Archive « The Word Detective

Waving a bloody shirt

Keep your shirt on.

Dear WD: An associate of mine (he’s a lawyer, and so am I, so that’s probably our first problem) keeps using the phrase “waving a bloody shirt” when referring to another attorney’s practice of attempting to settle a case by flaunting certain pieces of evidence. My colleague is U of C educated, and I tease him relentlessly about his mastery of the trivial, and his inability to explain the origin of this particular phrase … he usually has an answer for everything. My own meager Ivy education was unable to support our quest for this particular piece of knowledge, and a search of other resources has so for proved fruitless. Can you help? — John F. Thomas.

I remember reading a news story a few years back that said that the occupation with the lowest self-esteem was dentistry. Dentists, the article declared, may seem supremely confident while they peer and poke in our reluctant mouths, but that alabaster tunic actually conceals a soul wracked by self-doubt and inner turmoil, a fragile spirit in search of human warmth and love. Now comes the first line of your letter, and I am wondering whether the article might not have had it wrong — perhaps lawyers are the premier lost souls in need of our approval. It makes me a little (not much, but a little) ashamed of my vast (and excellent) collection of lawyer jokes.

Perhaps it will help to tell you that the use of “bloody shirt” as a metaphor for dramatic overkill has quite a long history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bloody shirt” meaning specifically “a blood-stained shirt exhibited as a symbol of murder or outrage” dates back to 1586, and the use of the term metaphorically to mean a highly emotional argument or flagrant evidence of guilt is first cited in 1886 in The New York Weekly Times (“It is reprehensible .. for the Bourbons of the South to continue to play on the colour line … the Southern bloody shirt.”). There is no citation specifically for “waving a bloody shirt,” but your interpretation of the phrase as meaning “attempting to settle a case by flaunting certain pieces of evidence” seems a logical outgrowth of the original sense. Incidentally, one wonders, does one not, whether in the near future this phrase might be modified from “shirt” to “glove.”

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Jerry rig / Jury rig

Caught in the rigging.

Dear Word Detective: I’m curious about the word “jerryrig,” as in to make do with materials on hand. I recently saw it spelled “juryrig,” but the context seemed to be the same. Is the correct spelling “jerry” or “jury” and what is the origin of the word? What, if anything, does it have to do with a rigged jury? — Jill Fitzpatrick.

Not much, if anything. Then again, some of the juries running around out there these days could probably do with a little jury-rigging, perhaps a little money under the table for paying attention to the simple facts of the case. Between turning certain people loose in the face of mountains of evidence and fining other folks millions of dollars for lying on their job applications, juries are rather rapidly reaching a level of credibility formerly attained only by UFOlogists and mail-order psychics.

In any case, the “jury-rig” (it is usually hyphenated) you’re asking about has nothing whatever to do with juries in the judicial sense. “Jury” was originally a naval term for any makeshift contrivance substituting for the real thing in an emergency, most commonly found in the term “jury-mast,” a temporary mast constructed in place of one that had been broken. There’s some debate about where the word “jury” in this sense came from, with the leading (but unverified) theory being that it was short for “injury.”

To say that something is “jerryrigged” is to mix idioms a bit, because the proper term is “jerrybuilt.” A “jerrybuilder,” a term dating to 19th-century England, was originally a house builder who constructed flimsy homes from inferior materials. The “jerry” in the term may have been a real person known for the practice, or may be a mangled form of “jury,” as in “jury-rigged.” I tend to think that “jerrybuilt” arose separately from “jury-rig” simply because their senses are slightly different. Something that is “jury-rigged” is concocted on the spur of the moment to meet an emergency, but something “jerrybuilt” is deliberately constructed of inferior materials to turn a quick buck.

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Faze

Fazers on stun.

Dear WD: In a magazine article I was reading recently, the author announced that he was not “phased” by something bad that had happened to him. I was taken aback by this spelling of the word, which I have used all my life and have always seen spelled “fazed.” Is “phased” a more correct spelling, and perhaps the key to the origin of the word? — Edith Freedle.

“Phased” certainly looks more formal, but no, the proper spelling is indeed, as you remember, “fazed,” meaning “disconcerted or alarmed.” Perhaps the author thought that he was being meticulous when he spelled the word that way, or perhaps (and this is the scarier scenario) he had never seen the word spelled out before. Personally, I blame television.

Just to be certain about all this, I went looking for “faze,” and a funny thing happened. I looked in every dictionary of slang and unconventional English I have, and “faze” was nowhere to be found. Surely, I thought, this is a fairly established slang word, probably from the 1930’s or 40’s, so why isn’t it there? I even looked up “phased” in desperation, but no dice. I took several deep breaths (not easy in Manhattan) and plunged into the pages of my trusty Oxford English Dictionary. Eureka! “Faze” isn’t in dictionaries of slang because it isn’t slang, and it is far from new — it first appeared in its current form in 1890. An earlier form, “feeze,” dates back to the 9th century, and comes from the Old English word “fesian,” which meant “to drive away.” The first citation for the “faze” spelling comes from The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio in 1890, and is worth noting: “This blow, altho a fearful one, did not faze me” — words to live by.

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