Bang on the mark.

Dear Word Detective: I have been teaching marksmanship for the past five years and I have been a pistol shooter for ten years now. One day, I was asked by a student about the origin of the word “marksmanship.” I am not really sure about my answer but I told them that perhaps the word is derived from the Mark’s rifle in the same manner that the word “sniper” is derived from the word “snipe” (a type of small bird found in India). — Jack Palanca.

That is a darn good question. I didn’t have much luck tracking down your reference to “Mark’s rifle,” but it is true that the word “sniper,” meaning a military sharpshooter, comes from the “snipe,” a small bird found in marshlands in Europe, Asia and New Zealand. Snipe are, apparently, quite hard for hunters to hit, leading to the verb “to snipe,” meaning to shoot very precisely at an animal or person. “Sniping” also usually consists of a single shot, which gave us the figurative sense of “to snipe” meaning “to verbally attack sharply and quickly,” often with a single sly gibe (”Although adult factions may have made peace with each other, their children on the way to school may continue sniping at each other for generations,” 1959). “Snipe” as a noun also became a derogatory term, leading to “guttersnipe,” originally a Wall Street epithet for shady stock traders who conducted business on street corners.

“Marksman,” meaning an accomplished sharpshooter, rests on a special meaning of the common English word “mark.” The original meaning of “mark” when it first appeared in English, based on Germanic roots, was “boundary or limit.” In Old English, “mark” had taken on the logical sense of “an object or sign denoting a boundary,” which underlies many of our modern uses of “mark” to mean a notation or sign signifying something.

One of the early uses of “mark” in English, around the late 13th century, was to mean “target or other object set up to be shot at by an archer.” This was extended to mean any target shot at, and even used figuratively to mean the “target” of a scheme or ruse (as criminals today still refer to the victim of a swindle as “the mark”).

Oddly enough, one meaning of “marksman,” when it first appeared in the early 17th century, was “a person regarded as a victim or target.” But that meaning quickly gave way to our modern usage meaning “a person skilled in shooting.” So whatever the story of “Mark’s rifle,” the word “marksman” simply means one who is skilled at hitting the “mark” or target.

Time out.

Dear Word Detective: What does the phrase “light somewhere” come from? My mom used to say it when she wanted someone to sit down and quit moving around. — Taylor Leigh.

I’m going to play psychic here for a moment and hazard a guess (which is what professional psychics do, after all) that you grew up in the American South or southern Midwest. I’m not really psychic, of course, but those are the regions of the US where you’re most likely to hear “light” used to mean “sit down,” according to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE).

The first thing to note about “light” is that there are two entirely separate verbs “to light” in English, words which, although spelled the same, have absolutely no connection to each other. The one we needn’t worry about at the moment is “light” meaning, generally, “to give or shed light” or “to set burning.” This “light” (and the noun form meaning “illumination”) comes from the same Indo-European root that produced the Latin “lux” (light), which gave us “luminous,” “lucid,” “illuminate” and other common English words, including “Lucifer,” which means literally “bearer of light.”

The other “light,” the relevant one, comes from a Germanic root with the general sense of “not heavy,” which is how we use the adjective today (as in “many hands make light the load”). As a verb, “light” followed an odd course. In Old English, “to light” meant simply “to lessen the weight of something,” a sense carried over to modern English and elaborated into meanings ranging from “make cheerful” to “give birth,” all of which are obsolete today. One variant of the “make less heavy” use of “to light” did survive in the phrase “to light out” meaning “to quickly leave,” which came from seamen “lighting,” or working together (”making light the load”), to hoist sails. This is also the source of “to light into,” meaning “to begin quickly” or “to attack fiercely.”

The other general sense of “to light” is “to descend, to step down” (essentially the same word as “alight”). The original meaning of this “to light” was “to dismount from a horse or descend from a carriage,” which seems very odd until you realize that dismounting from a horse lightens the load on the horse. This “to light” developed a number of senses based on the general notion of descending, from “to light upon” (”to chance or stumble upon” an idea, for instance) to “light” meaning “to fall or settle on a surface” as a bird or a snowflake might. This last sense, to alight and sit still as a bird might, is the one your mother was using.