I’ve always been partial to “Gracious Snakes,” myself.

Dear Word Detective:  I grew up in Mississippi hearing my mother say, usually in exasperation with me, “Oh my stars and garters!”  I moved to Vermont years ago and forgot this expression, which had always mystified me.  Last month, I phoned someone up here to tender profuse apologies for some minor discourtesy.  The response was, “Oh my stars and garters, Shelby.  Don’t be silly.”  That’s the way it was always used — as a more colorful version of “Oh, for pity’s sake!”  Whence this phrase, please? — Remystified, Shelby Grantham.

It’s funny how things like that pop up after all those years, isn’t it?  I remember as a child encountering the phrase “I swan” in books and movies (mostly set in the South, as I recall).  I gathered that it was an antiquated expression of surprise, but since no one I knew in Connecticut used the expression, I filed it away under “Weird things grownups say that you don’t have to understand.”  It was only many years later, when I heard my mother-in-law in Ohio say “I swan” in nearly every conversation (she was perpetually appalled by modern life), that I finally got around to looking it up.  “I swan” turns out to be simply the somewhat slurred northern English dialect pronunciation of “I shall warrant” in the sense of “I declare” or “I swear.”

“Oh my stars and garters” serves much the same purpose as “I swan” as an expression of surprise, but adds a jocular twist (“and garters”) to signal that it’s not to be taken too seriously.  “My stars!” (no garters) has been an expression of mild astonishment since the late 16th century, rooted in a time when astrology was taken very seriously and certain stars were thought to rule one’s fate.

I had initially assumed that the “and garters” part of the phrase was purely a joking extension of “my stars,” chosen for the “stars/garters” rhyme and perhaps for the slightly risque overtones of “garter.”  But Michael Quinion of World Wide Words (www.worldwidewords.org) points out that “stars and garters” has a history all its own in Britain.  Knighthoods and such honors usually come with star-shaped medals, and the Order of the Garter is the highest rank of knighthood.  Thus “stars and garters” has been slang shorthand in Britain since the early 18th century for all the trappings of knighthood (“He … Despised the fools with stars and garters, So often seen caressing Chartres,” Jonathan Swift, 1731).

At some point, probably early in the 19th century, someone familiar with both the idiom “stars and garters” and the exclamation “Oh my stars!” fused the two, producing “Oh my stars and garters,” which must have struck quite a few people as enormously silly and clever, which it was.  So what we have in “Oh my stars and garters” is, essentially, a 200-year old one-liner.

A thousand times no.

Dear Word Detective:  All through my adolescent and adult life I have used the word “renege” when it comes to someone backing out of a deal or situation.  As I try to look around Google and others I find I have no clue how to find what you find and cannot on my own understand where and when this word became common knowledge.  I beg of you to help me and my wife understand the full depth of this one single word. — Dan Drenberg.

This is interesting.  I’ve been getting an increasing number of questions from my readers couched in tones of near-desperation, imploring me to explain words or phrases so that the questioner might snatch a moment’s sleep for the first time in a month, get their housework done before the dog hair suffocates the goldfish, or just generally go back to leading a normal, ho-hum existence.  My hunch is that it’s really all about what the folks on the TV call, with unseemly perkiness, “the global economic meltdown.”  Understandably reluctant to meditate too long on the prospect of fighting the cat for the last can of Fancy Feast, people offload their anxiety into worrying about the provenance of “ampersand” or “pedigree.”   Hey, it’s OK with me, and I’m glad to help.  Your cloud is my tiny silver bailout.

All things considered, “renege” is actually a pretty straightforward word, snapped together from solid Latin roots.  “Renege” first appeared in English in the mid-16th century (with the now-archaic meaning of “to deny, renounce, abandon or desert”), but it wasn’t until the late 18th century that it acquired its modern meaning of, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “To change one’s mind, to recant; to break one’s word; to go back on a promise or undertaking or contract; to disappoint expectations.”  Incidentally, “renege” is sometimes spelled “renegue” outside the US.

As I said, “renege” is built from Latin roots, the prefix “re” plus the verb stem “negare,” meaning “to deny” (and which also gave us our modern English “negative,” “deny” and several other words).  The only slightly sticky part is that “re.”  Ordinarily, “re” appended to a verb signals repetition or restoration, as in “renew” (make new again), “recreate” (make again), “refer” (literally “to carry back”), and so on.  In this case, however, the “re” acts as an intensive modifier, meaning “strongly,” so “renegare” carries the meaning of “to deny strongly or completely; to refuse.”  Thus to “renege” on a promise is to flatly refuse to keep it.

“Renege” doesn’t play a large role in most people’s vocabularies (unless you’re a banker, I suppose).  It’s the slightly strange hat or clunky shoes we almost never wear.  But “renege” has a famous relative.  When that Latin “renegare” worked its way through Spanish, it became the noun  “renegado,” meaning  someone who denies or renounces their religious faith (specifically, in medieval Spain, a Christian who became a Muslim).  Brought into English in the late 16th century, “renegado” became our “renegade,” eventually arriving at the more general meaning of “one who deserts a party, person, or principle; a turncoat.”