Putting on

Filed Under April 2008, columns | Leave a Comment

Copy editor (with time machine) needed.

Dear Word Detective: In Craig Wilson’s September 12, 2007 column in USA Today, he quoted liberally from a new book of quotations compiled by one Elise Lufkin. The book is called “Not Bartlett’s.” Here’s Lufkin’s quote from Mark Twain: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” Clever and pithy, but I’m suspicious that the included phrase “who are putting us on” wasn’t yet current in Mark Twain’s time. I’ve tried doing Internet research on it, and I did find the quote attributed to Twain in at least one additional web site (what you might call a “site cite sighting”) but I continue to have my doubts. Can you trace back when “putting me on” became what it is today? — Jerome Norris.

That’s a good question (or, as Shakespeare once put it, “Totally awesome question, dude!”). “To put someone on” means, of course, “to pretend, to conduct a ruse or a hoax, often as a joke” (”Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody’s putting you on? That this is all a hoax?”, Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966). “Put” twain08.pngitself is, as one might suspect, a very old word, derived from the Old English “putian,” but where that Old English word came from is a mystery. As the centuries passed “put” developed a variety of meanings reflecting the general sense of “push” or “place,” and began to sprout figurative meanings as well. Many of these are older than one might suspect. “To put down,” meaning to snub or insult, for instance, dates back to around 1400.

As for that quotation attributed to Mark Twain, there are really two questions: could he have said it, and did he actually say it? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to either question. “To put on” meaning “to feign or pretend” (probably from donning a disguise or costume in order to deceive) dates back to at least the 17th century, well before Twain’s time. But the form in which it was commonly used prior to the 1950s was “to put on [something]” with the “something” being the object of the verbal phrase “put on” (”That voice is put on,” 1806). The earliest written attestation of the form “put someone on,” with the object of the verb being the deceived person, dates only to 1958. So Twain saying “putting us on” is very unlikely, although not absolutely impossible.

As to the second question, I found about 19,000 instances of that exact quotation online via Google, but exactly zero occurrences in several reputable collections of quotations. Given that Twain was the source of dozens of famous quotations, such an omission seems unlikely. Far more likely is that someone fabricated the quote and attached Twain’s name, it spread out over the internet, and Ms. Lufkin didn’t bother to check its provenance before she stuck it in her book. I wish I were more shocked by such a possibility.

Twain, incidentally, is often credited with things he didn’t say, including “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics,” which Twain himself credited to Benjamin Disraeli. The debunking site Snopes.com, in fact, devotes an entire page to bogus Twain quotes at www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp.

 

If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe.

 

 

Mortress of Brawn

Filed Under April 2008, columns | 1 Comment

Next best thing to a bacon milkshake.

Dear Word Detective: Speaking, as you recently were, of authors’ using arcane words, I have stumbled upon a puzzler in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, The White Company. The tale is set in 14th century England and France, and is rife with what I suppose are 14th century terms and tricks of speech. Most can be worked out with relative ease, but I have been stumped by the phrase “a mortress of brawn.” The reference is clearly to the main component of a hearty dinner, and a dictionary hunt suggests that “brawn” is probably (but not unequivocally) pork. The “mortress” part, however, eludes me, although it evidently refers to either the quantity or the cut of the meat. Even the (Compact) Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not appear to shed light on it. Can you? — Mike Lucey, Troy, NY.

I’ll give it a shot. I guess if the Compact OED contained words as obscure as “mortress,” it wouldn’t be very compact. What we need is the full-bore 20-volume OED, and here I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There’s a good chance that your local public library subscribes to the electronic edition of the OED. My local library here in Ohio even allows access to it from home via the internet.

mortress08.pngYour hunch about “brawn” is correct. Derived from the Old French “braon” (fleshy part, muscle, hind leg), “brawn” first appeared in English in the 14th century with the general sense of “part of the animal suitable for roasting.” In England in particular, “brawn” almost always referred to pork. The sense of “brawn” meaning “muscle” gave us “brawny” in the 16th century meaning “muscular, strong” in both literal and figurative senses (”Liberty is … the brawn of national strength,” 1883).

While “brawn” remains in common usage, “mortress” is considered archaic and obscure today. A “mortress” was a thick soup made with meat or fish (so a “mortress of brawn” would most likely be a pork soup). “Mortress” (and its cousin “mortrel”) entered English in the 14th century from the Middle French “morterel,” which was then a mixture of bread and milk. The root of all these words was the Latin “mortarium,” mixing bowl or mortar (as in the mortar and pestle once used by pharmacists to crush and mix drugs), reflecting the sense of food that had been crushed in a mortar (or, in the case of meat, finely minced).

Incidentally, the name of the kind of cement called “mortar” used between bricks, as well as that of the artillery piece called a “mortar,” both come from the same “mortarium.” The cement sort refers to the mixing of its ingredients in a “mortar,” while the “boom” sort harks back to the resemblance of early artillery mortars to the pharmacist’s mixing bowl.

 

If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe.

 

 

← Previous Page — Next Page →