Con du jour.

Dear Word Detective: I was recently listening to Maddy Prior’s rendition of the song “Rigs of the Time.” I’m curious — what exactly is the meaning of that phrase? I’m not familiar with the use of the word “rig” in that context. Any insights? — Gwyn.

That’s a great question. I’m not familiar with Maddy Prior as far as I know, but I must have heard her at some point because Wikipedia says she was in the British folk group Steeleye Span back in the 1970s. “Rigs of the Time” sounded vaguely familiar, but that’s probably because the late Sandy Denny (of Fairport Convention) recorded it as well and I was a big fan at one time. Like many of the best English folk songs, “Rigs of the Time” is very old, probably, in some form, dating back to at least the 18th century. The song is essentially a catalog of the little cons, rackets and outrages that various malefactors visit on working people, from the butcher who puts his thumb on the scale to the barkeep who overcharges for a glass full of suds. The refrain runs: “Honesty’s all out of fashion / These are the rigs of the time / Time, me boys, / These are the rigs of the time.” Apparently Maddy Prior released a version of the song in 1999 that replaced the butcher and so on with multinational corporations, public utilities and supermarkets as the villains, but I prefer the original. That new version sounds a bit too much like what we used to call a “singing leaflet.”

There are several “rigs” in English, the most common of which is the noun that appeared, apparently from Scandinavian sources, in the late 16th century meaning “the particular arrangement of the sails, masts, etc., of a ship” (more often now called “rigging”). This “rig,” which came from the verb “to rig” meaning “to prepare a ship to go to sea,” eventually went on to be used to mean “a horse-drawn vehicle” (and, by extension, a large truck) as well as any sort of complicated equipment intended for a particular purpose (“I consider the Victor mill & Cook’s evaporator the best rig for making sirup profitably from cane,” 1868).

The “rig” in “Rigs of the Time,” however, is a different noun, dating to the mid-17th century, meaning “a trick, swindle, or dishonest scheme” (“These two gentlemen having by turns perused Mr. Pickwick’s billet, the one expressed his opinion that it was ‘a rig’ …” Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens, 1837). The origin of this “rig” is uncertain; it is possible that it’s actually a metaphorical use of the common “rig” in the “specialized machinery” sense (in this case, a “mechanism” to defraud). Thus “rigs of the times” would be scams and shady practices commonly encountered in, and perhaps defining, today’s world.

In any case, “rig” in the dishonest sense is probably best known today as a verb meaning “to manipulate in an underhanded, dishonest manner,” as in “rigging an election” or “rigging the stock market” by causing prices to rise or fall (“The Tea men … have been merrily rigging the market, so much that the prices have gone up about 4d. per lb.” 1841).
But a “rig” can be a small con, too, as “Rigs of the Times” indicates. One enduringly popular (at least among con artists) “rig” is the “thimblerig,” in which the victim, usually just a passerby on a street corner, is challenged to pick which of three thimbles hides a pea beneath it. The name “thimblerig” appeared in the early 19th century, but the con itself is probably ancient and has gone by the name “the shell game” in the US (where the thimble was often replaced with walnut shells). When playing cards are used, it’s known as “Three-Card Monte” and the challenge is to pick the ace among three face-down cards. Not surprisingly, the only people who ever win any of these “rigs” are the shills and ringers hired by the “thimblerigger” to lure onlookers into falling for the scam. The one good legacy of several centuries of such “rigs” has been the term “thimblerigger” itself, a fine word for a con artist since around 1831.

Happy Purple Kangaroo Day, infidels. Have a groatcake.

Dear Word Detective: We do not have a flag stand at our house, so, for Memorial Day, we hung some red, white and blue bunting from a patio railing. I then began to wonder about the term “bunting.” My abridged Webster’s II has the dreaded “origin unknown,” so I thought to look at the definitions of “bunt” and found one definition to be the midsection of a sail or the sagging middle of a fishing net. This seems to me to describe most bunting, which is swatches of cloth not in the regular, rectangular shape of a flag. Can you confirm or deny my suspicion that this is the source of “bunting” for flag-like drapes or banners? — Martin Celusnak.

Bunting is cool. We have a flag we put out on such occasions, but otherwise holiday house decorations are a sore point with me. I have no problem with Christmas lights, which we traditionally put up a few days before the day. But in recent years our neighbors have taken to lighting up their gutters to Clark Griswold-level excess weeks in advance of every conceivable occasion. Lighted eggs and bunnies for Easter, strings of phosphorescent miniature jack o’lanterns for Halloween, pink pagan love emblems for Valentines Day, even tiny glowing OSU Buckeye helmets for every tiny glowing game day. What I need is something truly bizarre, perhaps flashing day-glo purple kangaroos, that I can plug in on same random evening in March and drive all these people nuts.

There are actually several “buntings” in English,The oldest, dating back to the 14th century, is “bunting” as the name of a lark-like bird, as well as similar birds of other families that are in some fashion reminiscent of real buntings. In a rather abrupt disconnect from all this birding, “bunting” popped up in the 19th century as a term for a kind of shrimp. More familiar, perhaps, is the use of this “bunting” as a term of endearment for infants as well as the name of a kind of snug sleeping bag (“baby bunting”) for infants. All of these “buntings” are, apparently, based on the Scots word “buntin,” meaning “short and plump.”

The “bunting” to which you refer in your hunch, that of “a bulging or swelling of a sail or fishing net,” appeared in the late 17th century and comes from the verb “to bunt,” meaning “to furl a sail in the middle” or “to swell” like a partly furled sail. This came in turn from the noun “bunt,” meaning a pouched part of something, which is, unfortunately of unknown origin.

It is possible that this “pouched” or “sagging” kind of “bunting” influenced the use of “bunting” to mean “strips of cloth in flag colors used as draperies or decorations on patriotic or festive occasions,” but most authorities believe that the roots of “bunting” in this sense lie in a yet another, completely unrelated, “bunting.”

The initial meaning of the flag-colored “bunting,” when it first appeared in print in the mid-18th century, was “light cotton or woolen cloth used to make flags and banners.” This kind of cloth was of a very open weave, and apparently called “bunting” because it was similar to loosely-woven cloth used to sift grain or meal. The action of sifting grain had been known as “bunting” since the 14th century, and a contraption for sifting meal and grain had been known as a “bunt,” which may have simply been a form of the older word “bolt” (from the Old French “bulter”) for the same kind of sifting process. So the cloth routinely used to make flags was called “bunting” because it was similar to the cloth used to sift grain and meal. And when the same cloth was used for decorative, flag-themed draperies or streamers, it made sense to call those “bunting.”

Incidentally, since someone is bound to ask, none of these “bunts” and “buntings” have anything to do with “bunting” in baseball, where the batter allows the ball to hit the bat without swinging it. That “bunt” is probably an alteration of the verb “to butt,” meaning to strike with the head as goats do.