readme:

Oh good, it’s still April, so I’m not really late.

First of all, thanks to all the wonderful readers who either subscribed or just hit that little “Donate” button (over there on the left) last month.  Your contributions have been an enormous help.  Special thanks of the highest order to Susan in California, whose extraordinary generosity is deeply appreciated.

Elsewhere in the news, I have disabled the text-to-speech feature (The Word Detective Read Aloud by a Very Stupid Robot) because it was annoying everybody and didn’t really work.  Incidentally, speaking as a former longtime member of the Authors Guild, I think their objection to the speech feature on the new Kindle was seriously idiotic. Trust me, readers can tell the difference between a book read aloud by the author (or an actor) and a book squawked out by a toaster.  And don’t get me started on the Guild  and their end run around US copyright law with Google.  Don’t be evil?  Ha.  As a corporate motto, it’s brilliant.  Gives you a five-mile head start on all the schlubs who believe you.

Onward.  I believe I may have mentioned at various points that I have a bit of a thing about computer keyboards.  For many years I’ve been devoted to the IBM Model M “clicky” buckling spring keyboard that came with a used IBM PS-2 computer I bought back in 1992.  Typing on one of these boards is like using a good electric typewriter, which makes sense since IBM engineers were trying to duplicate the feel of the legendary IBM Selectric typewriters.  There is absolutely no comparison between typing on a Model M and poking away at the kind of cheap, mushy “membrane” boards that come with computers today.  I don’t touch-type, but people who do say that when using the Model M their typing rate and accuracy increase dramatically.  The feel of the keys is deliciously, smoothly mechanical in the way that a fine camera is — the Model M is the keyboard equivalent of the original Nikon F, or perhaps even an M-Series Leica (but at a tiny fraction of a Leica’s cost).  If you are familiar with vintage shortwave radios (of course you are!), the Model M is the Yaesu FRG-7 of keyboards.

Still, my trusty Model M board dated back to the 1980s, and even though Model Ms are nearly indestructible, it bothered me to know that someday, possibly before the Sun burned out, I was going to need another keyboard. So it was nice to discover that a small company called Unicomp, in Kentucky, had bought the patents, dies and spare parts for making Model M boards from Lexmark, which had been spun off by IBM itself many years earlier. NPR recently did a nice feature on Unicomp, which can be heard here.

Below is a picture of Inky with the Customizer 101 I bought from Unicomp about five years ago.  It’s identical to an IBM Model M, although IBM never made one in that color scheme.  You’ll notice that it lacks the “Windows” keys found on cheapo “modern” plastic keyboards.  That’s a good thing.  If you really use those keys, it’s easy to remap them to, say, the right Alt key, which no human being has ever used.

Anyway, since that time, I’ve learned a lot about keyboards, and acquired a few more (most of which cost less than $10, making a keyboard fixation a very cheap hobby). At one point last year I stumbled across a site called geekhack.org which, despite its name, is actually full of very nice people who happen to be obsessed with mechanical keyboards.  If you’ve ever hankered for a rousing debate over the merits of black Alps switches versus the blue Cherry variety, Geekhack is your new home.

But while I appreciate other kinds of mechanical switch keyboards and I’m glad Unicomp is still making the “new” Model Ms, I remain loyal to the original, made-by-IBM boards (part number 1391401, to be precise).  They just feel sturdier, and I like the idea of typing on a 20-year old keyboard.  You can, of course, buy them on eBay, usually for between $20-40, but it pays to be picky.  This guy sells them along with a lot of other classic keyboards, and while his prices are slightly higher than some other sellers, he takes the boards apart and meticulously cleans and tunes them before sale.  I have no idea of who he is (nor he me), but I have bought things from him, and he seems very solid.

But I digress.  As usual, there are a few anachronisms buried in this batch of columns, mostly references to last year’s US elections, and, as usual, you can avoid that sort of jarring “what month is this” feeling by simply subscribing, which will put all this foo-frah on your digital doorstep months earlier.

And now, on with the show….

Now Playing:  Dim Tim and the Vortex of Doom.

Dear Word Detective:  We are being swamped daily with dire news from the financial markets of the world.  Stock markets fall into bottomless pits, then we get “dead cat bounces.”  I can work that one out. But we also get “bull” markets and “bear” markets.  “Bull” seems reasonable, someone charging about buying everything they can lay their hands on.  But “bear”?  What is so shy and retiring about a bear that makes them sell everything in sight?  I think, given the choice, I’d rather be in a field with a bull than a grizzly!  Come to think of it, where does “grizzly” come from?  There’s me getting my two questions in one. — David, Ripon, England.

Hmm.  That seems more like four or five questions, but I’ve never been good with figures, which is how we got in this mess to start with.  Yes, folks, it’s all my fault.  I was in the supermarket a few months ago and saw one of those “Buy two, get one free with double gas rewards and a Popsicle” specials on cat food.  But, over the vigorous protests of the cashier, I only bought one bag, a reckless act which apparently tipped a very delicate balance somewhere in Zurich and sent the world economy plunging into Lake Fuhgeddaboudit.  Sorry about that.

Onward.  Most people who pay any attention at all to the stock markets know that it’s common to hear the markets on a given day described as either “bullish” (marked by rising stock prices) or “bearish” (showing a tendency toward falling prices).  “Bullish” and “bearish” are also used as shorthand for “optimistic” and “pessimistic,” respectively.  The slogan of Merrill-Lynch, for example, has for many years been “Merrill-Lynch is bullish on America” (although how that fits with the recent collapse of the firm and its sale to Bank of America remains to be seen).

“Bear” as applied to an investor or stock trader dates back to the early 18th century, and comes from the adage “Don’t sell the bearskin before you’ve shot the bear.”  This is essentially what market “bears” do, selling stock they do not own for delivery at a future date, betting that by then the price will have dropped, giving them a profit on the trade.  This is also known as “short selling,” because the seller is “short” the actual shares at the time of sale.  Such “bearish” sellers were actually known on the 18th century London stock exchange as “bearskin jobbers,” later shortened to simply “bears.”

Bulls do the opposite, buying shares now on the hope that the price will rise.  Various theories have been offered as to why “bull” was picked as the opposite of “bear.”  Both bull-baiting and bear-baiting were popular “sports” at the time, making the animals convenient symbols.  It’s also true that real bears tend to be cagier and more cautious than bulls, who tend to charge first and think later, if at all.  And, of course, the fact that the phrase “bulls and bears” is alliterative certainly doesn’t hurt.

As for “grizzly” bears, they take their name from the gray or “grizzled” (from the Old French “gris”) tips on their fur.  They are also known as “silvertip” bears.

Incidentally, if you spend your life “scrapbooking,” what’s in the scrapbook?

Dear Word Detective:  A while back I was in a fabric store and I entered a section where the buttons, zippers and other trimmings were located.  The section is named “Notions” and is apparently so named in other fabric stores.  I understand that “notion” means sundries.  But it also means “a personal inclination,” among other definitions.  What is the connection between the two words, if any? — Al.

Fabric stores?  Fabric stores give me the wimwams.  Around here we have cavernous warehouse-like stores with cutesy names like “Fabrics ‘n Stuff” that sell not only fabric and sewing supplies, but also every conceivable variation on things like “101 easy patterns for pseudo-rustic ornamental pillows to give your neighbor’s nephew on graduation from his twelve-step program.”  Is there some secret race of immortal and easily-amused creatures living among us who plan to spend the next ten thousand years actually sewing this stuff?  And why are they so fond of scarecrows?

“Notion” is an interesting word, one of those English words that has been around long enough to acquire a wide variety of meanings, some of which seem quite unconnected to its other definitions.  The root of “notion” is the Latin word “notio,” based on “noscere,” meaning “to know” (which also gave us our English word “know”).  That Latin word “notio” was actually coined by the great Roman statesman and orator Cicero, who used it to translate the Greek “ennoia” (“conception, idea”) into Latin.

Our English “notion” first appeared in the late 14th century meaning “idea or concept” in a philosophical sense, but by the early 17th century “notion” was being used in our modern sense to mean “an idea, belief or view held by a person or group” (“It is not a new notion … that the history of the world is divided into certain great periods,” 1857).

Beginning in the 15th century, however, “notion” was also used to mean “an inclination toward, fancy for, or desire to do something” (“After being here for a week, I took a notion to leave, and accordingly did so,” 1891), a sense that sometimes was synonymous with “whim” or “strange impulse” (“She could not understand why they had got this silly notion of wearing coats and trousers in bed when nightshirts were so much easier to iron,” 1957).  Today “notion” is often used in a patronizing tone to mean “silly idea.”

This association of “notion” with one’s personal ideas or whims led to “notion” being used to mean “bright idea” or “clever invention,” which in turn led to the word “notions” being used in late 18th century America to mean “cheap, useful articles” sold in shops.  By the 19th century, “notions” in this sense had narrowed to items having to do with sewing, etc.

By the way, “sundries,” meaning “miscellaneous articles or small items” comes from the adjective “sundry” (“assorted, miscellaneous”), which is derived from the Old English “syndrig,” which is also related to our modern word “sunder” meaning “to separate.”

Monkey do.

Dear Word Detective:  What is a meme?  — Sally Purdy.

Oh, what isn’t a meme?  My spellchecker may not recognize the word (way to go, Open Office), but you can’t spend more than ten minutes on the internet before you’re knee-deep in “memes,” or what are labeled as such by the other netizens.  By the way, whatever became of “netizen”?  Of all the dippy coinages cooked up in the mid-1990s “internet evangelism” dementia, “netizen” (supposedly a combination of “internet” and “citizen”), meaning someone who, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it delicately, “uses the Internet, especially habitually,” was among the lamest (and quite possibly the most vacuously self-important).  I always preferred “mouse potato” myself.

I was kidding about the encyclopedic and omnivorous scope of the term “meme,” but the definition of the term offered by the OED certainly covers a lot of territory:  “A cultural element or behavioral trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (especially imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.”  In practical terms, “memes” include ideas, rumors, catch phrases (such as the Seinfeldian “not that there’s anything wrong with that”), particular fashions (tattoos, baseball hats worn backwards), tunes or snatches of music (e.g., the old Dragnet “dum dee-DUM-dum”), urban legends (such as “Eskimos have 1000 words for snow”), traditional remedies (“beefsteak cures a black eye”), bizarre legal myths (“undercover cops are not allowed to deny they’re cops”), superstitions, dietary biases (e.g., pork as “unclean,” Brussels sprouts as “good for you”), more rumors, fads, prejudices, things we all know are true but aren’t, and LOLcats.  Just about everything that makes life fun, in other words.

The key to a “meme,” what separates a “meme” from a simple personal quirk, preference or fixation, lies in its transmission between people.  “Memeticists,” who are apparently paid to study the phenomenon of “memes,” hold that “memes” propagate through human society in roughly the same way that genetic traits and mutations spread.  “Memes” can, in this view, be inherited, transmitted, modified, and culled by natural selection just like hair color or height.

“Meme” is one of those rare new words that were definitely coined by an identifiable person, in this case by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene,” published in 1976.  Dawkins explained that he derived “meme” by shortening the Greek word  “mimeme,” meaning “that which is imitated,” and even stipulated that his new word should rhyme with “cream.”  Hmm.  I suddenly have the irresistible urge to start an internet rumor that the proper pronunciation of “meme” is “mim-MAY.”

So, in practical terms, a “meme” is something that you notice two or more unrelated people doing, saying, singing, dancing, wearing, eating or believing.  Pass it on.

Leg in the door.

Dear Word Detective:  Where did the slang term “gams” for women’s legs originate? — B.D.

That’s a good question, and it just gave me an idea (oh no, here he goes again).  If we can have a “Talk Like a Pirate Day” every September 19th (and apparently we can), why can’t we have a “Talk Like a Gumshoe Day” every year?  It would be much more fun than just peppering every sentence with “Avast!” and “Arrgh!”  We could use words like “gat” and “stiff” and “heater” and “patsy”!  We could wear trench coats and fedoras!  What’s not to like?

There are actually three “gams” in English, and they all have separate sources.  The oldest is of Scottish origin, is used only in the plural, and means “‘large teeth or tusks.”  This usage first appeared around 1500, and seems to be largely defunct, although the use of “gam” to mean “mouth” in general was still in use in the 19th century.  The origin of this “gam” is uncertain, but it may be related to the Scots word “gamp,” meaning “to eat greedily.”

The second sort of “gam,” dating to the mid-19th century, means “a herd or school of whales” (or, by extension, “a social meeting of whalers at sea”).  This “gam” is thought to be a dialectical variant of the familiar English word “game,” probably drawn from the playful behavior of a group of whales.

All of which brings us to the third kind of “gams,” slang for a woman’s legs, especially if regarded as attractive.  “Gam” in this sense probably reminds most people of the “noir” crime novels and films of the 1930s and 40s and the hardboiled patois of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain (“The gams!  The gams!  Your face ain’t news!”, Mildred Pierce, 1941).  But “gam” in this sense is actually considerably older than Sam Spade, dating back to at least the late 18th century.  And “gam,” which began as underworld slang, originally referred to the leg of either sex, and not necessarily an attractive one.

There are two theories about the origin of “gam” meaning “leg.”  The shorter and more straightforward one simply traces it to the Italian word “gamba,” also meaning “leg.”

The other theory treads the same ground, but with a detour, tracing “gam” to the old word “gamb,” meaning the representation of a leg on a coat of arms, which comes from the French “gambe,” a close cousin of that Italian “gamba.”  Interestingly, another form of “gambe” in French was “jambe,” which gave us our modern English word “jamb,” as in “door jamb,” the supporting side pieces of a door frame.  The connection between a door “jamb” and the “leg” meaning of “gam” and its relatives may seem murky, but the “jambs” were named because they serve as “legs” supporting the lintel, the piece at the top of the door frame.  Even a door frame, it seems, needs legs to stand on.

Plus ça change?

Dear Word Detective:  What is the correct spelling and derivation of “sea change” or “C  change” (perhaps meaning an important or major change in some circumstance)? — Sean.

It’s a truism of anthropology that human beings are pattern-seeking creatures, and we tend to notice when things happen after (and perhaps because) other things happen.  This is as true of this column as it is of chicken farming or pole vaulting.  So when we decide to have a presidential election, I can expect to receive lots of questions about such words as “stump,” “caucus,” “soapbox,” “poll,” “ballot,” “narcolepsy” and “emigration.”  This means that I get to repeat myself in print at least a few times every four years, although I do my best to spice up the answers with fresh cat stories.

What’s a bit odd, although also absolutely predictable, is that whenever the winner of the election is not of the party to which the previous president belonged (still with me?), I am deluged with inquiries about the phrase “sea change” (which is indeed the correct spelling).  It’s almost as if the news media and their Pavlovian pundits were programmed to spit out this particular phrase whenever the White House gets new drapes, thereby confusing their listeners, who then write to me.  I’m not complaining, of course.  I just wish there were a way to float derivatives based on this certainty.

When pundits use the phrase “sea change” today, they usually mean “a profound change in the situation or the way things are done” (“Borosage said President-elect Obama’s victory spearheaded not only a change election, but a sea change election, marking the end of a conservative era,” Marketwatch, 11/07/08).

Like many of our most colorful phrases, “sea change” was coined by William Shakespeare, in this case in his play “The Tempest,” in Ariel’s song to Ferdinand:  “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

Shakespeare’s “sea change” was more than a change in the appearance or functioning of the thing changed; it was a radical change in the very nature and composition of the thing itself (“Of his bones are coral made”), the kind of fundamental change that would result from long submersion in the sea.

As a metaphor for radical change, “sea change” had legs, as they say, although it certainly took a while to get going. The first use of the term in print found (so far) after Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in 1610 didn’t come until Ezra Pound’s poem “Lustra” in 1917.  Subsequent usage of the phrase tended to restrict it to situations where a truly momentous change had taken place (“The Messianic vision … has undergone some strange sea-changes outside Judaism,” 1976).

Unfortunately, as “sea change” has gained more popularity lately, its meaning has often been diluted and trivialized (“Gavin believes that this update indicates a sea change for the software and web applications…,” TechRadar.com).  In the ultimate insult to the Bard, “sea change” has been harnessed as bizspeak (“Business is in the midst of a sea change when it comes to staffing and retaining superior talent,” New York Times), and I’m sure that somewhere out there right now a trucking company is promising a “sea change in package delivery.”  Full fathom five them all, I say.

Of course, back then we actually had railroads.

Dear Word Detective:  On a recent episode of “Mad Men,” a person was referred to as a “trainwreck.”  That usage seemed anachronistic to me.  When did “trainwreck” start to mean a person whose life was out of control? — James E. Powell.

Good question.  I must admit that I haven’t been watching “Mad Men,” an AMC network series about the advertising industry in New York City in the early 1960s (which was largely centered on Madison Avenue, thus the “Mad”).  I did catch part of one early episode, but it gave me a creepy “trying much too hard” vibe that made it unwatchable for me.  “Mad Men” could use a dose of Stan Freberg.

Picking out the anachronisms on Mad Men has become a cottage industry among its more obsessive fans (just Google “Mad Men anachronisms”), but most “catches” seem to have to do with typography (fonts invented in the 1990s) and wallpaper patterns.  The only one that really jumped out at me as a major blooper was the show’s use of 1970s-vintage IBM Selectric II typewriters in the office scenes.  Of course, if that’s the worst that the nitpickers can come up with, chances are good that there aren’t any really egregious verbal anachronisms lurking in the show’s scripts.

And so it would seem in the case of the use of “trainwreck,” although the exact vintage of that expression is hard to pin down.  My first reaction, like yours, was that it must be an anachronism.  I don’t remember hearing a person called a “trainwreck” until at least the late 1970s or early 1980s, and even then, as I recall, it was the kind of usage one encountered in press coverage of Hollywood (“Friends described the star as a ‘trainwreck’ after her divorce”), rather than the sort of thing you’d use in casual conversation.  At least one dictionary of slang also dates the term to the 1980s.

But then I searched the archives of ADS-L, the mailing list of the American Dialect Society, and discovered that back in 2005 linguist Ben Zimmer had posted an excerpt from a 1953 Washington Post article about the jargon of the TV industry.  In between “goulash” (a variety show) and “face factory” (the make-up room) was “train wreck,” meaning a TV show that was, for whatever reason, “a mess.”  It seems reasonable to assume that if a figurative use of “train wreck” to mean “mess” was TV jargon common enough to be included in a glossary in the early 1950s, the subsequent ten years until the period of “Mad Men” would be plenty of time for the term to migrate to Madison Avenue and be applied to an individual.

So while “trainwreck” didn’t become common in popular slang until at least the late 1970s, it’s not impossible that someone in the advertising industry would have used it in the 1960s.  Of course, we’ll probably never know whether the show’s writers actually knew that or simply dropped “trainwreck” into the script without thinking.

Flustered and busted.

Dear Word Detective:  Being a fan of author Terry Pratchett I must face odd British expressions.  Apparently “done his nut” and “go spare” both mean “totally lose your temper.”  Any insight into the origin of these idioms?  — KT Kamp.

Well, I guess the jig is up.  The music has stopped and I have no chair.  It’s finally time to admit that I’ve never read anything written by Terry Pratchett.  I guess I’m banned from the internet now, eh?  I suppose I did have ample warning.  I first heard of Pratchett back in the early 1990s, when everything on the internet was just text and nearly every discussion group teemed  with his passionate fans.  Gradually, I gathered that he is an enormously popular British science-fiction and fantasy writer with an excellent sense of humor.  I’ll give him a shot one of these days, honest.

The fact that Pratchett is British adds considerably to the likelihood that I’ll actually get around to reading him, because one of the attractions of reading British writers is the chance that I’ll run across, as you have, an unfamiliar figure of speech or catchphrase.  Your interpretation of “done his nut” and “go spare” as both meaning “to completely lose one’s temper” is exactly right, and both phrases are, I think, a bit more interesting than American equivalents such as “go ballistic” or “flip out.”  I suppose our “going postal” counts as clever, but it has always struck me as pretty tasteless.

Of the two phrases, “to do one’s nut” is closer to other figures of speech that are probably familiar to Americans.  The word “nut” itself is very old, derived from the Indo-European root “knu,” which meant simply “lump.”  While for most of its subsequent history we used “nut” to mean peanuts, cashews, etc., it also developed a range of figurative meanings, one of which was, in the mid-19th century, “the human head.”  This led to the slang use of “nut” to mean “a crazy, eccentric or obsessive person,” as in “lone nut” or “football nut,” as well as “nuts” or “off his nut” to mean simply “crazy.”   By around 1919 in Britain, the phrase “do one’s nut” had become popular, meaning “to become extremely angry” (“I thought what Grace would say, that she’d do her nut maybe. But she didn’t blink an eyelid,” 1972).  Why “do”?  There probably isn’t a particular reason, aside from the fact that “do” conveys decisive action, as in an explosion of anger.  After all, the “go” in “go nuts” doesn’t really mean you go anywhere.

“Go spare” doesn’t have any relatives in American slang, but the underlying logic of the phrase is sadly familiar on this side of the Atlantic.  The original sense of “go spare,” when it first appeared in British slang in the 1940s, was “to be or become unemployed,” making it a close cousin of the more formal British euphemism for being laid off, “to be made redundant.”  By the late 1950s, the normal emotional reaction to losing one’s job had colored the term “go spare,” and it had had acquired the added meaning of “to become distraught or very angry” (“When he saw what I had done he went spare,” 1958).

[Edith -- I need a head for this that won't get me in trouble.]

Dear Word Detective:  My wife and I were discussing yesterday the history of the word “redneck.”  As a Texan, I’ve heard this word all my life, and just assumed it had to do with people working in the sun all day.  On a recent trip to Jackson, Mississippi, however, I was presented an alternate theory: the Old Capitol Museum there attributes the term to the red-tie wearing followers of an old politician there named Theodore G. Bilbo — the campaigners for Bilbo would wear white suits and red ties.  My Mississipian grandfather recalls Bilbo being a rabid racist.  A brief internet search revealed all kinds of other theories ranging from persecuted Presbyterians in Europe to coal miners in West Virginia.  Please Word Detective, help me get in touch with my redneck heritage. — Shane.

Good question, and now I get to type the word “Mississippi” a few times, which is almost as much fun as spelling it out loud.  It’s the only US state name that you can dance to.

First of all, I have to hand it to the folks at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson for bringing up Theodore G. Bilbo (1877-1947) in their explanation of “redneck.”  If I were in their shoes, I’d be strongly tempted to deny the guy ever existed.  But Bilbo was indeed twice Governor of Mississippi, as well as a US Senator from that state for 17 years, and to call Bilbo, a longtime member of the Ku Klux Klan, a “rabid” racist is an understatement.  In any case, it’s possible that Bilbo’s supporters wore red ties, but the term “redneck” first appeared in print in the 1830s, quite a while before Bilbo slithered onto the stage of history.

I, too, have heard the theory that the term “redneck” originally referred to 17th century Scottish Presbyterians who signed anti-Anglican proclamations in their own blood and wore red scarves or kerchiefs to signal their beliefs.  According to this theory, their descendants eventually settled in the Appalachian region of the US and came to be known as “rednecks” because of those scarves.  It is true, of course, that Appalachia was largely settled by Scottish and Irish immigrants.  But the fact that the term “redneck” was apparently never applied to the Presbyterians while they were still in Scotland and actually wearing the scarves poses a problem for this theory.

Various struggles by coal miners in Appalachia for the right to unionize also are said to have involved red neckwear, but this theory lacks any actual evidence connecting these struggles to “redneck.”

The accepted theory among linguists about “redneck” is the one you’ve deduced on your own:  that the term was applied to poor white Southerners because long hours working in the fields caused a permanent sunburn on the back of their necks.  But there may be more to it than that.  The term “redneck” first became truly widespread during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when food was scarce in the rural South, and many poor people subsisted on a diet composed largely of pork fat and hominy grits (made from corn).  Such a diet is lacking in niacin, and severe niacin deficiency produces a disease called “pellagra,” one of the symptoms of which is a striking reddening of the skin.  Pellagra was endemic to the American South during the Depression, and since sunlight worsens the dermatitis produced by the disease, the sunburned necks of poor white agricultural workers would have been even more noticeable, perhaps increasing the popularity of the term “redneck.”

Cuffs are so coming back.  You’ll see.

Dear Word Detective:  My wife used the word “dishevelled” in describing my 20-year old suit.  Can I make myself “sheveled,” or “heveled,” or is this simply another lost positive?  I’ll be very gruntled if you can help me out here. — Charlie.

That sounds like my suit (note the singular).  I know it makes me look like a time-traveler from Planet Cheapskate, but I figure that since lapel styles seem to swing between wide and narrow every ten years or so, people will just assume I’m dancing on the bleeding edge of fashion.  I should note that this strategy probably works best if you live in rural Ohio and wear the suit only to weddings and funerals.

As for “disheveled,” if we ever get around to completely overhauling the English language, I would strongly argue in favor of doing away with prefixes such as “dis,” “de,” “un,” and “in” that usually, but not always, signal negation of the rest of the word.  That “not always” is the fly in the ointment.

I’ve written in the past about the word “inflammable,” for instance, which means “likely to catch fire” (from the Latin “inflammare,” the source of our “inflame”).  But since the prefix “in” usually signals “not” (e.g., “invisible” means “not visible”), folks just after World War II were afraid that some people would think “inflammable” means “fireproof” and insulate their homes with gasoline, or something.  So they pushed for adoption of the clearer “flammable” and “non-flammable” instead.  The effort actually worked, and today you rarely see anything labeled “inflammable.”

Similarly, “disgruntled” doesn’t mean “not gruntled,” as if “gruntled” meant “pleased.”  “Gruntled” actually means “angry” (from an animal grunting in anger), and the “dis” in this case is an intensifier, making “disgruntled” mean “very gruntled,” or “really ticked off.”

“Disheveled” (in the US we spell it with only one “l,” but the Brits use two) is another case where “dis” doesn’t exactly meant “not.”  The word “disheveled” is used today to mean “unkempt, untidy, messy or disorderly,” whether in a literal sense (“Her whole appearance was haggard and disheveled,” Trollope, 1862) or figuratively (“In vehement diction, but disheveled grammar,” Saturday Review, 1858).

We adopted “disheveled” from the Old French word “descheveler,” which meant specifically “to undo or disorder the hair” (from “des,” apart, plus “chevel,” hair).  So the “dis” element actually means “apart” or “undone,” not “not.”  (If it meant “not,” then “disheveled” would probably mean “bald.”)

When “disheveled” first appeared in English in the 15th century, it meant literally “with your hair mussed up, hanging loose,” and was usually used to describe women in moments of considerable stress (“Growing distracted with griefe …she went up and downe … all discheveled with her haire about her eares,” 1653).  It wasn’t until the 17th century that “disheveled” came to be applied to untidiness in non-hair-related respects.

Since the “shevel” in “dishevelled” refers to hair and not some lofty standard of neatness, there’s really no way to “shevel” your suit, unless you’d like to bring it to our house and let a few of our cats sleep on it.  Judging by my experience, it would be completely “sheveled” in less than ten minutes.

A whole lot of fishy.

Dear Word Detective:  I picked up the word “scads” for “lots” somewhere in my travels.  Is it regional slang? — Jack.

Well, if it is, you and I have been traveling in the same regions.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t use the word “scads” to mean “lots” of something.  I actually answered a question about “scads” a little more than ten years ago, but since that’s “scads” of time in most people’s lives, we’ll give it another go.

It was probably shortly after human beings invented counting that they realized that there were times when there were just too many of something — birds, sheep, relatives — to count, and came up with words to convey that sense of “whole lotta whatever it is.”  They didn’t abandon numbers and counting entirely, of course, so we have “thousand,” “million,” “billion,” “trillion” and so on (though I’m pretty sure “gazillion” isn’t a real number).  But even though we have names for enormously large numbers, it’s apparently not in most taxpayers’ DNA to be able to truly comprehend them, a fact highlighted lately by what the pundits have cheerily taken to calling “the global financial meltdown.”  Did you know, for example, that a million seconds is 11.5 days, and a billion seconds is 32 years, but that a trillion seconds is 32,000 years?  Yeah, me neither.  I’m gonna stick with “scads.”

There are actually seven different kinds of “scad” in English, each with its own meaning, ranging from “corpse” to a kind of plum to “a faint gleam of light.”  The kind of “scad” meaning “a large amount” is the most recent “scad.”  This “scad” first appeared in the mid-19th century as slang with the very specific meaning of “one dollar,” although it was most often used in the plural to mean simply “money” (“We have mercenary motives … We desire the scads,” 1884).  Within a few years, however, “scads” (nearly always in the plural) had come into common use in its modern meaning of “a large amount of anything” (“What did England do when she found she could raise scads of opium in India, but had no market for it?” 1904).

If you look up this kind of “scad” in any good dictionary, you’ll see that lexicographers consider the word a case of “origin unknown.”  But I have a hunch about the source of the word which, while it might not pass strict etymological muster, may very well be true.  One of the six other kinds of “scad” in English is “scad” as the name of a food fish once caught by the millions off the English coast.  (This “scad” is thought to be a variant of “shad,” a fish similar to the herring.)  It seems logical to me that the abundance of these “scads” in the nets of English fishermen in the 19th century might have made “scads” a vivid metaphor for “lots of something.”  Not only would that theory, if true, pin down the origin of “scads,” but it might also explain why the current financial crisis, involving uncountable “scads” of our money, strikes so many of us as deeply fishy.

Dear Word Detective:  The other morning I was listening to Public Radio with my coffee and email, as is my wont most mornings, when in an interview that I otherwise hadn’t been paying much attention to, the PR interviewer said something like “It’s like a wiki, then” and she and the interviewee continued as if  “wiki” meant some sort of communal activity.  I suppose, with the popularity of Wikipedia, that “wiki,” which I heard often during my Navy stint in Hawaii, will change from meaning “quickly” or “hurry” to “communal.”  Any comments on the transformation of “wiki,” or would you like to open source your column so we can all write paragraphs and change the name of the column to WikiWord? — Barney Johnson.

Now there’s a good idea.  I wish you had suggested it sooner.  Unfortunately, now that I’m getting that big bailout from the US Treasury, I’ll no longer be able to afford to be poor.  On the bright side, with all that moolah I’ll be outsourcing the actual writing to Sri Lanka, so we’ll have a whole new range of wildlife appearing in this column.  Cobras are way more exciting than boring old cats and dogs, doncha think?  And they have something over there called a “sloth bear” that looks like pure comedy gold.

Onward.  “Wiki” is indeed a word in Hawaiian meaning “fast” or “quick.”  For most of us, our first exposure to the word “wiki” was in the name of Wikipedia, the collaborative free internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  Wikipedia operates on the theory that if a contributor writes something that is factually wrong or deliberately distorted, other contributors can quickly step in and correct the entry.  In practice, however, it’s impossible to know whether the entry you’re reading has been most recently edited by a true expert in the field or by Bozo the Vengeful Clown.

Wikipedia, however, was not the first “wiki” online.  A site called WikiWikiWeb was developed in 1994 by a programmer named Ward Cunningham to facilitate the exchange of ideas among software developers, with an emphasis on making contributions from users quick and easy.  He chose the word “wiki” after riding a shuttle bus called “the Wiki Wiki Shuttle” at the Honolulu airport (“wiki wiki” being a “reduplication” of “wiki” meaning “very quick”).

Many kinds of “wiki” software have since been developed, but all share the basic goal of making contributions by users to a collaborative website (or part of a website) easy.  Many hobby websites, for instance, now include a “wiki” section where visitors can contribute information on the minutiae of basket collecting, model railroading, etc. to a centralized repository.  This sort of site is now what the vast majority of English speakers mean when they use the word “wiki.”

It’s hard to say that the meaning of “wiki” in English has changed, because “wiki” in the Hawaiian sense of “quick” never had much currency in English to begin with.  What we have done is adopt a Hawaiian word and give it a completely new meaning in English.  And there is, of course, no guarantee that we’re done yet.  It’s entirely possible that “wiki” will eventually be used to mean any sort of collaborative activity that relies on the contributions of individuals, from potluck dinners to social movements.