Things fall apart, or not.

Dear Word Detective: I was reading a story about the Round Table the other day. In this novel there was a discussion about the past tense of “cleave.” It ended with a fish being “clooved,” and there was no definite answer. What is the past tense of “cleave”? I thought it might be “cleaved,” “clave,” “claved” “clove” or, I think my best guess, “cloven.” I couldn’t find out. I don’t have a good dictionary, either. My parents can’t help me on this one. Can you? — Cora.

No good dictionary? Horrors. A house without a good dictionary is like a house without … I was going to say “phone book,” but I can’t remember the last time I saw one around here. Well, anyway, you actually do have access to a couple of good, trustworthy dictionaries online. One is at Merriam-Webster.com (or just m-w.com). The other is at Yahoo Reference, and if you manage to navigate through through the unnecessarily byzantine interface at education.yahoo.com, you’ll find the excellent American Heritage Dictionary (which used to be parked at Bartleby.com). You should also check the website of your local public library; many libraries offer their members free access to the Oxford English Dictionary Online.

“Cleave” is, as you’ve already discovered, a tricky little word. It’s often cited as an “auto-antonym,” a word which can mean its own opposite, because “cleave” can be used to mean both “to split apart” and “to stick together.” Some such pairs of words (also called “Janus words,” after the Roman god with two faces) are actually the same word with contradictory senses developed over time (e.g., “fast,” moving quickly, and “fast,” securely attached). The two senses of “cleave,” however, are two entirely separate words, with different origins, that just happen to share the same spelling.

“Cleave” meaning “to split, divide, separate” first appeared in Old English in the form “cleofan,” derived from Germanic roots with the general sense of “to split or cut.” The original meaning of this “cleave” in English was “to part along the grain,” as in splitting wood for a fire, but today we use it to mean simply “to cut in two, divide.”

The other “cleave,” meaning “to adhere to, stick to,” also harks back to a Germanic root, in this case the same one that eventually gave us the word “glue.” Along with its literal sense of “stick to” (“Huge masses of masonry, which seem to cleave to the bare rock,” 1867), this “cleave” has long been used in the warm and fuzzy sense of “to remain attached, devoted, or faithful to” (as in the Biblical injunction “Cleave unto that which is good”).

If this all seems like a recipe for confusion between the two words, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The fact that English has two “cleaves” from different sources and with entirely different meanings would, if language were logical, dictate that they each have their own distinct forms to indicate tense, etc. No such luck. As the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) explains, because the words were identical, “…their inflectional forms were naturally also confused, and to some extent blended or used indiscriminately.” Thus the antiquated past tense form “clave” belongs etymologically to “cleave” (adhere), but it has also been used off and on as the past tense of “cleave” (split). The more common form “cleaved” also serves as the past tense of both verbs.

The OED has a fascinating rundown of the dizzying array of past tense and past participle forms of both words over the centuries, but I sense it’s time to cut to the finish line and give you the long story short. So the existing past tense forms of “cleave” in the “split” sense are “clove,” “clave,” “cleaved” and “cleft,” and the past participle forms are “cloven,” “cloved,” “cleaved” and “cleft.” In the “adhere” sense we have “cleaved” and “clave” again for the past tense and “cleaved” for the past participle. Practically speaking, “cleaved” is probably the most popular past tense form for both words, though “cleft” for “split” is more poetic, and the participial “cloven” (“having been split”) is one of my favorite words. “Clooved,” incidentally, is a very creative, but historically non-existent, word.

And there’d be no rainbows for the unicorns!

Dear Word Detective: Where did the phrase “right as rain” come from? I’m sure there are plenty of flood victims who might not think that rain is always “right.” — Andy Hughes.

Yes, well, there’s that. On the other hand, if we had no rain, there’d be no wheat, and without wheat there’d be no flour, and without flour there’d be no pizza. Also no cows, so no milk, thus no cheese for the pizza. And tomato plants don’t grow in the desert. Furthermore, even if it weren’t necessary for life on this so-called planet, I rather like rain, and I have never understood people who freak out and run for cover the minute it starts to sprinkle. It’s water, for pete’s sake. Your body is already ninety-five percent made of the stuff. Consequently, it’s always gonna be way too late for an umbrella, so please relax.

Rain has been around pretty much since the beginning, of course, and the word “rain” itself (which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “Condensed moisture of the atmosphere falling to the ground visibly in separate drops; the fall of such drops; rainwater”) is very old. Its source was the Indo-European root “regna,” and our English “rain” has close relatives in many other European languages. “Rain” is also a verb and can, of course, also be used figuratively to describe anything arriving in large quantities, whether good or bad (“It was raining bonuses on the company’s executives while it was raining layoffs on the factory floor”).

“Right as rain” is a popular idiom meaning “absolutely fine or perfect; in perfectly functioning order” (“We’ll pop a new battery in your robot and it’ll be right as rain”) or, applied to a person, “in fine health” (“Two months after the robot attacked him, Bob was right as rain again”). As an adverb, “right as rain” means “with no problems; smoothly” (“We’ll pull through right as rain,” 1908).

“Right as rain” first popped up in print in the late 19th century (“If only this infernal Fitzpatrick girl would have stayed with her cads in Dublin everything would have been as right as rain,” 1894), but other “right as” idioms had already been widespread for several hundred years in English. “Right as a book,” “right as nails,” “right as a trivet,” “right as a line” and “right as a gun” (as well as my favorite, the weirdly recursive “right as my leg”) were all popular at various times beginning in the 15th century. In most cases, the item referenced was something straight (a nail, a line) or especially solid (a trivet). None of the phrases were meant to be literal comparisons, however, and the only apparent logic behind “right as rain” is that rain usually falls in a straight line. But the key to the enduring popularity of “right as rain” is clearly its monosyllabic alliteration. (By the way, I just realized, while trying to type it, that the phrase “monosyllabic alliteration” is about as far from monosyllabic alliteration as you can get.)

And now for something truly strange. I was searching the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary for earlier synonyms of “right as rain,” and I came across the breathtakingly bizarre phrase “all (or everything) is gas and gaiters,” meaning “everything is fine” (as well as “all gas and gaiters,” used to mean “pompous”). “Gaiters” are, in case you were wondering, cloth or leather coverings for the lower leg. As helpfully explained by Michael Quinion at his World Wide Words website (worldwidewords.org), the phrase “all is gas and gaiters” began as the denouement of a demented monologue by a deranged old man in Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby. It was meant by Dickens as utter nonsense, of course, but “all is gas and gaiters” was quickly picked up and became a popular catch phrase meaning “everything is perfectly right” in 19th century Britain. Use of the phrase “gas and gaiters” to mean “pompous but empty words” apparently arose later, in the 20th century, originally referring to senior church officials in England, who really did wear gaiters under their vestments and were widely considered pompous and a bit vapid.