Take human bites.

Dear Word Detective:  A co-worker just sent me an email explaining that information that I needed was being received “in piece mail.”  My immediate response was “Although actually somewhat appropriate, given that all the data is submitted electronically, that’s the wrong word, for all in tents and porpoises!”  But then it struck me that “piecemeal” is just an odd word.  I get the “piece” part, but what does “meal” bring to the table, and why? — Rasteen Nowroozi.

This is an awesome question.  It has everything: an odd locution from a co-worker, a spirited but good-natured response from you, followed by an entirely reasonable rumination about one of those everyday words that we often use every day for years before we realize that they really don’t make a heck of a lot of sense.  And your “What does ‘meal’ bring to the table?” is right up there with “Does the name Quasimodo ring a bell?” in its recursive snap.

You also seem, thanks to your co-worker, to have stumbled across a hitherto unrecognized “eggcorn.”  An “eggcorn” is a word or phrase, substituted for an established (but unfamiliar to the speaker) figure of speech, which (while strictly speaking “wrong”) still makes a certain amount of sense.  A classic example of an eggcorn is “Old Timers’ disease” for “Alzheimer’s disease.”  The term “eggcorn” was coined by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003 after the a similar substitution of “eggcorn” for “acorn.”   I checked the online Eggcorn Database (at eggcorns.lascribe.net) and didn’t see “piece mail,” although I did find someone at hackbash.com suggesting that “piecemail” would be a good term for a “fragmentary or unsystematic approach to sending email.”

While “piecemeal,” meaning “one part at a time, in stages, bit by bit, gradual,” certainly sounds as if it came from the practice of eating just small bits of food (perhaps at a communal “potluck” dinner), the word actually has nothing to do with dinner.  The “meal” in “piecemeal” harks back to the original sense of “meal” in Old English, which was “measure” or  “amount.”  (The Indo-European root of “meal,” in fact, also gave us “measure.”)  The connection between “measure” and “food” only came much later with the development of “meal” to mean “fixed time” and, in particular, “fixed time to eat.”

In Middle English, however, “meal” still meant “by a fixed measure” or “at a time,” so the form “pecemeale” meant “a piece at a time,” and eventually became “piecemeal.”  Middle English had a number of such “meal” compounds, including “footmeal” (step-by-step), “cupmeal” (one cup at a time) and “flockmeal” (in a large “flock,” e.g., “We marched on the castle flockmeal, but soon fled for our lives singly”).  “Piecemeal” is the sole member of this “meal” family still in use, which strikes me as a real shame.  I think the world could find lots of uses for the now-obsolete “gobbetmeal” (in large mouthfuls).

Whoopsies.

Dear Word Detective:  I love community theater and am lucky enough to have been cast in several musical productions.  We are currently presenting “The Sound of Music” and are intrigued by the word “flibbertigibbet” which we, as the nuns, use to describe Maria.  I am imagining it comes from the flitting to and fro of butterflies or birds.  But I am asking for your help with its origin. — Marsha.

The hills are alive … run!  You know, every so often I realize that I’ve never actually seen “The Sound of Music,” just the same few movie clips over and over on the TV.  (We call it “the TV” out here in the boonies.)   But that doesn’t seem to prevent that darn song from running through my head.

I haven’t heard anyone actually use the term “flibbertigibbet” aloud in years, and even Google News comes up with only an anemic twenty-six hits for print use lately.  I did, however,  have the word on my mind a some months ago after seeing the film “Julie & Julia,” a painfully tedious chronicle of one blogger’s attempt to leverage unearned fame and fortune on the life and reputation of the late Julia Child, author of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”  I would characterize “Julie & Julia” as essentially a very boring vampire movie.  Anyway, Meryl Streep, adding insult to injury in my view, chose to portray Child as a whooping flibbertigibbet, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “a silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person,” and which Child was definitely not.

Onward.  “Flibbertigibbet” is an interesting, and more than slightly mysterious, word.  As far as anyone has been able to determine so far, it first appeared in print in 1549, with essentially the same “blithering fool” meaning it has today.  Though “flibbertigibbet” is, strictly speaking, a gender-neutral word, in practice it is, and long has been, usually applied to women.

Although that basic sense of “flibbertigibbet” has been in constant use since the mid-16th century, there have been two interesting exceptions.  In King Lear (1605), Shakespeare used “Flibbertigibbet” as the name of a demon (“The foule Flibbertigibbet … hurts the poore Creature of earth”), apparently drawing the name from a list of such creatures published several years earlier.  Two centuries later, Sir Walter Scott, in his novel Kenilworth (1821), used “Flibbertigibbet” as the nickname of an impish, impetuous child.  Until “King Lear,” incidentally, “flibbertigibbet” had been spelled in a wide variety of ways (including “flybbergybe” and “flebergebet”) but Shakespeare’s version became the standard spelling (apart from occasional excursions such as “Flibber de’ Jibb” later in the 17th century).

The source of “flibbertigibbet” was, as far as anyone has been able to tell, our old friend onomatopoeia, the “echoic” formation of a word in imitation of a sound or other characteristic of a thing.  “Flibbertigibbet” almost certainly arose as an attempt to duplicate the sound of someone babbling or prattling on in meaningless chatter.

The air-brained motormouths among us have given us more than just “flibbertigibbet,” of course.  The words “babble,” “prattle” and “chatter” all also originated as onomatopoeic attempts to replicate the sound of someone who has nothing to say but simply will not shut up.