Not counting the cats perched like pigeons all around the room.

Dear Word Detective: Over the weekend I was at a large rummage sale and one of the booths had a sign saying “Bric-a-Brac.” I know it means “odds and ends” or “knick knacks,” but what is the origin of the term? — Carolyn.

Ah yes, Spring, the beginning of the rummage/yard/garage sale season, when otherwise sane, frugal people rise at dawn on weekends to groggily comb through their neighbors’ bad purchasing decisions on the off chance that they’ll find a treasure among the inevitable exercise  gizmos (obviously unused) and dingy answering machines (clearly pining for the fjords). Back when the US was awash in cheap credit, you’d occasionally find a real bargain put up for sale so the owner could buy a newer one. But for the past few years, the people down the road from us, to pick a proximate example, have been sitting in their front yard every Saturday from April through September trying to sell nothing but plastic dinnerware, some very ugly hats, and a large, rusty chain. I guess they’re saving the shiny chains for eBay.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that magisterial repository of linguistic odds and ends, defines “bric-a-brac” as “Old curiosities of artistic character, knick-knacks, antiquarian odds-and-ends, such as old furniture, plate, china, fans, statuettes, and the like.” Whether that definition encompasses today’s typical rummage sale fare is debatable, in particular whether “statuettes” includes bobble-head figurines of football players, a favorite around here. And I’m pretty sure they mean the ornamental hand fans popular in the 19th century, not the cat-fur encrusted box fans so often seen at yard sales. So I think it’s fair to say that the “artistic” part of that definition is true, in many cases, solely in the eye of the seller.

“Bric-a-brac” (the hyphens are optional) is, not surprisingly, a French import, probably a modification of the expression “de bric et de broc,” which the OED translates as “by hook or by crook,” and other sources render as “here a little, there a little,”"at random” or simply as a nonsense phrase “expressive of confusion.” The basic sense is of a collection of inconsequential but vaguely interesting and pleasant items used as ornamentation in a home, etc., or as the American Heritage Dictionary says, “Small, usually ornamental objects valued for their antiquity, rarity, originality, or sentimental associations.”

The closest synonym of “bric-a-brac” is probably one you mentioned in your question, “knick-knack,” meaning a small article or trinket used for decoration (again, the hyphen is optional and it’s often seen as “knickknack”). “Knick-knack” is simply a repetitive form of “knack,” which originally meant “a trick or devious method,” but later came to mean “a small ingenious toy or trinket.” (“Knack” also eventually took on the meaning of “the trick or acquired faculty of doing something cleverly and successfully,” as in “Bob had the knack of getting late fees removed from his account.”)

Another good word (and one of my favorite words) for the sort of little dust magnets found on many peoples’ mantles and bookshelves is the Yiddish “tchotchke” (plural “tchotchkies”), which is often seen in the phonetic Anglicized spelling “chachka.” I think I have a small tchotchke problem myself. I took an inventory of my office bookshelves a few years ago and tallied a mechanical cow, a small rubber walrus, a small rubber cat, two plastic lobsters, an extensive collection of gargoyle figurines, and a small plastic toaster which, when wound, marches across your desk waving slices of toast and rolling its eyes. I’d be tempted to offer this stuff at a yard sale, but I need the toaster for my work.

If only your left ear works, are you “listing to port”?

Dear Word Detective:  I work at the Graduate School of  Education at Portland State University, and I was talking with one of the Special Education professors over lunch today.  The question came up, why do we use the phrase “hard of hearing”? All my life, I’ve used that phrase without ever wondering, but now it does seem strange. I wear hearing aids in both ears, and I know that hearing is hard for me, but why is it reversed? Is it just shorthand for “it’s hard for me to hear”? — A. Tasa Lehman.

Hey, “Portlandia,” right? It must be cool to have an IFC TV comedy series about where you live. I’m actually thinking of pitching a similar show set in our little town of Bump, Ohio. Of course, instead of the waiter in the local Portland restaurant explaining that the free-range chicken on the menu was named Colin and had lots of friends, we’d have Carl at Cafe Bump specifying the owner and brand of the truck (“Bob Wilson’s Chevy Silverado”) that dispatched the deer in today’s stew. And since the only guy in town who rides a bicycle rides it in the dead of winter while wearing no shirt, I think we might have to skip the whole ecological-awareness angle. I’m not making that up, by the way. Strange dude, but he always waves. Everybody here always waves.

“Hard of hearing” is indeed one of those phrases that we use every day but that suddenly seem truly strange when you stop to think about them. There isn’t any similar phrase in common usage today; we don’t say “I’m hard of walking” if we use a cane (though we might say “Walking is hard”), or “He’s hard of thinking” if someone seems a bit dim.

The short answer to the question is that we used to say such things all the time, using “hard” in the general sense of “not easily capable; having difficulty in doing something.” From the 15th century until the mid-19th century, for instance, it was common to say that an unsuccessful student was “hard to learn” (“Of slow capacitie, and hard to learn and conceive,” 1579) or that an insomniac was “hard to sleep” (“I have been very hard to sleep too, and last night I was all but sleepless,” Charles Dickens, 1858).

Our modern English word “hard” first appeared in Old English, drawn from Germanic roots, with the meaning of “not soft or fragile; resisting force or pressure,” a sense we still use when describing a rock or mattress as “hard.” One other early sense of the word was “not easy to wear out; capable of great exertion,” which led, in the 14th century, to the use of “hard” to mean “difficult to accomplish; laborious or full of obstacles,” as we say a job is “hard” today. In the 15th century, the focus of this sense of “hard” shifted from the task to be done to the person doing it, and we began to use “hard” in the sense of “having difficulty doing something” that persists in “hard of hearing” today. “Hard of hearing,” however, is the only use of that sense of “hard” still in common usage.

There have been, incidentally, some interesting synonyms for “hard of hearing” over the years. Back in the 17th century the hearing-impaired were termed simply “deafish.” In the 18th century the term “dunny” was common, “dun” here being a form of “din,” meaning loud noise, with the implication that the person’s hearing was impeded as one’s would be by a loud noise. Unfortunately, “dunny” was also used to mean “stupid,” paralleling the use of “dumb” (originally in English meaning only “unable to speak”) as an insult meaning “slow-witted.”

If there were an award for the weirdest synonym for “hard of hearing,” I’d nominate the archaic term “thick listed,” based on the obsolete English verb “to list” meaning “to hear,” which eventually produced our familiar “to listen.” The “thick” in “thick-listed” is a dialectical English usage of the common adjective “thick,” here meaning “dull, not sharp,” also found in the archaic expression “thick-sighted.”