Make mine coffee and pizza.

Dear Word Detective: “Sam’s parking fine payments keep the city in beer and skittles.” In my hearing, this expression has always referred to a payment, usually onerous or unfair, for a second party’s benefit. Can you tell me from whence it comes and why? — Janet.

That’s an interesting question. But before we begin, I should warn you that there are people out there, who someday you may have the misfortune of encountering, who will castigate you for using the phrase “from whence.” They will point out that “whence” all by itself means “from where,” and insist that “from whence” must therefore mean “from from where,” which, if they were correct, would be awkward and redundant. But they are not correct, and “whence” and “from whence” are equally proper.

Whee.

Onward. The example you provided of “beer and skittles” certainly does reek of unjust enrichment, as the lawyers say, but I think you may be carrying a bit too much of that context into judging the connotation of “beer and skittles.” It is entirely possible to enjoy “beer and skittles” without bilking anyone. It used to be possible, for instance, for a factory worker to look forward, after a life of toil, to a retirement of carefree enjoyment of “beer and skittles.”

As an idiom common in English since at least the early 19th century, “beer and skittles” means “unalloyed enjoyment and relaxation,” what we might also call “living on easy street.” Unfortunately, such a state of bliss is uncommon, and it shows in the history of the phrase. The first recorded use of “beer and skittles” in print is in Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” in 1837, where it is used straightforwardly to describe a comfortable state (“It’s a reg’lar holiday to them — all porter and skittles”) (“Porter” is short for “porter’s ale,” a strong dark beer.)

But the remaining citations for “beer and skittles” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the vast majority of examples to be found today, employ the phrase as a symbol of precisely what life is not “about” (“‘Teach him life can’t be all beer and skittles,’ said Robert Gardner maliciously,” Agatha Christie, 1931). The phrase “life isn’t all beer and skittles,” often deployed as a stern admonition to wayward youth, is considered a tattered cliche today but remains nonetheless enormously popular, probably because life stubbornly refuses to get any easier.

One interesting aspect of “beer and skittles” is that the phrase is often used, especially in the US, by people who haven’t the faintest idea what a “skittle” is. There is, of course, a brand of candy called Skittles, but the “skittles” in “beer and skittles” is a game often played in pubs in Britain, a kind of tabletop bowling in which the pins are called “skittles.” The word “skittle” itself dates back to the 17th century and is of uncertain origin, but appears to have Scandinavian roots.

Move along.

Dear Word Detective: When I was a boy, my father used many colorful phrases. He was from Texas, so that may explain it. My wife, from Idaho, had not heard of many of these. However, a friend from Massachusetts and I had both heard of “get off the dime.” Now we are wondering about its origins. It seems like it was not something my father just created. — Harry Plumlee.

And when I was a boy, you sent me this question. Actually, it was only three years ago, but it seems like sometime in the last century, which would have been only a little over nine years ago, come to think of it. Am I the only one around here still weirded out by this turn-of-the-century thing? In any case, every so often I go back through my reader mail in case I’ve missed a good question, which I clearly did, so here we are. Sorry for the delay, to put it mildly.

Not really relevant.

I’m happy to report that your father did not, in fact, invent the phrase “get off the dime,” so we don’t have to worry about how it ended up being heard in Massachusetts. “Get off the dime” has been around since at least the 1920s, and today it’s generally used to mean, as defined by the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, “to take action after a period of indecision or procrastination; to act” (“Congress [should] get off the dime and adopt the … budget proposal before it,” President Ronald Reagan, 1982).

According to Wikipedia (a phrase I always use with the trepidation of a man skydiving with a parachute he bought on eBay), the “dime,” in size the smallest coin in US currency, was first issued in 1796. The name “dime” comes from the Latin “decem,” meaning “ten,” a “dime” being worth one-tenth of a dollar, or ten cents (“cent” being rooted in “centum,” Latin for “one hundred”).

Since a dime is a small unit of money and fairly easily to come by, this small coin has played a much larger role in US slang than, for instance, the hundred-dollar bill. To “drop a dime on someone,” for instance, means to inform on them, usually by tipping off the police, and originated back in the 1960s when a call from a public telephone cost ten cents. “Dime” has also found a home in the slang of drug users, where a “dime” or “dime bag” has long meant ten dollars worth of a drug. The small size of a dime has also been used as a metaphor for “a small spot,” as in “stop on a dime” or “turn on a dime” when speaking of motor vehicles (or politicians).

“Get off the dime” dates back to the days of dance halls and “taxi dancers,” women employed by the halls to dance with strangers, usually for ten cents per dance (a grim occupation immortalized in the 1930 Rodgers and Hart song “Ten Cents a Dance”). A contemporary account, published in 1925, explains the phrase: “Sometimes a … [dancing] couple would … scarcely move from one spot. Then the floor manager would cry ‘Git off dat dime!’” Similarly, “dancing on the dime” meant to dance very closely with very little movement, behavior that might well attract the attention of the Vice Squad and get the hall closed. Thus “get off the dime” referred both to the the customer as the “dime” he had paid and to the small spot (“dime”) on the floor where the couple seemed frozen.