Picky, picky.

Dear Word Detective: I’m being accused of overanalyzing this, but the idea that anything can “fall between the cracks” just doesn’t make sense to me. I picture two parallel cracks. Wouldn’t the space between them be the surface? Please help me make sense of this. — Jane Francis.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when literally idioms we perceive, or something. I’d turn back if I were you. Deconstructing English idioms is right up there with squaring the circle and explaining Ben Stiller’s career as lose-lose endeavors. That way madness lies. Google “Unabomber” and “Eat your cake and have it too” for an example of how wrong this sort of thing can go.

As the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, an “idiom” is “a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements.” In other words, hang it up. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s a figure of speech.

Some idioms mean just what they say (“to take it in stride,” for instance, meaning to endure something and keep going). But some mean nearly the opposite of what they seem to say. For instance, we speak of falling “head over heels” in love with someone, meaning that our life is profoundly transformed by the experience. But most of us, having mastered bipedal locomotion at an early age, already spend our days with our heads above our heels, don’t we? It’s true that the phrase was originally, back in the 14th century, “heels over head,” which better conveys the sense of being “turned upside down” by love. But when a few popular writers (including Davy Crockett) accidentally reversed the phrase in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rest of us just decided to go along with “head over heels.” No sense? No problem.

It’s hard to say just where and when “fall between the cracks” jumped the rails of literal sense, but you’re right that it lacks logic. My guess is that the current illogical form came from a blending of the established metaphors “fall through the cracks” (as small objects might fall through the gaps between floorboards) and “fall between the stools” (to not fit in either of two categories, by analogy to bar stools).

In any case, “fall between the cracks” seems to have graduated to being an accepted idiom, and recently popped up in the august Christian Science Monitor (“News reports flash a daily barrage of stories about children who fall between the cracks, abused by parents or neglected by social welfare agencies,” March 11, 2008). If the Monitor’s copy editors don’t have a problem with it, I guess “fall between the cracks” is here to stay.

And why is gas so cheap now that all the stores have closed?

Dear Word Detective: What is the true origin of the word “towrag” or “toerag,” meaning a rascally type of person? Has it any connection to the nomadic Berber Touareg tribe? Could there be a connection to the towing rag, suspended from a long load in a car or truck? I have even heard it might be related to a strip of cloth used for wrapping around the feet, in place of socks. I would appreciate a definitive explanation. — Irene Brackenridge.

Ah yes, wouldn’t we all? So many questions in life, so few answers. Why do cats invariably climb to the highest point in the room when they feel nauseated? Why does the bank charge so much for bounced checks when, by definition, you have no money? Why does the TiVo always decide not to record the season finale of your favorite show? And if life is such an awesome mystery, how come I’ve never been in a car chase?

You seem to have come up with a variety of interesting possibilities for the source of “toerag” (as it’s usually spelled), but the one tying the word to the Touareg (or Tuareg) people of North Africa has, perhaps surprisingly, more than a glimmer of plausibility. The Touareg, an ancient Saharan tribe, operated the great trade routes across the Sahara desert for more than two millennia until the French colonized the area in the 19th century (an incursion the Touareg fiercely resisted). The European colonization of the region had already given us the British slang term “street Arab” for a homeless, wandering child (“The hero and heroine began life as street Arabs of Glasgow,” 1883), so it wouldn’t be too surprising if colonial encounters with the Touareg had spawned another derogatory term in the streets of London.

Unfortunately, the actual origin of “toerag,” which dates back to the 19th century, is considerably less interesting and more depressing. As a slang term for, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “A tramp or vagrant; a despicable or worthless person,” the epithet “toerag” simply refers to a poor person who wraps rags around his or her feet in lieu of socks. The term initially appeared in the literal sense of a rag wrapped around the foot inside a shoe in about 1864, but by 1875 it had become the synonym for “tramp” it remains today (“All them toe-rags, mate, got the manners of pigs,” Harold Pinter, 1960).

The equation of poverty and low moral character is, of course, sadly common in the English language, but the state of one’s feet seems especially prominent in the vocabulary of derision. “Down at the heels” has been a metaphor for “destitute” or “failure” since the early 18th century, referring to worn shoes the owner lacks the funds to fix. Similarly, “to be on one’s uppers” is a 19th century phrase meaning “to be broke,” invoking the image of one so poor that the heels of his shoes have worn away entirely, leaving only the upper part of the shoe remaining. To call someone a “heel,” however, simply means that the person (usually an untrustworthy, unscrupulous man) has demonstrated that, as the heel is the lowest, rearmost portion of the foot, he is the lowest form of human being. One can be a “heel” and wear very nice shoes.