of writing materials.
The obsolete meaning is preserved in the name of the Stationers’ Company (these days the Stationers’ and Newspaper Makers’ Company), one of the ancient City of London livery companies, which has always been a trade guild of booksellers and publishers. From 1557 to 1694 it controlled the production of printed books, and even down to 1911 it supervised copyrights, which is why old British books are marked as being ‘registered at Stationers’ Hall’.
Stationery, as a general term for the things stationers sold, appeared in the eighteenth century. There was much confusion about spelling in the early days, since stationary as an adjective for things that don’t move about had been in the language for about a hundred years. But by the middle of the century a clear distinction had appeared, based on the logic that what a stationer sold had to be stuff called stationery.
Q. Could you shed any light on the origins of the mysterious term to steal one’s thunder?
A. There’s a rather splendid story about the origin of this colourful phrase that connects it with John Dennis, a critic, author and playwright of the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century:
Mr Dennis happened once to go to the play, when a tragedy was acted, in which the machinery of thunder was introduced, a new artificial method of producing which he had formerly communicated to the managers. Incensed by this circumstance, he cried out in a transport of resentment, ‘That is my thunder, by G–d; the villains will play my thunder, but not my plays.’
The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the time of Dean Swift, by Theophilus Cibber and others, 1753. Mr Cibber, an actor and hack writer, was the son of the much more famous actor, writer, theatre manager and poet laureate Colley Cibber. The subtitle shows it was a mishmash of tittle-tattle: ‘Compiled from ample materials scattered in a variety of books, and especially from the MS. notes of the late ingenious Mr. Coxeter and others, collected for this design.’ Mr Cibber probably cribbed this story from The Life of Mr. John Dennis, the Renowned Critick, of 1734, in which a version of the tale was told and in which it was said in passing that stage thunder had been ‘oftentime introduced, to keep the audience awake’. This book had no author listed; not only that, but a note on the title page asserted that it was ‘Not written by Mr Curll’, a rare example of negative anonymity; the non-author was presumably the bookseller Edmund Curll.John Dennis had indeed invented a machine to make stage thunder, which he employed in his tragedy Appius and Virginia, performed at Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1709. Mr Dennis, whatever his inventive gifts, was not a good writer; his play was unsuccessful and was taken off after three nights in favour of a production of Macbeth by another company. Dennis went to a performance and was astonished to hear his thunder machine being used.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on John Dennis says that the incident is probably apocryphal, a story that the poet Alexander Pope put about to further his own derogatory image of the critic. But it doesn’t actually matter whether Dennis’s outburst ever happened, or even whether the infamous thunder machine existed, because the tale was so often told that it became embedded in the public’s mind in later decades and provided the basis for the expression.
So far as we can tell, the earliest examples of the figurative expression appeared in the US in the middle years of the following century. This is the first example I can find:
The State Journal is afraid that the Locofocos will steal its thunder, and come out in favor of a United States Bank and high protective tariff.
The Wisconsin Democrat, Madison, Wisconsin, 8 June 1843. Locofocos was a deprecatory slang term of the time for Democrats, in reference to a radical branch of the party centred in New York. Their name derived from a brand of matches, Locofoco, after an incident at one of their meetings in 1835 at which opponents turned off the gas, leaving the audience in darkness and requiring them to light matches to see by.
Q. Could you enlighten me about the origins of the English expression steam radio?
A. It was coined in the UK no later than the early 1950s at a time when television was the coming medium.
Radio, or sound broadcasting as it was still called in the BBC at the time, was starting to be thought old-fashioned and out of step with the times by the pioneers of television. It was also a period in which steam locomotives were being phased out on British railways and in which steam power had gained the image of a technology that was moribund and characteristic of the previous century. The equation of steam with old-fashioned most probably occurred to several people around this time and we may never learn whose fertile mind came up with it first.
These are among its early appearances in print:
Today radio broadcasting is so commonplace that the TV men speak of it patronisingly as ‘steam radio’.
Recollections of the Cambridge Union: 1815–1939, by Percy Cradock, 1953. Despite the title, the personal memories of Sir Percy Cradock CGMG, as he has since become, don’t go back that far. He has spent his life in public service, being at one time the UK’s ambassador to China. One stimulus for the book was that he had been President of the Cambridge Union before the Second World War.
The flight from ‘steam-radio’ to television has become an admitted rout.
British Radio Drama 1922–1956, by Val Gielgud, 1957. Val Gielgud, the elder brother of the actor Sir John Gielgud, had risen from answering readers’ letters to the Radio Times to become an enthusiastic pioneer of radio drama at the BBC in the late 1920s and to run the corporation’s drama department for thirty-four years.
Radio, of course, has long since shaken off this defeatist and depressing belief and is still a very important force in broadcasting, belying the critics who thought it would waste away in the face of the visual medium.
Until I came to research the term, I had believed that it was the writers of The Goon Show, Spike Milligan in particular, who had coined the term as a defensive epithet for the older medium. The show used it so often, however, from about 1954 on, frequently with sound effects, that it must have done a lot to popularize it.
Q. Having moved from the UK to the US, I’m often entertained by the different use of words. I’ve used a British term here in the US that gets blank looks: to stick one’s oar in. Could you expose its history?
A. Certainly. Somebody who is sticking their oar in is interfering or meddling in some matter that doesn’t concern them. It’s a close relative of sticking one’s nose into something.
In a bid to add a little pzazz, Cherie allowed her friend and lifestyle guru Carole Caplin to stick her oar in – with disastrous consequences when it came to a property scandal, but to little effect in terms of her husband’s wardrobe.
Scotland on Sunday, 13 May 2007. Note the idiosyncratic spelling of pizzazz; writers are often uncertain about the number of zs, but leaving out a vowel is less usual.
Americans have told me that it is indeed known in the US, though it may be of regional distribution or used by only certain age groups. Its meaning is transparent enough even if one comes across it for the first time.
‘Well, now, that was surely meant to apply to Urrastf, not Anarresti,’ said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974. She is an American SF and fantasy writer, based in Oregon. This richly textured novel contrasting socialist and capitalist worlds won both a Hugo and a Nebula award.
The expression dates back to the sixteenth century and has turned up in lots of different formulations down the centuries. The original was to have an oar in every man’s boat, meaning to be involved in every man’s business or affairs, whether they wanted you to be or not. Variations include he’ll have an oar in everything, he will put in his oar, and don’t you put your oar in. There never was an actual oar – the expression has always been figurative.
One reason some Americans may be familiar with it:
And you’re just as bad as he is with your cock-and-a-bull stories about catching his eye and his whistling an air. But that’s so like you! You must put in your oar!
The Mikado, by W. S. Gilbert, 1885. The Lord High Executioner of Titipu, Ko-Ko, is criticizing Pitti-Sing, one of his wards. The form ‘cock-and-a-bull story’ is an older version of our more usual cock-and-bull story (see p. 60).
Q. A friend recently told me to keep a stiff upper lip. How did that strange idiom come to mean remaining steadfast in the face of adversity?
A. The idea behind it is that when fear or other deep emotion threatens to overcome a person, one of the first signs is the upper lip beginning to tremble uncontrollably. In Britain, it is now a popular cliché linked to the once much-admired products of the public schools, who generations ago were sent into the Empire to battle adversity while keeping their emotions bottled up and their countenances cheerful, because it was the thing to do.
George Orwell satirized it in his essay Inside The Whale of 1940: ‘With Maugham it is a kind of stoical resignation, the stiff upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere east of Suez, carrying on with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine Emperor.’ P. C. Wren used it in all seriousness in Beau Geste in 1924: ‘Anyhow, I conquered the yearning to go back to her, and when the local train loafed in I got into it, with a stiff upper lip and a bleeding heart, and set out on as eventful and strange a journey as ever a man took.’
It’s so characteristically English (P. G. Wodehouse wrote a novel with the title Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves in 1963) that I was amazed to find that the earliest examples on record are all North American. The oldest one I’ve so far found is in a publication called the Massachusetts Spy for 14 June 1815; ‘I kept a stiff upper lip, and bought [a] license to sell my goods.’ It’s on record throughout the nineteenth century in works such as Thomas Haliburton’s The Clockmaker of 1837, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 1852, and in books by Horatio Alger, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain, and others. It was only near the end of the century that it started to appear in British publications.
Q. What can you tell me about the historical origins of the phrase stool pigeon?
A. These days a stool pigeon is a spy or informer:
‘Everyone in the office has noticed the way he’s been dandying up on certain evenings. And his wife is always phoning asking where he is.’ ‘Everyone knows that?’ ‘All the girls know.’ ‘Does his secretary talk about it?’ ‘You mustn’t ask me questions like that, darling. I can’t be the office stool pigeon.’
London Match, by Len Deighton, 1985. This is the concluding novel in the Game, Set and Match trilogy, the first two novels in the sequence being Berlin Game and Mexico Set, which was followed by two further trilogies, Hook, Line and Sinker and Faith, Hope and Charity.
When the phrase first appeared – in the US in the 1830s or thereabouts – it instead meant a person used as a decoy, usually to entice criminals into a trap. In that sense, it’s the same as the French agent provocateur.
A man informed the justice that a person had applied to him to purchase counterfeit coin. The justice taking a quantity of counterfeit dollars and half dollars which lay in the police office, gave them to the man to sell to the person who had applied for them, which he did, and the moment that he had them in his possession, he was arrested by an officer stationed for the purpose, and was tried and convicted for having counterfeit coin in his possession, when in fact, had he not been supplied by a stool pigeon, with spurious coin, he might have thought nothing more of the matter.
Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, 27 September 1839. The report is headed The Stool Pigeon System and ends, ‘A base and infamous policy, as it strikes us, and calculated in the long run, to do infinitely more harm than good.’
Most modern dictionaries say that the phrase came from the practice in hunting of tying or nailing a pigeon to a stool to act as a decoy, presumably to entice birds such as ducks into range of the hunters’ guns. The idea behind the pigeon is obvious enough: birds will come down to feed if they see other birds in the area, their presence suggesting that it’s safe.
But why a stool? You can hardly visualize a hunter being prepared to traipse out into the countryside while carrying a stool to fix his pigeon decoy to. It’s just conceivable that stool really refers to a tree stump, though that meaning of the word has never been especially common. And in any case how often would you find a ready-made stump just where you needed it? There’s something badly amiss with the suggestion.
The phrase starts to make sense once we delve into the history of words for decoys, of which there are a surprising number. The one to focus on is the archaic term stale, which probably comes from the French estale, applied to a pigeon used to entice a hawk into a net. Stale appears in English from the early fifteenth century; by the end of the following century it was being used for a person who entrapped another and for a person or thing used as a lure or bait to entrap a person. Another spelling was stall. At the end of the fifteenth century this began to be recorded as a bit of thieves’ jargon for a pickpocket’s accomplice, who acted as a decoy to distract the attention of the victim. The verb for this action evolved into phrases like stall for time.
It seems pretty clear from all this that the Americans who started to employ stool for a decoy bird were using yet another version of this old word. The use of stool in this sense is recorded a little earlier than stool pigeon – the earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is to the town records of Huntington, New York, in 1825: ‘No person shall be permitted to gun with macheanes [machines] or stools in said Town’. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that stool is a short form of stool pigeon, but it seems much more probable that stool came first, not least because there are no known examples of stool pigeon applied to decoys, only to people.
The other half of the expression, pigeon, has been used in slang since at least the sixteenth century for a person who allows himself to be swindled, a simpleton or fool, a sucker. It seems that this idea formed part of the genesis of stool pigeon, so you might explain the term as ‘a fool used as a decoy’, though with a nod to the literal sense of the word. By the 1840s, stool pigeon had shifted from being a decoy to being an informer. By the 1920s, it was abbreviated to the now-dated term stoolie.
Q. I’m a journalist who was just about to write a headline containing the words strait and narrow, which I believe is the proper usage, from the Bible. However, I am fairly sure that my US readers would be more familiar with straight and narrow. Faced with the choice, I chose to phrase the headline an entirely different way. Am I being too much of a stickler? Or are there convincing precedents for the correctness of both?
A. Both have been widely used down the centuries. However, the evidence is that you would have been safer, and indeed better advised, to use straight and narrow for both your British and your US readers. Straight and narrow is now by far the more common spelling, both in the UK and the US, and is the one that’s given as standard in dictionaries.
The oldest sense of strait is of something that’s restricted or confined (it derives from Latin stringere, to bind tightly, which is the root of our constrain, strict and stringent, among other words); that’s why that obsolete method of restraining lunatics called the straitjacket is correctly spelled like that. These days we know it mainly in the sense of a narrow stretch of navigable seaway, such as the Straits of Gibraltar. Its other extant meaning refers to a situation of difficulty, distress or need, but it usually appears only in the fixed phrases dire straits, for a situation of great need or extreme danger (a phrase recorded from the last decades of the nineteenth century), or straitened circumstances, for a person who is living in poverty.
A folk-etymological confusion between strait and straight has long been widespread. Not only do we see references to straightjackets, to the extent that this spelling is frequently offered as an alternative in dictionaries, but it also appears in straight-laced to refer to someone with strict and unbending moral attitudes, a form which dictionaries also now allow. In the latter case, the original was certainly straitlaced, referring to stays or corsets that were tightly laced and confining, but a term that by the sixteenth century had already taken on the modern figurative moralistic sense.
As you say, the source of the expression is a quotation from the Bible:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 14, in the King James Version, 1611. The text uses narrow and strait in closely related senses to reinforce each other in successive parallel phrases.
Both strait and narrow and straight and narrow appear around the same time, the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Both forms are misunderstandings of the Biblical original: strait and narrow is a compression of the original that contains an unnecessary repetition of two words with virtually identical senses, while straight and narrow confuses the words strait and straight. Both are equally wrong and there’s little to choose between them.
However, the latter has triumphed, not only because strait is now not well known but also because straight and narrow seems to make more sense, since it can be said to contain the idea of a road which is constrained, direct and undeviating, the true path of virtue that leads us unswervingly to our destination without straying into byways of temptation.
Q. What is the origin of the phrase tapping the Admiral, meaning to take a small quantity of strong drink? The story I have read is preposterous, about pickling some sailor, but I can’t refute it because I don’t know the real background.
A. Where did you come across that, I wonder? The expression was known among British sailors in the nineteenth century, but has been pretty much defunct for more than a century except in historical references. It could refer to legitimately taking a drink, usually brandy for reasons that will become apparent. In the tropics it was used by sailors for secretly drinking from a coconut from which the milk had been drained and replaced by rum. There was also a practice under that name of illicitly boring a hole in a cask of spirits in a ship’s hold and extracting the contents through a straw.
Here’s an example from what one might call its heyday:
As Fort Simpson lay within the range of the competition of the Russians of Sitka, who used spirits in their trade, we had not been able here to abolish the sale of liquor; and such was the influence of the simple fact, that several of our crew, though not a drop was either given or sold to them, yet continued to be tolerably drunk by ‘tapping the Admiral’.
An Overland Journey Round the World, during the years 1841 and 1842, by Sir George Simpson, 1847. Sir George, knighted by Queen Victoria on the eve of his journey, was a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company who in the 1820s had been governor of Prince Rupert’s Land, the vast area around Hudson’s Bay that was in effect owned by the company. In the journey recorded in the book, he travelled westwards across British North America, being the first European to cross the Rockies to Banff through what is now called Simpson Pass. He continued via Hawaii through Siberia, Russia and Europe back to the UK. He was then aged about 55 with failing eyesight.
Readers of a sensitive disposition should skip to the next item. Various versions exist of what I take to be the tale you mention but all purport to describe what happened to the body of Admiral Nelson after his death at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. His remains, it is said, were put in a cask of rum to preserve them on the voyage back to Britain. Sailors who would do anything for a drink bored a hole in the cask with a gimlet and drew off quantities of the rum through a straw. So many did so that when the body arrived in London the cask was found to be nearly empty.
Though Nelson’s body was indeed preserved in this way, albeit in brandy not rum (replaced with wine when his ship put into Gibraltar), the story is clearly, as you say, preposterous. For a start, the tale and the expression are older than Nelson:
Tapping the Admiral is still a favourite practical joke with Jolly Tars – particularly on India ships – it first originated from the puncheon of rum in which the body of Admiral Lestock was transported from Jamaica to England – the sailors soon made an end of the rum, of which when the ship cast anchor, there was not literally any remains.
The Times, 24 March 1790. A most unsatisfactory item, reproduced here in its entirety, which leaves us ignorant of the details of the practical joke (though we may hazard some guesses). Admiral Richard Lestock was best known for taking part in the English defeat at the battle of Toulon in February 1744, for which he was court-martialled. He died in 1746, unfortunately for the tale, not in Jamaica but either in London or Portsmouth, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, so there could have been no post-mortem immersion in spirits and no surreptitious cask tapping.
It is clear the legend was transferred to Nelson after Trafalgar. Similar ghoulish tales have been told in many circumstances, including one of a couple who bought a house that had once been an inn and who were delighted to find that one of the old casks in the cellar still held rum. Only after they had drunk it and cut the cask in two to make plant containers for the garden did they find the well-preserved remains of a man inside. Jan Harald Brunvand, the American academic who has made a lifelong study of urban legends, discusses several versions of the story – he calls it The Body in the Cask – in The Choking Doberman. These include a French one about finding a body in a cask of imported Algerian wine, unfortunately only after the wine had been bottled and sold. Other tales tell of containers holding similarly preserved bodies of monkeys or apes that spring a leak on their way from Africa to museums; the leaking spirits are consumed with a gusto that turns to horror when the truth of the situation emerges.
Though the story about Lord Nelson is folklore, like all good tales it’s grounded in an acute understanding of the cupidity of human beings, provides a moral lesson and is based on real situations. Important persons who died at sea in centuries past did indeed have their corpses preserved in a barrel of spirits so they could be brought home for proper burial (embalming didn’t arrive until the 1860s and even then wasn’t available at sea).
A related expression, suck the monkey, was current in the London docks in the nineteenth century to describe the practice of boring a hole in a cask of spirits to steal the contents; this may have built on the tale about monkeys’ bodies preserved in casks of spirits.
Q. I’ve been wondering about the term tattoo and why it’s used both for ink drawings on the body and for military festivals. The homepage of the Edinburgh Tattoo says that the word comes from a cry announcing closing time in the inns in the Low Countries. How did it get connected to its two modern meanings?
A. That sounds like one of those stories people invent to disguise their ignorance of the real origin of an expression. But just for once it’s pretty much correct.
The original was the seventeenth-century Dutch phrase, doe den tap toe, ‘put the tap to’, ‘close or turn off the tap’, in which tap is the spigot of a beer barrel. It probably derives from the way that the Dutch police closed the pubs at night, by making the rounds and instructing innkeepers to shut the taps on their casks. In time this became abbreviated in Dutch to taptoe and became a colloquial phrase meaning ‘Shut up!’
The first sense of tattoo in English was the related idea of a signal on a drum to call soldiers back from the local drinking establishments to their quarters at night. It’s first recorded during the early stages of the English Civil War:
If anyone shall bee found tiplinge or drinkinge in any Taverne, Inne, or Alehouse after the houre of nyne of the clock at night, when the Tap-too beates, hee shall pay 2s. 6d.
The standing orders of the Parliamentary garrison in Nottingham, issued by Colonel John Hutchinson, the governor of Nottingham Castle, in 1644. In modern money the fine would be about £5. Hutchinson was later to be a regicide, one of the signatories of Charles l’s death warrant.
By the following century, the usual phrase was to beat tattoo, hence one of our modern meanings, a rhythmic tapping or drumming (‘He beat a tattoo with his fingers on the tabletop’). It’s also related to the US Army term taps in the sense of a bugle call for lights to be put out in army quarters, which was originally also sounded on a drum. The sense of an evening military entertainment that extends and elaborates the tattoo dates from the early twentieth century.
The other meaning of tattoo, to mark the skin with pigments, could not be more different in origin. It was brought back from the South Pacific by Captain Cook, and appears in his journal for July 1769: ‘Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible.’ It could be from any one of several Polynesian languages, such as Tahitian, Samoan, or Tongan.
Q. I wonder if you would care to explain a phrase that my parents use (they’re both in their 70s) that sounds extremely odd: teach your grandmother to suck eggs? Why would one want to do such a thing, even assuming that one had a grandmother (and an egg) to hand?
A. It does look odd, but its warning is well understood: don’t give needless assistance or presume to offer advice to an expert, or to any elder or adult if you’re a child.
‘Don’t pull that bandage so tight, doctor. You want to have me running over after you in an hour to come and loosen it.’ ‘That’s it, Mehitabel; teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’
The Puritans, by Arlo Bates, 1898. Bates is now not much remembered, but he wrote five novels and six books of poetry as well as several collected works of criticism.
Many similar expressions have been invented down the years, such as Don’t teach your grandmother how to milk ducks (which is in James Joyce’s Ulysses), and don’t teach your grandmother to steal sheep. These have the same kind of absurd image as the version you quote, which has survived them all and is so well known that it’s sometimes abbreviated to just don’t teach your grandmother. You may be sure that grandmothers never much sucked eggs; it was just a ridiculous image with which to punch the message home that your elders know well how to do all sorts of things you can’t even imagine.
This is its first appearance in something like our modern form:
You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs.
Quevedo’s Comical Works, 1707, in a translation by John Stevens. Francisco de Quevedo was a prominent Spanish poet and novelist of the previous century.
Another early example was whimsically inverted:
I remember my old schoolmaster, who was a prodigious great scholar, used often to say, Polly matete cry town is my daskalon. The English of which, he told us, was, That a child may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs.
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, 1749. Young Jones is rebuked by the schoolmaster Mr Partridge for daring to correct his Latin grammar. ‘I have lived to a fine purpose, truly, if I am to be taught my grammar at this time of day,’ Partridge said.
The idea behind it is much older. There was a classical proverb, a swine (or a sow) to teach Minerva, she being the Roman goddess of wisdom who would certainly need no instruction. This was translated by Nicholas Udall in 1542 as to teach our dame to spin, something any married woman (which is what dame meant then) would know very well how to do. And there are other examples of sayings designed to check the tendency of young people to give unwanted advice to their elders and betters, such as this doggerel version:
Teach not thy parent’s mother to extract The embryo juices of the bird by suction. The good old lady can that feat enact, Quite irrespective of your kind instruction.
Anon., undated.
Q. Can you tell me anything about the expression Who’s she? The cat’s mother? I’ve heard it used in a context in which you’re talking about a woman and referring to her as she rather than by name.
A. All I can tell you for sure is that expressions of this type are first recorded around the end of the nineteenth century. They are corrections to children who refer impersonally to a woman as she rather than by name. Here’s a recent example:
‘We’re not defenseless,’ Tony broke in. He jabbed a finger toward Arra. ‘She can defend us.’ ‘She is the cat’s mother.’ ‘What?’ Arra draped the cloth over the oven door handle, carefully spreading it flat. ‘Just something my gran used to say. If you know a person’s name, use it.’
Smoke and Shadows, by Tanya Huff, 2004. This is the first volume in a trilogy (all fantasy writers today are required by their publisher’s marketing departments to write trilogies, in a curious reprise of the Victorian three-volume novel); it’s an odd mixture of fantasy, horror, romance and mystery set in a TV company producing a series about a vampire detective.
Modern examples usually refer to it as a saying of grandparents, confirming that it has now gone out of use. And it always refers to women, not men, so we never get cat’s father.
‘I suppose,’ said Brangwen, ‘you know what sort of people we are? What sort of a bringing-up she’s had?’ ‘ “She”,’ thought Birkin to himself, remembering his childhood’s corrections, ‘is the cat’s mother.’
Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence, 1921.
How it came into being, I can’t begin to discover.
Q. The phrase three sheets to the wind came up in conversation. Any ideas as to its origin? I have always used it as a measurement of how drunk someone is, but really have no idea what it means.
A. It’s a sailor’s expression, from the days of sailing ships.
Ignorant landlubbers think a sheet is a sail, but it’s actually a rope (always called a line in sailing terminology), sometimes on really big sailing ships a chain, attached to the bottom corner of a sail. Sheet is an ancient mariner’s term – it turns up first in inventories in English exchequer accounts in the fourteenth century – and it derives from an Old English term for the corner of a sail.
Exactly what it does depends on the type of ship. The expression dates from the days of square-rigged ships, so called because their sails were supported on long poles or spars called yards that were set at right-angles (‘square’) to the mast. In such ships, each sail had two sheets, one at each bottom corner. These helped to keep the sail at the correct angle to the wind (the yards they were attached to were hauled around by another set of lines called braces). If the sheets came loose, the sail would flutter about (or shiver) and the ship would wallow off its course out of control.
Extend this idea to sailors on shore leave, staggering back to the ship after a good night on the town, well tanked up. The irregular and uncertain locomotion of these jolly tars must have reminded onlookers of the way a ship lurched about when the sheets were loose. There were three sheets in the expression because a square-rigged ship had three main masts and so three principal sets of sails.
He talked a great deal about propriety and steadiness, and gave good advice to the youngsters… but seldom went up to the town without coming down ‘three sheets in the wind.’
Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, 1840. He based the book on a journal he kept during a voyage in 1834 from Boston around Cape Horn to California.
Hans Schuyler has not got the wheel to-night – you see he was three sheets in the wind anyhow, and the captain says, ‘Hans,’ says he, ‘don’t tech [touch] another drop this night, or we’ll never see another mornin’ till we are resurrected,’ and so he turned into his hammock and swung himself to sleep.
Miriam Monfort, by Catherine A. Warfield, 1873, a novel largely set in Georgia in the late 1850s.
There was a graduation in degrees of drunkenness. If you were merely one sheet in the wind or a sheet in the wind’s eye you were tipsy. To be two sheets in the wind was to be more than merely merry. To be the full three sheets in the wind was to be on the verge of insensibility. There was even an intermediate stage between the last two: to be two sheets in the wind and the third shivering.
Wolf replenished his glass at the request of Mr. Blust, who, instead of being one sheet in the wind, was likely to get three before he took his departure from the dwelling of his brother-in-law.
The Fisher’s Daughter, by Catherine Ward, 1825.
The battle-ground was now nearly deserted, and to own the truth we were, all three, at least two sheets in the wind.
Ned Myers: or, A Life Before the Mast, by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, 1843. Although supposedly a fictional biography, it was actually based on the reminiscences of a former shipmate of Cooper’s during a childhood voyage he took.
The version you give, by the way, is comparatively recent, since the original form – as you can see from these examples – was three sheets in the wind. However, online searches show your version is now much more common than that with in, so maybe some day soon it will take over completely. The to version may be gaining ground because so many people have the mistaken idea that a sheet is a sail.
Q. What does heard it through the grapevine really mean and where does it come from?
A. Are you perhaps thinking of the Marvin Gaye song of 1968? (Or possibly the version a year before by Gladys Knight and the Pips?)
To hear through the grapevine is to learn of something informally and unofficially. The usual implication is that the information was passed person to person by word of mouth, perhaps in a confidential manner among friends or colleagues.
D’Erquy had heard, through the grapevine, that Eliza had been buying up bad loans from petty nobles like him who had been foolish enough to lend money to the government.
The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, 2004. This is the second volume in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle that features a substantial cast of characters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including historical savants such as Newton, Leibniz, Hooke and Pepys. The author calls it science fiction, because it’s fiction about science, although it is at heart a sequence of sprawling historical novels, albeit with many anachronisms. The trilogy is so vast that the Guardian’s reviewer began by measuring it: ‘The Baroque Cycle will occupy almost 3,000 pages and weigh four kilos’. (Luckily, my paperback set weighs a mere two kilos.)
But how can you communicate through a grapevine?
There are several expressions of this type, of which a well-known couple are bush telegraph and jungle telegraph, both referring originally to the system of communication by drum in Africa. These are historically rather odd, because they were created – at least, first reached print – well after the era of the telegraph. But that’s because both are imitations of the first such expression, grapevine telegraph, which is where our term comes from.
The phrase was invented in the USA sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s. It provided a wry comparison between the twisted stems of a grapevine and the straight lines of the then new electric telegraph marching across America. The telegraph was the marvel of the 1840s – Samuel Morse’s first line was opened between Washington and Baltimore on 24 May 1844 and rapidly expanded in the following decade – vastly improving communications between communities. In comparison, the grapevine telegraph was by individual to individual, often garbling the facts or reporting untruths (so reflecting the gnarled and contorted stems of the grapevine), but likewise capable of transmitting vital messages quickly over distances.
Various early references suggest that grapevine telegraph was associated with clandestine communication among Southern blacks, especially slaves.
The Colorado ladies have their compensations; their husbands complain that they can get no goods, no machinery out from the States under a year from the time of ordering – that all business, all progress must wait this long delay; yet the ladies shine in the latest fashions of millinery and dressmaking. Modes that were just budding when I left home, I find in full blossom here. How it is done I do not understand – there must be a subtle telegraph by crinoline wires; as the southern negroes have what they call a grape-vine telegraph.
Across the Continent: a Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, by Samuel Bowles, 1865. He referred to States as a separate entity because Colorado had not then joined the Union; it did so in 1876, when it became the thirty-eighth state.
The term became widely known during the American Civil War period, so much so that the phrase permanently entered the standard language. Soldiers used it in the sense of gossip or unreliable rumour, as was made clear in a diary note of 1862 reproduced in Major James Connolly’s Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: ‘We get such “news” in the army by what we call “grape vine,” that is, “grape vine telegraph.” It is not at all reliable.’ But it was widely acknowledged that the blacks’ communications network was extremely useful to the Union cause, as John G. Nicolay and John Hay reported in Abraham Lincoln: A History in 1888, calling it ‘one of the most important and reliable sources of knowledge to the Union commanders in the various fields, which later in the war came to be jocosely designated as the “grape-vine telegraph.” ’
As the telegraph slowly went out of use for most purposes, superseded by the telephone, so the expression grapevine telegraph became shortened to just grapevine and then extended again in set phrases such as hear through the grapevine.
Q. I’ve been watching Westerns for years and the term tinhorn is always used to describe people who are new to the West. Where did the term come from?
A. My guess is that either you’ve misunderstood the way people were using it, or you were actually thinking of greenhorn, originally a young ox with newly grown horns; later on it came to mean anyone young or inexperienced, a novice. It was originally a seventeenth-century Scots term that was taken to the US by colonists.
Even when not serving, Nadal had ample other ways to win points in his 6–3, 6–2, 6–4 victory, storming all about the court to produce jaw-dropping shots that screamed down near lines and corners. He made Murray look like some greenhorn straggler just wandered down from Scotland.
Los Angeles Times, 2 July 2008.
The usual sense of tinhorn, on the other hand, is of someone contemptible, especially a person who is pretending to have money, influence or ability:
One thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral tinhorn that Nature had made him.
The Fighting Shepherdess, by Caroline Lockhart, 1919. Ms Lockhart, the daughter of a rancher, became a journalist and a writer of Western stories. This one was loosely based on the life of sheepherder Lucy Morrison Moore and was highly successful in its day.
Tinhorn has a much more interesting history than greenhorn. To find its origin we must delve into the murky world of gambling with dice. One such diversion was usually given the name chuck-a-luck in North America, a cruder variation of a nineteenth-century game called grand hazard, whose name, incidentally, had nothing to do with the old French and British dice game from which our noun hazard derives and which was the origin of the game of craps.
Chuck-a-luck was played with three dice, a chute that tumbled the dice as they fell, and a flat area, marked with the numbers 1 to 6, on which the players placed their bets. The only bets possible were on one, two or three appearances of a chosen number. Modern chuck-a-luck games in casinos usually have a wire cage in which the dice are spun and which has given it the alternative name of birdcage. An earlier term used in Britain and sometimes in the US was sweat-cloth. A version long associated with the Royal Navy is called crown and anchor; this is played with dice whose faces instead of numbers feature the symbols of the four card suits plus a crown and an anchor.
Chuck-a-luck was unsophisticated and easy to set up, so it was the province of small-time gamblers on river boats, on street corners, or in low gaming establishments. Though the proper chute was made of leather, those with limited resources used a cruder one made of tin.
The term tinhorn referred to this cheap chute, an abbreviation of the fuller phrase tinhorn gambler. This was a term of contempt for these small-time operators of games of chuck-a-luck, whose patrons (tinhorn sports) played for small stakes. It also reflected the common view that all things made of tin were poor imitations of better quality goods (an idea that survives in our derogatory adjective tinny) and was also a pun on the existing sense of tin horn for a cheaply constructed and inharmonious musical instrument. The expression led much later to the invention of tinhorn politician for a crooked legislator.
Tinhorn gamblers tended to make up for the poor quality of their gaming equipment by a dressy appearance and showy demeanour, from which the later sense of the word derives. In truth, they belonged with the keepers of cheap saloons and three-card trick men, down near the bottom of the social pyramid.
Q. Our mother used to say that something described us to a T. I’m not sure if the last bit should be spelled as t, tea or tee. Can you suggest where the phrase might have come from?
A. It’s usually written as to a T, though to a tee also turns up on occasion. It means that something is exactly or precisely so.
As Oliver, Barney Clark fits the description to a T: He’s small, angelic and suitably cowed by all the world has to throw at him.
A review of Roman Polanski’s film Oliver Twist in the Fresno Bee, 30 September 2005.
Jerome K. Jerome had fun with it:
Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a ‘T’. I don’t know what a ‘T’ is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and-butter and cake ad lib., and is cheap at the price, if you haven’t had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to its credit.
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome, 1889.
It was first written down almost exactly two centuries before Jerome used it:
All the under Villages and Towns-men come to him for Redress; which he does to a T.
The Humours and Conversations of the Town, expos’d in two dialogues. The first of the men, the second of the women, a satire of 1693 published anonymously by the lawyer, antiquary and author James Wright, who was also at times a translator, poet, essayist and historian of the theatre.
This rules out the possibility that it’s connected with T-shirt, which has been suggested as the origin, but which isn’t recorded before about 1920. Finding out where it came from turns out to be rather difficult. There are several candidates – one suggestion is that it comes from a tee in golf (or just possibly from curling). Another is that it refers to a T-square (a term that appears at about the same date), or to the correct completion of the letter t by crossing it. No evidence exists that links any of these to the expression.
The origin that most experts point to, rather cautiously, involves T being the first letter of a word. If this is the case, then tittle is easily the most likely source, since to a tittle was in use in exactly the same sense (with minute exactness, to the smallest particular), for nearly a century before to a T appeared:
FIRST INTELLIGENCER: The duke has more ears in court than two.
SECOND INTELLIGENCER: I’ll quote him to a tittle, let him speak wisely, and plainly… or I shall crush him.
Woman Hater, a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, 1607. Quote here is in an obsolete sense, also used by Shakespeare, of noticing, observing, or scrutinizing someone or something closely. An intelligencer was a man employed to obtain secret information, an informer, spy or secret agent.
We know tittle now mostly in the set expression jot or tittle, meaning some very small amount and in which both words refer to a tiny quantity. Jot comes via Latin from Greek iota, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, which we also continue to use to refer to some minuscule amount; tittle is from the same Latin word that has given us title, but has usually been taken to mean a small stroke or mark in writing, notably the dot over the letter i.
Q. I have been re-reading Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope and I wonder if you can explain the derivation of the phrase toad-eater? I can deduce what it means but the entire process sounds horrid.
A. The word is pretty much defunct, though toady, its shortened form, is still around for someone who behaves obsequiously to a person of power or influence. Toady is also a verb with a related sense:
In other words, cut the boys in on it, sort them out, grease and toady and tug your forelock to these jumped up little twerps that presume they operate for the good of the game.
The Times, 2 June 2008. The writer is fulminating against FIFA and UEFA, the governing bodies of football.
The Trollope quotation you came across is presumably this one:
Mrs. Robarts had been brought up almost under the dowager’s wing, and of course she regarded her as being worthy of much talking. Do not let persons on this account suppose that Mrs. Robarts was a tuft-hunter, or a toad-eater.
Framley Parsonage, by Anthony Trollope, 1861. Tufthunter meant much the same as toad-eater. Tuft was slang for a golden ornamental tassel worn on their mortarboards by titled undergraduates at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Their wearers became known as tufts and their fawning followers as tufthunters. By the 1850s, tuft had been changed into the lower-class London slang term toff for a person sufficiently smartly dressed to pass as a member of the nobility and – by extension – anybody who was rich and powerful.
We have to go back to market and fairground quack doctors of the seventeenth century and earlier for the origin of toad-eater. It was common for such men to have an assistant to do the dirty work, often somebody young or half-witted or otherwise under the boss’s thumb. As part of their sales pitch, such fake medical men sometimes made their assistants eat (or pretend to eat) a toad. The quack doctor would use his nostrums to make an apparently miraculous cure on his assistant and so enhance his reputation and his sales. As a result, toad-eater came to be a nickname for a servile assistant to a showman.
Be the most scorn’d Jack-pudding in the pack, And turn toad-eater to some foreign Quack.
Satire on an Ignorant Quack, by Thomas Brown, c. 1704. A Jack-pudding was a buffoon or clown, especially an assistant to a mountebank, a person who sold quack remedies, whose name is from the Italian phrase monta in banco, to mount a bench, the bench being the platform on which the mountebank stood to attract an audience.
As a natural-history aside: the European toad Bufo vulgaris was regarded as poisonous, since the warty glands on its skin secrete a nasty milky fluid containing toxins when the animal is threatened. Friends who are into natural history report they’ve handled toads with no trouble, but then they’ve not actually tried eating one; a dead one isn’t poisonous, or so I’ve been told, provided you strip the skin off first, but the experiment is not one to be recommended.
By the eighteenth century toad-eater had generalized into a term for a fawning flatterer or sycophant. It could at one time refer to a dependant or a friend in humble circumstances, especially a poor female companion or attendant, which might be the specific sense that Trollope meant, though its proximity to tuft-hunter makes that unlikely.
Q. Very often, while watching British TV crime series, one hears the word tom used to refer to a (female) prostitute. Why should this be? A tom-cat, after all, is male. Is it rhyming slang?
A. It seems not to be, though it has been suggested that it’s rhyming slang for Thomas More, a whore. This seems unlikely; I wonder how many people would have had Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More in the back of their minds when the term first appeared?
Tom has been around since the early part of the twentieth century but has become very much more common since the 1970s because of the slangy dialogue that has become usual in many British television cop series, starting with The Sweeney and now The Bill.
In the wake of his resignation, we’ve been treated to sympathetic profiles of these ‘high-class’ whores, many of whom are described as highly educated. Maybe we should call them ‘executive sex workers’, since even referring to drug-addled ten-quid toms as prostitutes is considered an affront to their dignity these days.
Mail on Sunday, 16 March 2008, drawing away its Victorian skirts in disgust. The resignation was that of the New York governor, Eliot Spitzer.
Tom, the common short form for the given name Thomas, has since late Middle English been a generic name for a man, as in tomfool, tomboy (a girl who behaves more like a boy), peeping tom, and the phrase Tom, Dick and Harry. The clue that suggests how it became connected with a woman may lie in an old bit of Australian slang, tom-tart, recorded since 1882. This had no implication of vice at the time, being one of the many slightly dismissive terms that males have used in various periods for a girlfriend or sweetheart, such as donah, sheila or dinah. It looks as though it was formed from Tom’s tart, a generic name for a female companion.
Though tart is now an insulting term for a promiscuous woman, it was originally a short form of sweetheart and was a compliment. John Camden Hotten defined it in his 1864 slang dictionary as ‘a term of approval applied by the London lower orders to a young woman for whom some affection is felt. The expression is not generally employed by the young men, unless the female is in “her best”.’ Hence, the subsidiary meaning today of tart as being an overdressed and flashy woman; it also accounts for the British slang verb tart up, to dress or make oneself up in order to try to look attractive or eye-catching, or more generally to decorate or improve the look of something.
Though the only recorded examples of tom-tart are Australian, our best guess is that it was taken there by emigrants who had learned it in England. In time, tom-tart was abbreviated to just tom, both in Australia and in Britain, and went seriously downhill to become a deeply derogatory description.
Incidentally, Louis E. Jackson and C. R. Hellyer, in A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang of 1914, said that a tommy was a prostitute; this is often cited in support of a derivation from the male name. It may have been a temporary form – it’s otherwise unrecorded – based on tom or tom-tart, although this is unlikely, since the book was compiled on the west coast of the US (Hellyer was a detective in Portland, Oregon) a long way from the places where either term is recorded.
Q. A display at a museum I visited recently featured pit-sawing. It said that the man who stood on the top of the log hauling on one end of the saw was called the top dog and the one in the pit below pulling the other end was the bottom dog. This was claimed to be where the expressions come from. Is this right?
A. The story’s quite common and you will find it in other museum displays and also online. I remember coming across it in an exhibition at the former convict settlement of Port Arthur in Tasmania. The top dog was said to be the senior of the team, who controlled the cutting, while the bottom dog just contributed muscle power in pulling and pushing the saw. He had the worse of it because he was working with his arms above his head and got showered in sawdust.
Top dog and bottom dog are recorded from the US in the middle of the nineteenth century. I am sceptical to the point of dismissiveness about a source in wood sawing, because I can’t find any early examples that use either expression in that context. The dogs were said to be the metal rods that held the timber in position on the sawhorses, though how the word might have been transferred to the two sawyers is hard to imagine. Only modern writers use the terms in connection with pit-sawing. The imagery is powerful and it’s a neat story, too good perhaps to pass up, but there’s nothing going for it by way of evidence.
It’s much more likely that it’s simply an allusion to dog fights, in which the dog on top has the better of the situation and is able to impose himself on the one underneath. But even the earliest appearances of the terms are figurative:
I know that the world, that the great big world,
Will never a moment stop
To see which dog may be in the fault,
But will shout for the dog on top.
But for me I never shall pause to ask
Which dog may be in the right
For my heart will beat, when it beats at all,
For the under dog in the fight.
Perchance what I’ve said I had better not said,
Or ’twere better I had said it incog,
But with heart and with glass filled chock to the brim
Here’s a health to the bottom dog.
We concluded to visit the lodgings of Sam Collyer, who proved top dog in the fight of Wednesday, and see for ourselves.
The Morning Herald of Titusville, Pennsylvania, 3 July 1866. Sam Collyer was a Baltimore prize fighter of the period, who had shortly before beaten Barney Aaron of New York in a match lasting forty-three rounds, thereby winning $2,000.
Q. Can you tell me if the word tracklements is just obsolete or a non-word?
A. It’s a real word, a delightful one, and not obsolete, just not widely known.
It’s used mainly in Britain. It refers to tasty condiments served with meat, such as mustard, mint jelly or spiced honey. I first learned the word when we bought a pot of mustard many years ago from the Tracklement Company, and the word turns up most often in references to that firm or to a similar business in the US.
Even among cookery writers it seems to be only an occasional relish to enliven prose.
Garnishes are traditional, down to the basket of tracklements – HP sauce, Colman’s English mustard and Heinz ketchup – that accompanies the rib steak and hamburger.
Independent, 22 March 2003.
The English cookery writer Dorothy Hartley claimed to have invented the word, which she used in her book Food in England in 1954. She said that she had borrowed it from an English dialect word meaning ‘appurtenances, impedimenta’. The problem for those tracking down its antecedents is that the dialect word concerned isn’t easy to identify unambiguously.
One possibility is trankliment, which is listed in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary of 1896–1906. He cites glossaries from Cumbria, Yorkshire, Cheshire and Shropshire that spell the word several ways. It variously means a trinket, ornament or knick-knack, a toy, or odds and ends. Wright also records tanchiments from Cheshire and Lancashire as well as tanklements from Yorkshire and Lancashire. John Ayto noted in The Glutton’s Glossary in 1990 that the word might be connected to Greek tragemata, the sweet course.
The founder of the Tracklement Company, William Tullberg, told me some years ago that his Lincolnshire grandmother used the word tracklement to describe accompaniments for meat, but that for her it ‘included roast potatoes, roast parsnips, Yorkshire pudding and gravy as well as horseradish sauce’. He added, ‘When I set up Tracklements, it seemed the obvious word to me for my collection of mustards and herb jellies.’
We’ve no way of knowing for sure which of these is the word that Dorothy Hartley had in mind when she presented her new term, but it looks plausible that it’s the Yorkshire one. But that it has survived is at least as much due to William Tullberg’s borrowing of the word from his grandmother’s Lincolnshire dialect.
Q. While reading a shipping report here in New Zealand dated 1877, I came across the phrase trig and trim, which referred to a ship that had arrived at Dunedin from the Old Country in superb condition. Are you able to provide, please, a dissertation on its origins?
A. This phrase is extremely poorly recorded in the standard references. However, I’ve found it in two very different works:
In her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and scoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a house for paying guests…
Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas, 1954. This delightful fable about the people of the little Welsh seaside town of Llareggub (spell it backwards) first appeared as a BBC radio play, starring the young Richard Burton. The description here is of twice-widowed Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.
Miss Browne is a trig and trim little figure on the court as she glides over its surface. It is no wonder that her public love her.
The Art of Lawn Tennis, by Bill Tilden, 1920. ‘Big Bill’ Tilden, born in Philadelphia in 1893, was a famous and successful tennis player, for example leading the US Davis Cup team to seven successive victories from 1920 to 1926. His other book, Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, remains a standard work. He had a genius for showmanship and was said to deliberately lose the opening sets of a match to make it interesting for spectators.
Going back a bit further, Marie Corelli included a naval reference in her Vendetta of 1886: ‘And she has been newly rigged and painted, and she is as trig and trim a craft as you can meet with in all the wide blue waters of the Mediterranean.’
All these examples confirm that it means exactly what you suggest: that something is neat and tidy, in good order, immaculate. It is yet another example of a favourite trick among English speakers of creating reduplicated compounds. In this case, it has much the same sense as another phrase of the same type, spick and span.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good account of trig, which it says is from an old Scandinavian word tryggr, meaning faithful or secure. Trig today is principally found in northern England and Scotland and can mean someone who is nimble, brisk and alert, or a person who is neatly or smartly dressed, or someone or something that is in good physical condition, strong or sound.
Though trig and trim isn’t recorded until the nineteenth century, it seems very likely that it had existed in Scotland and northern England for centuries. One pointer to this is that there was a closely related and much older southern English form, trick and trim. This form of trick, the Oxford English Dictionary says, could mean trim, neat or handsome. It was in use from about 1530 to 1630 and was very common from around 1550 to 1600. It seems that southerners converted the strange word trig into one that they already knew, so making trick and trim from trig and trim.
A very early example of trick and trim appears in Roger Ascham’s 1545 book on archery, Toxophilus, which says, in modern spelling: ‘The same reason I find true in two bows I have, whereof one is quick of cast, trick and trim, both for pleasure and profit.’ It is surely relevant that the first volume of Robert Chambers’ Cyclopaedia of English Literature, published in Edinburgh in 1843, converts Ascham’s sentence to trig and trim.
The strong Scottish presence among colonists in the South Island of New Zealand accounts for the phrase being known there in the Scots form.
Q. To trip the light fantastic. I know what it means, but why the light fantastic part?
A. You’re probably that much ahead of some readers, so let me nod in the direction of all those who know, while telling everyone else that to trip the light fantastic is an extravagant way of referring to dancing, a phrase rather more common years ago than it is now.
Just for once, it is possible to point the finger at the author of a saying:
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides,
Come, and trip it, as you go,
On the light fantastic toe.
L’Allegro, a lyric poem written by John Milton, 1645. The Italian title can be translated as ‘the cheerful man’, and the poem is directed to the goddess Mirth. We’ve lost the sense now, because to trip here doesn’t mean to stumble, but to move lightly and nimbly, to dance. And fantastic (or fantastick, as Milton originally spelled it) has here a sense of something marked by extravagant fancy, capricious or impulsive.
Milton’s lines were borrowed in abbreviated and garbled form as a humorous way to refer to dancing, first as the phrase trip (or ply) the light fantastic toe and more recently even more allusively:
There, on the green sward, with no other covering than the sky, do they ‘trip the light fantastic toe’ until the moon and stars have shrunk into invisibility before the splendours of the rising sun.
Joseph Jenkins, by James Grant, 1843. Mr Grant was a historian and peripatetic journalist, later to be the editor of the London Morning Advertiser, the daily trade newspaper of the Licensed Victuallers’ Association. Despite his active career, he also found time to write 40 books, virtually all of them – like this one – now forgotten.
‘My daughter’s one of the spinsters – Granby, my name; when we’ve had a drink, I’ll make her find you a partner – that is, if you care for the light fantastic.’ ‘I should like a dance or two,’ said Bailey, ‘though I’m getting a bit past it now, I suppose.’
The Singing Bone, by R. Austin Freeman, 1912. The five short stories in this book all feature Freeman’s detective Dr John Thorndyke, whom Freeman calls a ‘medical jurispractitioner’, this last word not gracing the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, not least because we would now call Thorndyke a forensic scientist. The tales are examples of what’s sometimes called the inverted detective story, in which the identity of the criminal act is known from the beginning and the interest lies in the way in which Thorndyke unravels it.
Such contractions – together with the change in sense of fantastic – makes the whole saying more than a little obscure to us moderns. That it has survived so long, at least in the United States, is probably due to this:
Boys and Girls together,
Me and Mamie O’Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic,
On the sidewalks of New York.
‘The Sidewalks of New York’, music by Charles E. Lawlor, lyric by James W. Blake, 1894. The song was once under consideration as a theme song for the city. It was presumably the source of the title of the 2001 film starring Ed Burns, as well as two previous ones.
Just to reinforce how mysterious the phrase now is to some people, one online site renders the relevant line as ‘We dance life’s fantastics’.
Q. On Radio 5 on 15 January 2008, Janet Street-Porter and Simon Mayo agreed that twaddle was (or had been) an indecent word. I’ve never heard this before, and have always used the word freely. Can you enlighten me on its meaning and origin?
A. It has never been indecent. But I can guess why they should think it might be.
Twaddle has always been an insult for a certain kind of writing or speech that’s variously verbose, dull, commonplace, vapid or nonsensical:
Everyone involved here seems so determined to play tricksy theatrical games that the heart of the show is in danger of being lost amid the pretentious twaddle.
Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2006. Charles Spencer was reviewing Hear and Now at the Gate Theatre in London.
Twaddle, meaning trivial or foolish speech or writing, has been in the language since the latter part of the eighteenth century:
Fanny Burney has taken possession of the ear of those who found their amusement in reading her twaddle (that piece of old fashioned slang I should not have dared to write or utter, within hearing of my dear mother).
A letter written in 1782 by Mrs Mary Delany, a famous letter writer, though even better known at one time for her flower compositions under the name of Hortus Siccus. You may judge the extent of her letter writing from its appearing in collected form in 1862 in six volumes. Mrs Delany meant that the word was considered impolite, not obscene.
It’s a variant of an older word, twattle, mainly dialectal, which hasn’t been recorded much in print. That meant to talk foolishly or idly or to chatter inanely. A twattle-basket was a chatterbox. It seems to have been itself a variation on tattle, as in tittle-tattle, another of those many reduplicated terms that English is so fond of, which has also been written as twittle-twattle. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that these, and other forms, are probably echoic in origin and are primarily colloquial, not often having been written down. So it’s difficult to work out which came first.
My guess is that Janet Street-Porter and Simon Mayo knew about the link with twattle and made the unreasonable assumption that it had a direct link with twat for a woman’s genitals, a low slang term dating from the seventeenth century, whose origin is unknown. Of such wild guesses are folk etymologies born.
Q. An office colleague of mine insisted on writing a project got under weigh rather than a project got under way, whenever he described the start of some task. His explanation was that the expression had a maritime beginning, along the lines of weighing anchor to get a ship moving. I rather fancied the idea at the time, but I suspect that his story is pure fiction. The next time I use the expression, should I use weigh or way?
A. According to the best current style manuals, definitely way. But your colleague has the ghostly support of generations of writers. In fact, at one time, under weigh was regarded as an acceptable spelling, if not always the standard one.
What happened was that the Dutch, European masters of the sea in the seventeenth century, gave the English language – among many other nautical expressions – the term onderweg, meaning ‘on the way’. This became naturalized as under way and is first recorded in English around 1740, specifically as a maritime term meaning that a ship was moving through the water as a result of the press of wind on its sails (its broader meanings didn’t appear until the following century).
Some over-clever individuals connected with the sea almost at once linked it erroneously with the phrase to fweigh anchor. The somewhat tenuous logic seems to have been that once a ship had weighed anchor, it was under weigh. Weigh here is the same word as the one for finding out how heavy an object is. Both senses go back to an Old English verb that could mean ‘raise up’. The link is the act of lifting an object, say on scales, to measure its weight.
It’s easy to find a myriad of examples of under weigh from the best English authors in the following two centuries, such as Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Frederick Marryat, Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, and others:
There were the bad odours of the town, and the rain and the refuse in the kennels, and the faint lamps slung across the road, and the huge Diligence, and its mountain of luggage, and its six grey horses with their tails tied up, getting under weigh at the coach office.
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, 1857.
It was still common as recently as the 1930s, but weigh has dropped off almost to nothing now. One reason is that under way almost exclusively appears in non-nautical contexts and the link with weighing anchor has been broken. Another change, starting around the same time, was that the two words began to be combined into a single adverb, underway, on the model of other words ending in -way, especially anyway. Though this is not yet standard, with many style manuals still recommending that it should be written as two words, it has helped the shift in spelling back towards way.
Q. My grandfather had many weird and wonderful expressions. When something was lost and could not be found, even after a thorough and sustained search, he often said it was up in Annie’s room, behind the clock. Could you tell me the origin of this expression?
A. I recognized this immediately from my youth, many decades ago, because it was a phrase of my father’s; I’ve even occasionally used it, to the mystification of younger people around me because it is now almost unknown. Could your grandfather perhaps have fought in the First World War, as my father did?
I ask because the expression was British Army slang of the period. Eric Partridge says that it dates from shortly before that war, but was ‘at its height during it’. He explained that up in Annie’s room was a common dismissive reply to a sergeant or corporal who was asking where somebody was. The implication was that the person sought wasn’t just elsewhere but actively didn’t want to be found. Partridge suggested the phrase was coined to suggest that the person was ‘a bit of a lad with the girls’, which sounds like wishful thinking. The absence of women in the barracks or battlefield trenches surely meant that he’s up in Annie’s room indicated that the person was no more to be found than was Annie, or her room.
It was after the war ended when the phrase had been taken back into civvy street that behind the clock was added. This makes more sense than you might think – it was common practice in homes to put bills or letters behind the mantelpiece clock as an informal filing system so they could be found when needed. Another, more fancifully extended, form is up in Annie’s room, behind the wallpaper. The expression was taken to Australia – its first appearance in print was in W. H. Downing’s Digger Dialects of 1919. A later Australian elaboration is up in Annie’s room, resting on a pedestal. Dart players borrowed up in Annie’s room for the double-one.
Q. Up to snuff has long been used to refer to meeting some standard – or rather more often, in my experience, not meeting it. I found myself saying it today and wondered about its origin. Naturally, I thought of you. Can you tell me the origination? In other words, are you up to snuff with the history of the word?
A. The correct sense of the word snuff here won’t be immediately obvious to men and women today. If we know snuff at all it’s mainly in the sense of extinguishing something (snuff out), though that word originally meant to stop a candle smoking by removing the burnt end of its wick (the snuff). We don’t immediately think of the curious habit of sniffing powdered tobacco up one’s nose. But that’s the meaning in up to snuff.
Several colloquial phrases are recorded that used this meaning of snuff, most of which date from the early part of the nineteenth century in Britain (such as the rarely recorded beat to snuff, in high snuff and to give somebody snuff), when snuff-taking was still common but less fashionable than it had been fifty years before. Up to snuff is the only one which became popular and has survived.
He’ll not be sounded: he knows well enough The game we’re after: Zooks, he’s up to snuff.
Hamlet Travestie, by John Poole, 1810. As the title shows, Poole – a theatrical wit – was parodying the Bard. His trick was to couple Shakespeare’s lines with colloquial expressions from his own era to make a curious double-line doggerel verse. It went down well with his audiences but today we miss most of the humorous references, which I suspect even at the time often weren’t very funny – an evening of repetitions of a one-beat joke must surely have become tiresome. Zooks is short for gadzooks, an alteration of God’s hooks, the nails by which Christ was fastened to the cross, an archly uttered oath even then going out of fashion.
Poole was using up to snuff the way people used it at his time, for somebody who was sharp, not easily fooled. This may have come from the idea of snuff being itself a sharp preparation, but more probably because it was mainly taken by men of adult years and some affluence (it was expensive) who would be able to appreciate the quality of snuff and distinguish between examples of different value. The evidence isn’t there to be sure about its exact origin, though an early form of the phrase was up to snuff and a pinch above it, which confirms it did indeed relate to tobacco.
Whatever its origin, the meaning of the phrase shifted later to imply somebody who was efficient and capable; more recently still it has come to mean that something is up to standard or is of the required quality.
The schools may not want your clapped-out computer – it costs them $400 or more to bring an old Windows machine up to snuff, and even more for a Macintosh.
Economist, 11 January 2008.
Q. Some fractions were, maybe still are, called vulgar fractions. I cannot think there is anything rude about putting one number over another, so why vulgar?
A. This bothered me at school and I can’t recall having been given a good answer at the time.
The problem lies in the changing meaning of vulgar. It comes from the Latin adjective vulgaris that derives from vulgus, the common people. Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible, comes from the closely related vulgata, meaning ‘for the public’ (it was so, when it was written, in the fourth century AD, when Latin was still a living language). Vulgar turned up first in English in the fourteenth century and then referred to something that was in common or general use or something customary or done as a matter of everyday practice. There was nothing disapproving about it. That old usage was used in phrases such as vulgar tongue, the language spoken by ordinary people, not one full of expletives. In time, vulgar went down in the world. It moved from meaning ‘in ordinary use’, and ‘relating to the ordinary people’, to ‘commonplace’ and then ‘relating to the masses’; by the seventeenth century it had begun to assume our modern senses of ‘lacking sophistication or good taste’ and ‘making explicit and offensive reference to sex or bodily functions’.
There’s nothing vulgar in the modern sense about vulgar fractions, which got their name when vulgar still had its old meaning of something everyday or customary. The name came into use to distinguish ‘ordinary’ arithmetic from those highfalutin new decimal things, at first called decimal fractions to distinguish them:
To extract the Cube-Root, of any Vulgar or Decimal or Mixt fraction consisting of a whole number and a Fraction.
Thesaurium Mathematicae: Or, The Treasury of the Mathematicks, by John Taylor and William Alingham, 1707. As the title page explained, it contained a ‘variety of useful practices in arithmetick, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, geography, navigation and surveying. To which is annex’d a Table of 10000 logarithms, log-sines and log-tangents.’ The term decimal arithmetic had come into English a century earlier, in 1608, with Robert Norton’s translation of a book by the Dutch writer Simon Stevin; the English title is Disme: The art of tenths – or Decimal Arithmetike. Disme is his word for a tenth or a tithe, a variant of dime and said the same way, hence the name of the American ten-cent coin.
Writers of textbooks today do not always agree on what they mean by vulgar fraction, when they use the term at all, which is less often than in the past (Americans also know vulgar fractions as common fractions; yet another term is simple fraction). Traditionally, fractions of value greater than one were improper fractions, the other sort, of course, being proper, though all of them were vulgar. As vulgar has changed its meaning, some writers have assumed that vulgar means the same as improper and call only those fractions of value greater than one vulgar fractions. This is improper usage.
Q. What is the origin of the word waddle? I have recently read about the famous Confederate captain, James Waddell, who commanded the CSS Shenandoah and apparently had only one leg and weighed around 200lb. This made me wonder if it was a corruption of his name referring to his gait, although I doubt it.
A. It’s a neat guess but you’re right to doubt it as the origin. There’s no connection at all and the verb waddle is known from about three centuries before Captain Waddell’s time.
The first known user is the Bard:
And since that time it is eleven years, for then she could stand alone, nay, by th’rood, she could have run and waddled all about, for even the day before, she broke her brow…
Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 3, by William Shakespeare, 1592. In this brief extract from a waterfall of words, Juliet’s nurse is trying to explain in an outpouring of muddled exposition how it is she knows that Juliet is not yet 14.
Waddle is most often used of ducks and geese and other wading birds, which is appropriate, since it’s an extension of wade by adding the -le ending that indicates an action continually or regularly taken, what grammarians call a frequentive. It’s a member of a long long list that includes crackle, crumple, dazzle, hobble, niggle, >paddle, sparkle, topple and wriggle.
Q. I’ve asked this of many people – and the type of people who generally reply to these type of questions with a clear answer and a ‘how pifflingly undemanding’ sweep of the hand, mind you – but no one appears to know the origin of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Where on Earth did it come from?
A. I promise not to wave my hand in any manner. To be waiting for the other shoe to drop is to be prepared, often in deep apprehension, for some consequential event or complication to occur.
Worse, for long stretches of Cassandra’s Dream, nothing happens; the movie is about 80 percent setup, 20 percent waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Baltimore Sun, 20 January 2008. The film was set and directed by Woody Allen in London and starred Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell. Other reviews were also unkind, the film being widely regarded as a low point in Allen’s directorial career, one critic calling it ‘a clumsy, clichéd morality play’.
Curiously, few of my reference works include this phrase. There was a discussion about it among members of the American Dialect Society some time ago, to no very positive effect, though it turned out to be an American invention that was a lot older than anybody thought:
If nine out often of us hadn’t heard that ‘drop that other shoe’ chestnut and molded our lives accordingly for the sake of the neighbor below us, what would be the end of us?
The New York Times, March 1921. The reference to its being a chestnut means it must have been old even then, but we have no earlier example of the exact figurative phrase; however, it does also appear in the same year in Julia M. Sloane’s novel The Smiling Hill-Top and Other California Sketches.
Its source must surely be some variation on the following tale, which may come from vaudeville or some long-dead comedian’s repertoire, though nobody has been able to tie it down more precisely:
The hotel was crowded and the clerk said he’d let me have the room only upon condition that I’d be very quiet. ‘One of our oldest patrons has the room next you,’ he said. ‘And he’s just a bundle of nerves. If I had any other room for you, I wouldn’t put you next him, but please remember to be very quiet, so as not to annoy him.’ I had a lot of things on my mind, and I forgot the clerk’s injunction. I took off one shoe and dropped it on the floor before I remembered. I was awfully sorry about it, so was careful not to add to my misdemeanor by dropping the other. I took it off with great care and disposed it noiselessly. I got into bed as still as a mouse. Ten minutes passed, when I heard the transom over the door communicating with the next room opened violently. My next door neighbor thrust his head through. He seemed to be standing on a table or something, and he was fairly dancing with range. ‘Darn you,’ he roared, ‘drop that other shoe.’
Washington Post, 15 January 1905. In later versions, the offending shoe-dropper is usually said to be in the room above, not next door.
Closely related forms are drop the other shoe!, meaning to say or do the next obvious thing, or the other shoe drops, the obvious or feared event has finally happened. Both seem to have been known for most of the twentieth century.
Q. I remember hearing part of a radio discussion on the ABC local station in Queensland, Australia, some years ago on local expressions, and among those mentioned was one similar to something that I recognized from my childhood, a wing-wong for a goose’s bridle. Do you have any comments on this expression?
A. The original form, I have learned, was whim-wham for a goose’s bridle, a version that is still remembered by some older people in Britain. It turns out to be a well-known Australian expression (though not used as much as it once was), a way of deflecting a question from an inquisitive child. ‘What are you doing, daddy?’ ‘I’m making a whim-wham for a goose’s bridle.’ In other words, ‘go away’, ‘stop bothering me’. As whim-wham is only known in Australia as part of this set phrase, folk etymology has often turned it not only into your wing-wong, but also into wig-wog and wigwam.
Whim-wham is an old English term for a trivial or frivolous thing, such as an ornament or trinket. It is now not much known, though not entirely obsolete. Its origin is mysterious, though it’s clearly a reduplicated word, like flim-flam, and may derive from whimsy in the same way that flim-flam is related to flimsy.
Other forms of your expression that have been recorded in Britain include a whim-wham for ducks to perch on and a whim-wham for a treacle mill.
I should drive over to the station to see if he took a ticket for London, or Sheffield, or Birmingham, or somewhere. It’s just like him. He has gone to buy screws, or something, to make a whim-wham to wind up the sun.
The Weathercock. Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias, by George Manville Fenn, 1892. The boy is 16 year old George Vane Lee, whose bias is towards invention and natural history, who lives with his uncle in a small Lincolnshire village. Fenn was a noted writer of adventure stories for boys in the second half of the nineteenth century; he was also at one time editor of Cassell’s Magazine and drama critic of The Echo newspaper.
There’s been a long history of nonsense phrases intended to put off intrusive enquiries about what one is doing. You might say you were making a silver new nothing to put on your shoe, making layovers to catch meddlers, or making a whipple for a dooses poke.
When a knowing blade is asked what he has been doing lately, and does not choose to tell, his reply is, that he has been very busy weaving leather aprons. (From the reports of a celebrated trial for gold robbery on the South-Western Railway.) Other similar replies are, ‘I have been making a trundle for a goose’s eye,’ or a ‘whim-wham to bridle a goose.’ Sometimes a man will describe himself as ‘a doll’s-eye weaver.’
The Slang Dictionary, John Camden Hotten, 1859. A blade was an easy-going person, a good fellow, a word that goes back to Shakespeare, perhaps from the idea of his being figuratively sharp. The Great Gold Robbery, so called at the time, actually took place on a train of the South-Eastern Railway between London and Folkestone in May 1855 at which £15,000 in gold and gold coins on its way to Paris was stolen, a considerable sum at the time. At a trial in November 1856, it came out that Thomas Agar and William Pierce melted down the gold in a wash-house in the back garden of the house where Agar was living in London. Fanny Kay, Agar’s common-law wife, said in evidence that she had asked what the men were doing when they came in very wet and dirty, and they said, ‘leather-apron making’. Cue laughter in court.
Q. My wife suggested to her choir director that the choir have a whip round to get a gift certificate for a group of kids that they were going to sing for. The director, an American, was unfamiliar with the expression, so it had to be explained. This made us wonder where the expression came from. I never had the impression that it meant being coerced by a whip to contribute, but rather that one would collectively help to come up with enough cash. Any ideas?
A. This colloquial phrase does refer to taking a collection for an informal purpose like buying somebody a present or paying for drinks. It’s mainly British and Commonwealth usage, not much known in the US, hence your director’s incomprehension. Its history links the hunting field, the British parliament and the officers’ mess in a regiment.
The original term was whipper-in, a term traditional to fox hunting in Britain:
The whipper-in helps the huntsman in the field by keeping the hounds on the track of their quarry and not allowing them to become distracted by other wild or domesticated animals or endangered by going onto roads.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Horseback Riding, by Jessica Jahiel, 2000. Whipper-in is obviously enough derived from the use of a whip by the huntsman. By the 1840s at the latest, it had been abbreviated to just whip. The book was written before fox hunting was officially outlawed in Britain by Act of Parliament in 2004.
In Parliament, there have long been officials of each party whose job it is to make sure that MPs attend the votes. In practice their role has always been wider than this – they’re the disciplinarians of the House of Commons who make sure MPs don’t step out of line or do anything silly, and especially that they always vote according to their party’s call. By the later part of the eighteenth century they had begun to be jokingly referred to as whippers-in, by analogy with the hunting term; by the 1840s they, too, were commonly called whips (as indeed they still are, and not only in the British parliament by any means).
The parliamentary vote in support of this was only won after the whips had imposed the most rigid three-line whip upon Labour MPs who, in a free vote, would almost certainly have defeated it.
Guardian, 13 June 2008. Whip is also used for the notice sent by whips to party MPs to tell them about an impending vote. It is underlined once, twice or three times to indicate how important it is. A three-line whip is the most urgent, indicating that disciplinary action may be taken against any MP who fails to attend and vote.
This use of whip became broadened to refer to an appeal for individuals to take part in some activity – as we say, to whip up interest or enthusiasm. A specific sense of this came out of the British Army:
On ordinary days, when no strangers were present, and the usual mess allowance of a pint of wine each had been [consumed]… a second would, perhaps, be placed upon the table, and those only who chose to partake of it would remain. After this an empty wine glass was sent round, and those who wished to sit longer put in a shilling each for an additional allowance. This was called ‘whipping’; the mess-waiter took the money, fresh bottles were placed upon the table, and the company closed up to the president, to enjoy a still more social chat till bed-time.
The Rifleman; or, Adventures of Percy Blake, by Captain Michael Rafter, 1855. Ayoung Irishman becomes an ensign in the Hereford Militia, in which he suffers many pranks, indignities and dangers during campaigns in the Peninsular War and in India. When the company closed up to the president, they gathered closely around him.
This military usage became more widely known, and any call for money among the members of any group also became a whip. The first recorded use is this:
If they would stand a whip of ten shillings a man, they might have a new boat.
Tom Brown at Oxford, by Thomas Hughes, 1861. The book is the lesser-known and less interesting sequel to the author’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
By the 1870s, this had turned into our modern whip round.
Q. I have long been puzzled by the fact that woebegone is used in a sense opposite to what the word seemingly means. I grew up with the expression woebegone face, meaning a sad, woeful, unhappy face. But if you take the word as it’s spelled, it should mean that woe has gone, so the face should be happy and cheerful. Why does the dictionary give the reverse meaning?
A. It does look as though it’s from a wish or desire: ‘let woe be gone’. But the story is rather more complicated, and to answer it, we have to delve into medieval English.
Woebegone is first recorded in The Romance of Guy of Warwick, of about the year 1300. At that date, people might say things like me is woe begon, grief has beset me or grief has closed in on me. Notice the word order, with me as the indirect object of the sentence, but put first. The verb is bego, which has been obsolete for something like 400 years, except for its participle begone. In medieval times it had a variety of senses, such as surround, overrun or beset.
Over time, the link between woe and begone, the past participle of bego, became so close that they fused into a single adjective, so tightly linked that they survived shifts in language and the loss of the verb bego. For some centuries it retained the sense of being afflicted by grief or oppressed with sorrow, misfortune or distress. Shakespeare uses it this way:
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dread in look, so woe-begone,
Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night
And would have told him half his Troy was burnt.
Henry IV, Part Two, Act 1, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare, 1597. The reference by the Duke of Northumberland was to Priam, the last king of Troy, the city which in legend was sacked and burned by the conquering Greeks, who also killed Priam. The curtain being drawn back is the one around Priam’s bed in his bedchamber.
This quotation in particular was so well known that it contributed to a revival of woebegone in a subtly altered sense at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not meaning somebody beset by woes, but somebody whose appearance made them look as though they were.
His hands hung down also along the back legs of the chair, till his fingers almost touched the ground, and altogether his appearance was pendent, drooping, and woebegone.
The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope, 1864. Mr Lupex fears that his wife has run off with Mr Cradell. Despite its popularity, Trollope considered this, the fifth in his series of Barsetshire novels, the least of his books and declared its heroine, Lily Dale, to be a prig and a prude. The book had a renewed burst of popularity in 1992 when the then prime minister, John Major, declared it his favourite book during an appearance on Desert Island Discs.
We’re now a long way from that medieval romance, but in continuing to use the word we retain a small vestige of middle English as a linguistic fossil. Other archaic forms in woe have also survived, such as woe is me and woe betide you (where betide means ‘happen’, from the obsolete tide, ‘befall’), presumably because there’s a continuing need for formulaic lamentatory utterances.
Q. Do you know where your name is mud began? I’ve been told that it came from the name of Dr Samuel Mudd, who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, and was subsequently convicted as a conspirator.
A. The facts about Dr Mudd are correct but he wasn’t the source for this common phrase, which means that the person addressed is in disgrace or unpopular for some sin of omission or commission.
If you forget their birthdays your name is mud.
Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood, 1993. This extraordinary modern fairy tale, partly based on The Robber Bridegroom by the Brothers Grimm, features Zenia, the classmate of three Toronto women whom she betrays and destroys, even though she is dead. Company boss Nicki is here ranting to herself about the problems of working with female assistants.
Dr Mudd certainly treated Booth and was imprisoned as a conspirator in the assassination. He was released in 1869 by Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, after three years in jail, as a reward for taking over from the prison doctor, who had died during an epidemic of yellow fever. The story is often told that his name prompted the expression. However, even a cursory look at the evidence shows this can’t be true.
Mud, a stupid twaddling fellow. ‘And his name is mud!’ ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.
A Dictionary of the Turf, by John Bee, 1823. This first example is therefore more than four decades earlier than Lincoln’s assassination. Moreover, the book is British, written under a pen name by John Badcock, a man so ill-recorded that even his date and place of birth and death are unknown. It’s thought he was born about 1810 and died about 1830. A short life, but one that left us lots of writings about horses and riding.
The expression comes not from the family name Mudd but from the wet sticky earth stuff. It builds on a slang sense of mud recorded in the previous century. A book called Hell Upon Earth of 1703 includes the word in the sense of a simpleton or a fool. In turn, this probably derives from another that’s two centuries older still, in which mud meant the lowest or worst part of something, the dregs.