Bang a gong.

Dear Word Detective:  Can you shine your light on the many sides of “forge”? It seems that the various usages (creating something by a process of applying heat and pressure, or the very tool kit that is used to do the same, versus the illegal duplication or replication of something for illicit gain) seem to be rather at odds. Is the third usage that implies motion (to “forge ahead”) derived from yet another source, or is it related to one of the other two? Hoping you’ll go at it with hammer and tongs, (ha!). — Chris Schultz.

Funny you should mention “going at it with hammer and tongs,” which originally, back in the 18th century, referred to a blacksmith working hard to shape metal in a forge using those tools. Coincidentally, I just spent five full days attempting to fix the mowing deck on My Little Tractor (a period now known among neighbors up to a half-mile away as “the Week of Him Swearing at Inanimate Objects”), and my best friend turned out to be my trusty rubber mallet. I truly believe that there are very few problems in life that can’t be solved with a rubber mallet. And lots of WD-40, of course.

There are actually two verbs “to forge” in English, which are considered separate words although they may actually be the same word. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

The first sense of “forge” that you mention, that of “to shape metal by the use of heat and pressure,” appeared in English at the end of the 13th century. The root of this “forge,” which we adopted from Old French, was the Latin “fabricare,” meaning “to make,” which also gave us “fabricate,” another word that, like “forge,” can carry connotations of fraud. When “to forge” first appeared in English, however, it simply meant “to make or build,” so one could be said to “forge” a house or a pair of shoes. “Forge” soon, however, came to be associated primarily with the work of blacksmiths, whose ovens (and shops) became known as “forges.” (A “blacksmith,” incidentally, is one who works in heavy metals such as iron, versus a “whitesmith,” who works in more ornamental mediums such as gold or tin.)

“Forge” rapidly acquired figurative senses centered on the general meaning of “create or fashion,” as in “forging a career.” The use of “forge” to mean “create a fraudulent imitation of something and pass it off as genuine” arose in the early 14th century, derived from a slightly  less nefarious use of “forge” to mean “to invent a tale, make up a story.” It’s a tribute to the importance of context in our speech and writing that today we can use “forge” in both the positive “create” sense (e.g., “forging an alliance”) and the very negative “forge a passport” sense. (There is, however, no modern positive use of the noun “forgery.”)

The use of “forge” to mean “push on through resistance or difficulty” (“The store was a crowded madhouse of Christmas shoppers, but Leonard forged ahead, his eye fixed on the perfume counter twenty yards ahead.”) arose in the early 17th century, and was originally a naval term describing a ship making difficult headway. There are two possible sources for this “forge.” It may have arisen as a mutation of “force,” perhaps via simple mispronunciation. Or, as I think is more likely, this “forge” is a metaphorical invocation of the repeated, powerful blows of a blacksmith’s hammer. If so, then these two “forges” are actually the same word.

Don’t look down

Dear Word Detective:  There is one word in the English language that never ceases to amaze and amuse me: “up.” There is the direction “up,” and then a million or so other phrases using the word: “free up,” “clam up,” “start up,” “shut up,” “send up,” “hurry up,” “put up” and so on, ad nauseam. How did this simple two-letter word get so many uses, and is there another definition of “up” that sets all those phrases apart from the direction “up”? — Gary.

Thanks for asking that question. Not only is it interesting in its own right, but it also, in a roundabout way, renewed my faith in my own memory. As soon as I read your query about “up,” I had a faint feeling of deja vu, not about “up,” but its opposite, “down.” I couldn’t remember writing a column specifically about the direction “down,” but, after I took the dogs for a walk, I realized that I had recently done one on “downs” in the names of racetracks (e.g., Churchill Downs). That “downs” comes from the Old English “dun,” meaning “hill,” and our modern word “down,” the direction, came from the derivative “adown,” meaning “from a hill,” i.e., in a descending direction.

I wish I could say that “up,” the direction, had as catchy an origin as “down” does, but ’twas not to be. Our modern English word “up” comes, as the words for “up” in many other European languages do, pretty directly from the Indo-European root “up,” signifying “up from below.” Snooze city, I know. The only truly interesting thing about that ancient “up” is that it also ultimately produced the words “open” and “over,” as well as the prefixes “hyper” and “super.”

But whatever excitement “up” may lack in its lineage, it has more than made up for in its wildly popular career in the English language. The phrases you have highlighted in your question, employing uses of “up” that are seemingly unrelated to either the direction or each other, are only the tip of the “up” iceberg. It’s like the linguistic version of the classic Monty Python “Spam” skit, where everything on the menu has at least some Spam in it. Over the centuries, we have apparently bolted “up” onto almost every verb in the English language. If you were to print out the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for the adverb “up,” it would run to thirty-eight pages, and the Oxford editors’ note on “figurative and transferred” (i.e., not literally directional) uses of “up” sounds, not surprisingly, a bit testy and exhausted: “Some uncertainty attaches to the origin and development of many of these uses, the variety of which is so great that the adverb comes to present a number of highly divergent and even directly opposite senses, e.g., ‘to bind up’ in contrast with ‘to break up’….” In other words, many of the uses of “up” in common phrases really doesn’t make sense.

There are, of course, some broad senses found in the use of “up” in idioms that can be detected. There is the sense of “to a state of greater cheerfulness or resolution” as in “buck up” and “cheer up” or that of “to a higher speed or amount,” as in “grow up” or “speed up.” There are the contradictory senses of “bring into the open” (as in “open up” and “dig up”) and that of “to close” (“shut up,” “clam up”) or “to finish” (“sew up” or “wind up,” etc.). But for every usage that you nail down, there are ten more with slightly different overtones, and soon you’re rummaging in your desk drawer for the aspirin. Furthermore, enumerating the dozens of uses to which “up” has been put doesn’t really explain most of them. What, after all, could the “up” in “break up” possibly mean that would logically have anything to do with the direction “up”? There is no logic to these idiomatic uses of “up,” so it’s probably best to stop looking too closely at this annoying little word and simply, dare I say it, give up.