Please stand by. Or run. Your choice.

Dear Word Detective: Can you tell me about the origin of the phrase “hang fire”? — Neil Jones.

Sure, but you’ll have to sit through a brief disquisition on my TV viewing habits first. Bear with me; it’s relevant. Judging by your email address, you’re in Australia, so you may not get The History Channel, one of the more popular basic cable channels up here. It used to be known as “the Hitler Channel” because whenever you tuned in you saw Panzers rolling into Poland, but THC has diversified in recent years with “reality” shows. One of them, Pawn Stars, is set in a Las Vegas pawn shop where people attempt to unload some seriously weird old stuff. A few days ago I caught a rerun in which the guys at the shop acquired a 1750 blunderbuss (a primitive shotgun, from the Dutch “donderbus,” thunder gun) and then attempted to fire it. The first two tries didn’t work, apparently because the powder in the external “pan” under the hammer didn’t flash through the little hole at the base of the barrel to set off the main charge. The third try was very loud.

Those initial attempts to fire the blunderbuss were a perfect illustration of the origin of “hang fire,” which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines in the literal sense as “(of a firearm) to be slow in communicating the fire through the vent to the charge.” The term itself is just about as old as that blunderbuss, first found in print (so far) in 1782 (“In consequence of which the piece is slower in going off, or, as sportsmen term it, is apt to hang fire.”). Since “hanging fire,” failing or balking at firing, was a problem in all firearms that used an external spark to ignite the main charge (including cannons aboard warships), the phrase may well have been in use for decades before it showed up in print.

The “hang” in “hang fire” is our common verb “to hang,” meaning “to suspend” in a variety of senses, used here in a figurative sense of “to hold in a state of inaction,” the same sense we use in the phrase “hung jury,” meaning a jury unable to reach a verdict. “Hang fire” can also mean “to delay something that was expected to happen,” since a gun like a blunderbuss or musket that “hangs fire” may fire on its own in a moment or two (making such weapons inherently dangerous to use).

“Hang fire” has been used in figurative senses since the early 1800s in the sense of “to be delayed or be slow to happen” (“Leyden’s Indian journey ?. seems to hang fire,” Sir Walter Scott, 1801), and it has usually been used in reference to something that would reasonably have been expected to happen, but did not, at an appointed time (“A book produced anonymously hung fire for six weeks,” 1892). The phrase is still very much in use (“Key rail projects hang fire as MMRDA holds back funds,” Indian Express, 2011), and is sometimes used to mean “hold off” or “deliberately delay an action” (“Alexis Jordan wants to be a role model but realises she needs to hang fire,” Daily Star (UK)). Such usage gives the phrase a voluntary connotation it lacks in its literal “fail to fire” origin; there’s a big difference between pulling the trigger of a gun and having nothing happen and deciding not to fire it in the first place.

A historically related but quite different phrase is “flash in the pan,” originally referring to a similar situation where the powder in the “pan” of a flintlock firearm “flashes” just fine, but the main charge fails to ignite. “Flash in the pan” has been used figuratively since the late 17th century to mean something that attracts great public notice but has no lasting effect or success (“These were flash-in-the-pan early Nineties pop stars who combined European dance music with tints of R&B and afro-Caribbean pop,” 2011). Unlike something that “hangs fire,” a “flash in the pan” attracts attention at least at the outset, even if it turns out to be, in the lingo of the recording industry, a “one-hit wonder.”

Fright Night vs. The Upper Berth.

Dear Word Detective: I find myself saying “that creeps me out” more than I would like these days. I am in my fifties, and believe I grew up saying “that gives me the creeps.” I don’t know when I adopted this newer expression, but I don’t like it. Can you tell me how old these two expressions are, and if there is something people might have used at the turn of the previous century? — Elizabeth.

That’s an interesting question, and I think I agree with you in preferring “that gives me the creeps.” It seems a bit more vivid and considered, and while “that creeps me out” is superficially more direct, it sounds airless, vague and much weaker. But I may be giving this too much thought.

Just when the use of “creeps me out” arose is uncertain. The earliest citation for the phrase in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS) comes from 1983 (“Univ. Tenn. Student: Just thinking about nuclear war creeps me out”), but that is apparently an instance of use personally heard by the dictionary’s editor and thus of questionable reliability. (I’m actually rather surprised that it’s in this dictionary.) A bit more verifiable is the one other example in the HDAS, from The Simpsons TV show in 1993: “You’re creeping me out.” If I had to guess based on when I remember first hearing the phrase, I’d say the late 1980s or early 1990s.

“Creep” first appeared in Old English as the verb “creopan,” derived from Germanic roots. Most early uses of the verb “to creep” involved the literal sense of, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it, “To move with the body prone and close to the ground, as a short-legged reptile, an insect, a quadruped moving stealthily, a human being on hands and feet, or in a crouching posture.” This “low and slow” sense, in the 14th century, produced “to creep” meaning “to move stealthily, to sneak,” or “to move or accrete gradually by imperceptible degrees” (as in “creeping socialism”). More importantly for our purposes, the 14th century also saw the development of an intransitive sense of “to creep” applied to one’s skin or flesh meaning “To have a sensation as of things creeping over the skin; to be affected with a nervous shrinking or shiver (as a result of fear, horror, or repugnance)” (OED) (“You make my hair stand on end, and my flesh creep,” Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, 1841). The current use of “creep” as a verb in “It creeps me out” is a new, transitive sense of the verb meaning (apparently) “to give a person the shivers or a feeling of dread.”

“Creep” as a noun followed a similar trajectory of development, from the mid-19th century onward being used to mean “the feeling of things creeping on one’s body; shivers of dread or horror,” usually in the plural form “the creeps” (“It gives you the creeps all down the small of the back,” 1879). This is, of course, the same “gives me the creeps” you and I grew up with. The use of “creep” to mean “an unpleasant or dangerous person,” incidentally, comes from the slang use of “creep” to mean “a sneak” or even a “sneak thief.”

As for older synonyms of “the creeps” or “to creep” in the “skin crawl” sense, one 18th century equivalent was simply “to crawl” (“You make me crawl all over, talkin’ so much about dyin’,” 1889). Further back in history, we had such cool words as “to agrise” (tremble with horror), “to grue” (feel terror), “to fremish” (tremble), and “to starkle” (show fear). My absolute favorite synonym for “get the creeps,” however, is the 17th century term “horrirpilate,” meaning “to have the hair on one’s skin stand up in fear” (a condition caused by contraction of the muscles under the skin and also known as “goosebumps”). “Horrrpilate” and the noun “horrirpilation” are derived from the Latin verb “horrere” (to shudder or bristle in fear, connected to our “horror”) plus “pilus,” meaning “hair.” In my book, “horrorpilate” beats “creeps me out” by a mile.