Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Alright, already, a little late. I’ll explain in a moment.

Hey, TWD has 863 “likes” on Facebook. Awesome. I hope we hit 1,000 before the whole Zuckerbergian shebang goes belly-up. I read a news story last week that said FB is ludicrously over-valued and early investors are trying to unload their shares (I believe the actual phrase they used was “claw their way out”) before reality sets in and the bubble bursts.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop in Cybertopia has been a kind of hobby of mine for years. Way back when (mid-90s) I thought Cliff Stoll was right on the money in branding the whole net-evangelist circus (Negroponte, et al.) as “Silicon Snake Oil,” and Nicholas Carr and Evgeny Morozov are both worth reading on the subject of the internet and society, especially claims made recently that Twitter and Facebook will be the magical agents of a global wave of freedom.

Which is not to say that the internet doesn’t have its good points. A few years ago I suggested that people check out Arts & Letters Daily for pointers to interesting long-form articles. ALD is still going strong (though listing a bit to starboard much of the time), but I’m happy to report that several other sites have since appeared that also point to worthwhile things to read on the net. Best of the breed at the moment is probably The Browser, closely followed by Longreads and the aptly-titled Give Me Something To Read. There’s usually a bit of overlap between the sites at any given moment, but checking them all once a day certainly beats hanging out on Fark (Woman Survives Tornado by Hiding in Tanning Bed!) or, God forbid, the Huffington Train Wreck.

By the way, I changed the layout of this page from 90% fluid to 1000 px wide so that the columns would end closer to where they should. Let me know if this is screwing up anything at your end. Any screen resolution 1024 x 768 or higher shouldn’t have a problem. You people on iPads should just suck it up and tilt your heads or something.

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Onward. Um, has anyone noticed that there seems to be something pretty seriously wrong with the weather? We’ve been spared the horrible destruction in the South, but it’s been raining more or less non-stop for two weeks, often violently, and we’ve had two tornadoes hit within a mile of us in the past month (both following precisely the same path, which is very weird).

I suppose I should explain why this issue of TWD is so late. So I’m sitting on the living room couch a couple of weeks ago, and I notice that Boots the Cat is staring at the ceiling. This is not unusual, because Boots is obsessed with ceilings in general, and this ceiling in particular due to the honking huge ugly ceiling fan the previous owner of this pile installed. We’ve always meant to take it down, but that would leave a big hole in the ceiling and would also require me to climb up there, which, as will become apparent in a moment, would be a very bad idea. Anyway, I glance up and notice that Mister Boots is actually staring at a huge, nasty-looking spider crawling across the ceiling and due to arrive above my head in about 30 seconds.

I have a problem with spiders, which is too bad because this house is infested with about nine different species of them. I’ve taught myself to ignore them most of the time, at least the little ones, but I happen to know this one is the kind that bite, a lesson I learned about a week after we moved in, when I sustained a chomp on my hand that took a month to heal. So I hop up and go out to the kitchen, where we have a tall, heavy chair of the sort intended to be used at a breakfast bar (which we do not have, so I don’t know why we have the chair). It’s tall enough to put me up near the ceiling, so I drag it into the living room and clamber awkwardly up, intending to show the spider a fascinating article on funicular railways I’d been reading in the magazine our local electric coop puts out instead of reliable power. I’ve never met a spider who wasn’t totally into railroads, so maybe we can be friends.

In retrospect, I figure that my shoulders must have been about eight feet above the floor when everything went wrong. Somehow the stool began to tip, launching me into thin air, whereupon gravity kicked in and I fell straight to the wooden floor, landing on my right shoulder. From eight feet up. The Very Heavy Stool, meanwhile, was doing its own acrobatics, and somehow managed to land on top of me, smashing my left knee, left upper arm and (go figure) my right hand. It hurt. Everything hurt.

Long story short, nothing was broken, but I had bruises all over and, more importantly, seemed to have torn or otherwise damaged the tendons in my right shoulder, making that arm unusable and very painful. Breathing, in fact, was very painful.

That was more than two weeks ago and my shoulder still makes sleeping difficult. And since I have only limited use of my left arm because of the ms, I haven’t gotten a lot done lately. You should see the lawn. It’s awesome.

So, in the end, the spider got away and I have had to promise at least once a day ever since not to climb up on anything ever again. What makes this all even more stupid on my part is that I have fairly regularly fallen of off ladders outside in the past few years, so my sense of balance is clearly no good anymore.

This cat is a piker.

Elsewhere in the news, Inky the Cat is mad at me because I said she’s beginning to look like a bowling ball with ears. But she is. I think she’s making up for being the runt of the litter and last in line for food as a kitten, and she’s doing it with a vengeance. If she notices you making a sandwich, for example, she races out to the living room, where most informal eating takes place, and positions herself carefully for the most effective begging. Once the food arrives, she perches on the arm of the sofa and cries piteously until you give her a bit, then a bit more, and so on until the score is You 3 bites / Inky 7.

Inky the Insistent

Then, as the last morsel nears your mouth, she howls like her tail is on fire, stands up on her hind legs, and swings her paw at your face in hopes of intercepting the last precious bit of food on the planet.

I think she may be getting a little spoiled.

What’s worse is that (a) the other cats are starting to notice that her abominable behavior gets results, and (b) the dogs have realized that the cats are cleaning up and now sit directly in front of the TV, blocking the view while wagging their tails like idiots. I think I’m gonna take my chances with the coyotes and start eating outside.

Oh well, that’s it for now. Sorry this issue is late, but remember that if you subscribe, you never have to wait for the website to be updated even if I’m indisposed. I am constitutionally incapable of missing column deadlines. There were actually a couple of nights right after my fall that it hurt too much to lie down, so I sat up all night writing columns, popping Motrins and watching infomercials. It was weird. Every cat and dog in the house gravitated up to my office, like a slumber party with fleas.

And now, on with the show….

I love you all. Now get off my lawn.

Dear Word Detective: I noted that you used “cantankerous” in the description of another word, but there wasn’t a entry for “cantankerous” on your website. Can you elaborate? — Monica.

Hey, you’re right. Apart from that one use in a column about the word “ornery,” I haven’t used “cantankerous” (much less explained it) a single time in all these years. I guess when you have a sunny disposition like mine, the glass is always at least half-full of delicious sody-pop and, gosh darn it, you just don’t have time for all those frowny old words like “cantankerous.” Strangely enough, there are people who expect me to be a bit of a cranky, cantankerous curmudgeon myself when they meet me (especially if they’ve met me before), but the truth is that I greet each day with a feeling of soaring euphoria so intense that I can barely restrain myself from breaking into song. I kid you not. I gotta remember to get this prescription refilled. Now who’s ready for pie?

Meanwhile, back at your question, “cantankerous” is a word so perfectly suited in form to its meaning of “argumentative, ill-tempered, cranky” that you might well guess what it meant just from the sound of the word. Even the Oxford English Dictionary, not known for musing aloud in print, notes the “oddly appropriate sound” of “cantankerous.” The only other possible meaning that the sound of the word evokes for me would be an unpleasant skin disease, and that’s probably because it reminds me of “canker.”

“Cantankerous” first appeared in print in English, as far as we know, in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1772 comedic play She Stoops to Conquer (“There’s not a more bitter cantanckerous road in all christendom”). It’s worth noting that “cantankerous,” unlike many words, has never varied in meaning since its first appearance. It still just means “cranky and difficult” and it’s still in wide use today (“But rather than crack a smile, [Barney] Frank began a harangue that was cantankerous even by his standards, sniping at everything from the Tea Party to the Boston Herald,” Boston Globe, 11/03/10).

The origins of “cantankerous” are, fittingly for a word that means “uncooperative,” uncertain, although we do have a general sense of its lineage. The most likely source is the Middle English “”conteke,” which meant “contention, quarrelling,” from which came “contekour,” a person who argues, and finally something like “contackerous” meaning the quality of being a real pill. The final form of “cantankerous” may have been influenced by the spelling of words such as “traitorous” and “rancorous.”

It’s also possible that “cantankerous” is related to the Irish “cannran,” meaning “strife or grumbling.” Or that it is based on the Old French “contechier,” meaning, loosely, “firmly held,” which certainly fits with the idea of stubbornness. If this Anglo-French connection is true, the ultimate root of “cantankerous” may be the Latin “contactus,” past participle of “contingere,” meaning “to touch” and also the source of our English “contact.”
That may sound like a rather large cloud of possibilities that doesn’t get us very far in our quest for the origin of “cantankerous,” but its possible that all of those theories are true and just represent various bits of a very winding path taken by the word.

Hello, I must be going.

Dear Word Detective: Once again I have used a phrase that caused my children to look at me and say, “What?” I was saying that we never left a party during the “shank of the evening.”  To me, this has always meant the time when the party was at its best with the most fun being had by all. Now I am curious to know, (1) if I am correct, and (2) how this expression came about.  Any explanation from you will be immediately forwarded to my kids! — Marsha.

Hey, I’m with your kids on this one: Huh? I don’t recall ever hearing “shank of the evening” until I read your question, although I could be wrong, because my memory seems to be shot. I blame the internet. After all, if you can look up the lyrics to the theme from “Mister Ed” in three seconds, what’s the point of even trying to remember the name of that kid in third grade who bit you on the leg at recess? Just put up a Facebook page and he’ll find you. My mind is starting to resemble a vacant lot full of big rocks. I just hope my car keys are under one of them.

Fortunately, many other people have heard the expression “shank of the evening.” Unfortunately, they seem unable to agree on exactly what it means.

“Shank” itself is a very old English word, derived from Germanic roots, that initially meant “the part of the leg of an animal between the knee and the ankle” or a similar section of the leg of an animal that lacks ankles. “Shank” has also been used throughout its history to mean simply “the leg.” From this literal meaning, “shank” soon developed a wide range of figurative senses, mostly describing a straight part of something, especially a part used to grip the thing or attach it to something else. Thus the straight part of a fishing hook is called the “shank,” as is the straight part of a pin or nail, the stalk of a plant, and the end of a drill bit that goes into the chuck. Aficionados of prison documentaries (does MSNBC ever show anything else on weekends?) will also know “shank” as slammer slang for a homemade knife, probably because such things are often made from a simple strip of metal.

The literal “leg” sense of “shank” produced one of my favorite slang expressions way back in the late 18th century, “to ride Shanks’ mare” (or “take Shanks’ pony”), meaning, of course, to walk on one’s own legs, especially for a distance one would rather ride a horse (“I’ll start for Carnarvon on Shanks’s pony,” 1898). “Taking Walker’s bus” is of similar vintage.

The “shank” of “the shank of the evening” is a more figurative use, but, as I said, opinions vary on what it means. The phrase first appeared in print in 1828, and “shank” in this sense is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The latter end or part of anything: the remainder or last part of a thing.” That would make “shank of the evening” the time when a party is winding down, not just getting good. But other sources define “shank of the evening” as “the main part” of the evening, which would not only agree with your understanding of the phrase, but also seem more in keeping with “shank” meaning “long, straight part of something.” Many dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster Online, play it safe on this “shank” and offer both “the latter part of a period of time” and “the early or main part of a period of time” as definitions. Not surprisingly,”shank of the evening” also appears on several lists of “words and phrases that are their own antonyms” (such as “cleave” meaning both “to separate” and “to stick together”).

As to which is the “correct” meaning, I actually suspect that “tail end of the evening” was the original, invoking the sense of “shank” as “the end one holds” as in the “shank” of a drill bit.   But feel free to use it either way, and have fun explaining all this to your kids.

You missed a spot.

Dear Word Detective:  I recently received an e-mail from friends enjoying a cruise who described conditions on board as “most luxurious with service to a tee.” Putting aside my trip envy, I’m wondering: Why is outstanding service is described as to a “tee”? — Charlene.

E-mail on a cruise ship? Call me a Luddite, but I thought the whole point of cruises was to escape such things. Then again, my only experience of ocean travel was a voyage across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth as a kid. No radio, no TV. It was very peaceful, like being marooned at your grandparents’ house for a week. Being trapped on a ship full of people yammering into their cell phones while they work on their Facebook updates doesn’t sound like a vacation to me. It sounds like a floating Starbucks.

OK, enough geezing. That’s a good question, and the answer leads down an interesting path to several other words and phrases.

“To a T” or “to a tee,” meaning “exactly, precisely, perfectly” is an older expression than you might think, dating all the way back to the late 17th century (“All the under Villages and Towns-men come to him for Redress; which he does to a T,” 1693). There’s been a lot of talk in the news about the recent discovery of a “Goldilocks planet” in a remote star system, one perfectly suitable to life as we know it. “To a T” denotes that “Goldilocks” state: not too much, not too little, just right.

There have been several suggestions as to what the “T” in the expression might represent, including a golf “tee,” the “tee” in the sport of curling (the center of the scoring area), a “t-square” and even a “t-shirt,” but none of these have any actual evidence in their favor.  (“T-shirt,” referring to the simple silhouette of the garment, first appeared in the 1920s, so that’s definitely not the source).

The “T” in “to a T” was probably originally short for a word beginning with “T,” and the word considered most likely is “tittle,” meaning “a very small part of something” or “a very small amount.” One powerful argument for “tittle” being the source of our “T” is the fact that “to a tittle,” meaning exactly the same thing as “to a T,” was in common use almost a century before “to a T” appeared.

If “tittle” sounds familiar, it’s because the phrase “jot and tittle” (or “jot or tittle”), meaning “every little point” or “the tiniest amount,” is a slightly antiquated but still common English idiom (“[T]here’s a real insider dogfight going on over every jot and tittle of insurance company expenditures,” Dallas Morning News, 9/24/10).

“Tittle” is, etymologically, actually the same word as “title” (as of a book), but “tittle” developed the special sense early on of “a small stroke in print or writing,” such as the dot over an “i,” a cross mark on a “t” or an accent mark. From there “tittle” moved on to being used to mean anything very, very small. “Jot” also means “a tiny mark or amount,” and was also originally used to mean a small mark made with a pen. (That “small mark” sense lives on in our use of “jot” as a verb meaning “to write a brief note.”) The root of “jot,” interestingly, is the Greek word “iota,” which was the equivalent of our Arabic “I” and the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. And because you can, evidently, never have enough words for “nearly nothing,” we still use the word “iota” to mean “a tiny amount” (“We will not part with one iota of our privileges,” 1863).

Incidentally, the proverbial admonition “be sure to cross your t’s and dot your i’s,” meaning to double-check all the details of your work, is not only good advice but also a neat illustration of the progress of “tittle,” “jot” and “iota” from literal use in handwriting to their modern figurative uses.

So “to a T,” meaning “just right,” is actually a shortened form of “to a tittle,” meaning that something is correct down to the smallest point. And when we say “jot and tittle,” also meaning “to the smallest detail,” we are, yes, being a bit redundant, since “jot” and “tittle” mean the same thing. But while our refrigerator magnets may declare “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” the truth is that, as Goldilocks discovered, perfection consists of getting the jots, tittles and iotas just right.

And don’t even think about pulling out your coupons.

Dear Word Detective:  This is one of those expressions we use so often it only just occurred to me to wonder how it developed. We can bind something, and something can be bound to something (like with twine). But how is something “bound” to happen, or “bound” to be? Tied to the fate of that eventuality? Sorry if this seems so obvious, but it’s been niggling at at me in the background since it came up. Ooh, how about “niggle”? Oh by the way, reading Terry Pratchett’s latest book, I came upon “dree (one’s) weird,” which I was able to look up, and think we should reintroduce into everyday discourse. Oh the possibilities! — Margaret Lethbridge-Cejku.

Uh, that’s three different words you’ve got there. No problemo, of course, but it reminded me of one of the strange things I noticed when we moved from New York City to Ohio. Out here, folks seem weirdly tolerant of people who join the “ten items or fewer” lane at the supermarket with 47 items in their cart. People behind them might mutter a bit, but it’s all very restrained. If they tried that kind of nonsense in a New York City supermarket, they’d be limping home with yogurt in their hair.

Your question about “bound” is a good one. There are actually four separate “bounds” in English, only one of which is directly related to the common verb “to bind,” meaning “to make secure, restrict, etc.” This “bound,” the past participle of “bind,” carries the figurative sense of “compelled or obliged” (“bound by his promise”) as well as “determined” (“bound to succeed”) and “fated, destined” (“bound to lose all his money in a silly scheme”). This is the “bound to happen or to be” sense in your question. In Old English, this word was “bunden,” which lives on in the somewhat antiquated phrase “bounden duty.”

The slightly older “bound” meaning “prepared to go” or “going,” as in “bound for college,” etc., comes from the Old Norse word “buinn,” which meant “to get ready.” Although this “bound” and the “destined” “bound” above are etymologically separate, there is some overlap, and it’s not easy to tell which “bound” is at work in phrases such as “We are bound to win.”

As for the two other “bounds,” things get a bit simpler. “Bound” meaning “limit” (as in “out of bounds”) comes from the Latin “bodina,” as does “boundary.” “Bound” as a verb meaning “to leap” comes ultimately from the Old French “bondir,” meaning “echo or rebound.”

The origin of to “niggle,” meaning “to be fussy, stingy” or, in the sense you used it, “to annoy, gnaw at,” first appeared in the 16th century, but its origin is unknown. A “niggling” thought, worry or doubt is not a major one, but one just annoying enough to drive you a bit crazy.

“To dree one’s weird” is indeed a great phrase. “Dree” is a very old word found mostly in Northern England and Scotland today meaning “to perform” or “to endure, to submit to.”  Although we use “weird” today primarily as an adjective meaning “strange or uncanny,” it was originally a noun meaning “fate or destiny,” or, in a personified sense, the three Fates themselves (who appear as the “weird sisters” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Thus “to dree one’s weird” means to endure one’s fate or submit to one’s destiny, and the phrase dates back to at least the 14th century.

Hint: It’s easier if you name them with numbers.

Dear Word Detective: As the proud father of several (if not more) teenage kids, ownership is a subject which often crops up. This may relate to either the desirability of ownership (“That’s MY iPod charger”) or to the opposite (“It’s YOUR room, you clean it up”). This brought up a debate about the word “belong.” On the face of it, it seems so simple. Can it really mean simply that one individual has “had” something for a sufficient time to claim ownership over its previous owner, i.e., that skateboard belongs to (has “been long” with) me? If that is indeed the case, then it’s just possible that my neighbor can claim ownership of my electric drill, as he’s had it for well over three years and doesn’t show any sign of wanting to return it. Help! –   Simon Silverwood.

Hey, I can swing by your house next week and count your kids for you if it’ll help. I know the feeling. People, especially supermarket cashiers for some reason, keep asking how many cats we have, and we’ve decided that from now on we’re just gonna say “five.” There may be a few more hiding under the couch, but we’re certain we have five. Of course, the only proper answer to “How many cats do you have?” is “How many do you want?”

Your hunch about the logic behind “belong” is, if not really in the ballpark, at least in the parking lot of the ballpark. In the beginning was the adjective “long,” which first appeared in Old English from Germanic roots, generally meaning (as it does today) “of a great extent in spatial measurement or duration” (e.g., “a long rope” or “a long time”) or as part of a phrase specifying length or duration (“three feet long”).

“Long” as an adjective went on to develop a dizzying range of uses both literal and figurative, but, most importantly for our purposes, it also spawned the verb “to long.” More precisely, it gave us two verbs “to long,” which are sometimes considered separate words but which are pretty clearly closely related. The older form of “to long” originally meant simply “to grow longer or lengthen,” but it also meant, as it does today, “to yearn for, to desire deeply,” a sense probably based on the sense of “thinking or feeling for a long time.”

The other “to long,” now considered archaic, meant “to be appropriate to” or “to be a part of.” This second sense of “to long” as a verb has faded from general use because it was replaced by “to belong” in the 14th century. “Belong” has, naturally, acquired its own wide range of meanings since then, from “to appropriately or habitually accompany” (“Grief has a natural Eloquence belonging to it,” 1712) to “to be a member of” (“Those who belong to the rank and file of life need this warning most,”1884) to the “to be legally or rightfully the property of” (“Thy buxom wench … Belongs a better man than thee,” 1764).

The question is, of course, how “belong” relates to the “length or duration” sense underlying “long” as an adjective. In the first place, the “be” of “belong” is not the common “to be” verb meaning “to exist or persist.” It’s not a verb at all. This “be” is an intensifying  prefix, dating back to Old English, meaning roughly “very much” or “thoroughly” (and also found in verbs such as “to bedazzle”). So if something “belongs” to you, that “be” doesn’t mean that it has “been long” in your possession. It means that it really is your property. So your neighbor should give back your drill.

So what’s “long” about “belong”? The “long” of “belong” apparently originally carried the sense of “being of equal length,” which was broadened to mean “running alongside of, parallel to, accompanying, or being a property of.” Thus if I “belong” to a family or club, I “travel alongside” them (in a metaphorical sense at least), and my possessions “belong” to me in that they are closely bound to me, even if I lend them to my neighbor for a few years.

Plumb crooked.

Dear Word Detective: When I read the dictionary, I almost always check out the etymology of words. But I look askance at the phrase “origin unknown.” That is a very disappointing phrase, but I know that lexicographers use it to mean that the origin is not known absolutely, positively, beyond all fear of jeopardization. It does not mean there are no clues at all. So when I was wondering about the origin of “askance,” and was told it was unknown, I speculated that perhaps the Word Detective might know more about it than nothing at all. Any clues? — William Blum.

I know the feeling. Boy, do I know the feeling. Looking up the origin of an interesting word and seeing the blunt and merciless notation “origin unknown” is like getting a box of socks for your birthday. No fun at all. And there’s something in the human spirit (thank heavens) that refuses to accept that verdict. After all, every word comes from somewhere, right? There are times when that brick wall of “unknown” drives me a little bit nuts. Case in point: the word “pediddle,” US slang meaning a car with only one working headlight, has been making me crazy for about fifteen years. Forget certainty; no reputable source has even a hint of a guess as to where it came from when it first appeared in the late 1940s. Not a clue. Here’s a word that almost every teenager in America seemed to know (in the 1960s, at least), and it might as well have been imported from Mars.

You’re correct about why lexicographers are reluctant to make guesses about word origins in most dictionaries. (By the way, “jeopardization” is a fine word, though my spell checker doesn’t like it). Sometimes you’ll see a brave little “perhaps” preceding an especially plausible theory, but dictionaries quite rightly would rather frustrate readers than mislead them. A historical dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is, thankfully, more in the business of proposing possible sources of words (which makes their curt “origin unknown” in the case of “pediddle” even more distressing).

“Askance” first appeared in English in the 16th century with the meaning “obliquely, askew, with a side glance,” but quickly acquired its more common modern sense of “with suspicion, distrust or disapproval” (“India’s government also looks askance on Mr Obama’s wider Asian strategy,” The Economist, 10/28/10).

The OED begins its etymology note for “askance” with the usual “origin unknown,” but then, bless its daring little heart, goes on to offer a bit of speculation. Probably the most likely source of the word (or at least most often ventured in sources I’ve checked) is the Italian phrase “a schiancio,” meaning “slanting, on a slope, across,” which would certainly fit with the literal “askance” meaning “obliquely or sideways.” Another good possibility mentioned by the OED is the Old Norse “a ska,” meaning “sideways or slanted,” which in turn seems likely to be related to our English “askew,” which is very close to “askance” in meaning. There’s also the theory, which is unmentioned by the OED and strikes me as far-fetched, that “askance” somehow goes all the way back to the Latin “quasi,” meaning “as if.” As if, indeed.

The problem tracing “askance,” as the OED explains in tiny type, is that the 15th and 16th centuries produced a slew of terms in English beginning with “ask” including, in addition to “askew” and “askance,” such now-obsolete creations as “askoyne,” “askile” and “asquint.” All these terms were closely related in meaning, and, as the OED says, “seem to have influenced one another in form.” That means that the spelling of any one of these words may be a red herring and not a valid clue as to its source. It’s as if “askance,” having noticed that it was being followed, donned a fake beard and stovepipe hat and blended into a crowd of Lincoln impersonators.

Personally, I tend to favor the Old Norse “a ska” theory, if for no other reason than that it provides a solid link to “askew.” But at this point we are unlikely to ever free “askance” from that “origin unknown” label.

I’ll be waiting in the lifeboat.

Dear Word Detective: Is this (link attached) the origin of “tell-tale”? — Harry Farkas.

Oh boy, a test of my powers of verbal description. The link you sent is to a photo of a gizmo standard on the bridge of every large engine-powered ship until around 1950 and frequently seen in movies set at sea. It consists of a round dial on a drum-like contraption mounted on a short (waist height) pillar on the deck of the bridge. By moving a handle attached to a pointer on the dial, the pilot of the ship signals the gang in engine room to speed up, reverse, etc., the engines. Bells ring when this is done, and someone else usually says, “All ahead full, aye sir” or something similar. A bit later the same person screams “It’s an iceberg!” or maybe just “Godzilla!” I’m not sure what the proper term for that guy is, but I know I don’t want his job.

The picture you sent shows just such an instrument, with a smaller dial mounted below the large one with the handle, and the caption of the photo explains that it is the “tell-tale” from the USS Olympia, a battleship active in the Spanish-American War and now in danger of rusting into oblivion. But the caption is misleading. The big dial on top is an “engine order telegraph,” so-called because it relays orders to the crew in the ship’s engine room. It’s the smaller dial mounted below that’s called a “tell-tale,” and thereby, ahem, floats a tale.

“Tell-tale” is both a noun and an adjective, and both forms date back to the 16th century. The initial meaning of “tell-tale” as a noun was simply a person who “tells tales,” particularly stories maliciously disclosing the personal secrets of other people. A “tattletale,” in other words (“tattle” coming from Germanic roots meaning “to chatter or babble”). As an adjective in a figurative sense, “tell-tale” is probably best known from the title of the 1843 Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which a murderer goes mad (or madder than he already was), believing that he (and the police who have arrived to investigate) can hear the heart of his victim still beating loudly beneath the floorboards where he has concealed the dismembered body.

“Tell-tale” as a noun in a figurative sense (i.e., not a person) appeared in the 18th century meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “A thing that reveals or discloses something not intended to be made known” (or, intriguingly, “A small hidden object placed so as to reveal a secret intrusion by its disturbance”). By the early 19th century, we were using “tell-tale” in the considerably less dramatic sense of “A device for mechanically indicating or recording some fact or condition not otherwise apparent; an indicator, a gauge.”

This is the sense which gave us “tell-tale” for the dial often mounted adjacent to the engine order telegraph on a ship’s bridge. Such “tell-tales” usually indicated the orientation of the ship’s rudder, but could also be a compass. Such a “tell-tale compass” was often mounted on the ceiling of the captain’s cabin facing downward so that he could check that the ship was on its proper course when he was away from the bridge.

“Tell-tale” was (and is) also used in non-maritime endeavors mean a mechanism or device designed to monitor performance and warn of malfunction or specific conditions. A “tell-tale pipe,” for instance, is a small pipe tapped into a cistern near the top. If water flows from the pipe, it means that the cistern is nearly full. A turnstile that counts people passing through it, the meter in a taxicab, and even the lights on a car’s dashboard indicating that the turn signal is blinking have all been known as “tell-tales.” Today most mechanical “tell-tales” have been replaced by electronic gadgets, and overall use of “tell-tale” as a noun, even in the personal sense, has faded, which is actually a bit odd in this age of the whistleblower and Wikileaks.

Incidentally, if you Google “Titanic” and “Louise Patten” (a British novelist), you’ll find an interesting new theory (too long to relate here) about why that ship actually sank back in 1912. Something tells me that the Titanic is going to be “telling tales” long after we’re all living on Mars.

Take a left at the neon jackalope.

Dear Word Detective: What is the difference between a “street” and a “road”? Why are some “thoroughfares” called “streets” and some “roads”? — Linda.

That’s a great question, but obviously I can’t delve into “street” and “road” without also explaining “highway,” “lane,” “way,” “boulevard,” “avenue,” and “drive.” So fasten your seatbelts and we’ll put the pedal to the metal.

A “street” was originally simply a paved road, whether paved with stones in Roman times or asphalt today. The English word “street” comes from the Latin “strata,” which was short for “via strata,” meaning “paved road.” That “strata” was based on the Latin “sternere,” to spread out, referring to stone or gravel spread on the road, and the same “sternere” gave us “strata” in the sense of “layers.” While any paved road can be called a “street” in a loose sense, modern usage restricts the term to urban and suburban roads.

“Road” is a bit odd in that it comes from the same Germanic root as “to ride,” and the original meaning of “road” in Old English was “the act of riding” (as well as “an incursion,” a meaning today reflected in its close relative “raid”). It wasn’t until the 16th century that “road” acquired the meaning of “a path leading someplace,” which eventually became our modern “road” in the sense of a path commonly maintained and used for travel. The same sense of “path or direction” also underlies “way,” derived from a Germanic root meaning “to move.” Today we use “way” to mean both a metaphorical route or manner (“I like the way you cook hot dogs”) and a street or road.

Generally speaking, at least in the US, “street” is used in urban and suburban areas for most roads, with “road” being reserved for broader, longer roads. In the countryside, away from cities and towns, even narrow glorified cow paths are called “roads.” Go figure.

“Drive,” like “road,” derives from an act of movement, in this case the original sense of the verb meaning “to force to move, to push from behind” derived from Germanic roots. As a noun in English, “drive” initially meant simply “an act of driving forward,” then “an excursion in a vehicle,” and, by the early 19th century, “a path for carriages.” All the other common senses of “drive,” from “engine” to “psychological motivation” (“drive to succeed”) to “organized effort” (“fundraising drive”) also come from the basic idea of a force moving something forward.

A “highway” is “high” not because it is raised above the level of the surrounding land (though it may be), but because a “highway” was originally a main route between two towns or cities. “High” in this sense of “principal” dates back to the early 14th century, and the main drag of many British (and some US towns) is often named “High Street” reflecting this sense of being the “main or principal” street in town.

The roots of “lane” are, unfortunately, a mystery, but in Old English it meant a narrow way bounded by hedges or, later on, a narrow street closely lined by houses or walls. Today we use “lane” to mean simply a narrow, usually short road, but the sense of restriction lives on in the use of “lane” to mean a strictly defined section of a highway (“passing lane”) or ocean (as in “shipping lanes”).

An “avenue” takes its name from the Middle French “avenue” meaning “way of approach,” which was initially applied to the wide, straight and usually tree-lined drive leading up to a large country house. By the mid-19th century, however, “avenue” was being applied in the US to any broad “upscale” street (think Park Avenue in New York City).

That leaves my favorite of such “street” terms, “boulevard.” Like “avenue,” “boulevard” entered English from French, which had adopted the word from the Dutch “bolwerk,” meaning “fortified wall, rampart” (which also produced the English word “bulwark”). In French the word originally just meant “fortified wall, as around a castle,” and more particularly the walkway around the top of such a wall. Eventually, however, “boulevard” came to mean the sort of broad promenade often built on the remnants of ruined fortifications in Europe, and was still later generalized to mean a broad, graceful, multi-laned avenue in a city.

I think I’ll just stay home and betray myself, thanks.

Dear Word Detective:  Contemporary use of the term “double-cross” is unambiguous. I have tried to research its origins, and posted queries on other sites, with no success. “Cross” in all permutations seems not to yield an answer. Please can you tell me where we got the phrase? — Maura Emm.

Unambiguous? That’s what they want you to think. Seems pretty ambiguous to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with ambiguity, of course. Still, sometimes a little certainty would be nice. A few years ago somebody gave me a book called “You Are Being Lied To.” I started to read it, but then I began to suspect that the title might be a meta-joke and the book itself be stuffed with lies. So I parked it on the shelf and left it there, where it still sits, making me strangely queasy. Any reasonable offer will be entertained, including driving a stake through the thing.

But seriously, there does seem to be a bit of unclarity in how “double-cross,” a staple of detective fiction, “heist” movies, and “secret agent” shows on TV, is actually used in everyday speech.

The root of “double-cross” is, of course, the word “cross,” which first appeared in Old English, borrowed from the Irish “cross,” which was derived from the Latin “crux” (which also gave us “crucial,” “crusade,” “excruciate” and, of course, “crux” meaning “central or critical point”). The appearance of “cross” in Old English (replacing the existing word “rood”) was closely tied to the spread of Christianity in Europe, so it’s not surprising that its initial sense in Old English was “the instrument of crucifixion on which Jesus Christ was put to death.” Over the next few centuries, “cross” acquired a wide variety of other meanings as a verb, adjective, adverb and noun, including the “x” made in lieu of a signature by someone unable to read or write. Almost all uses of “cross” involve that “two lines crossing” meaning in some fashion, whether literally or figuratively. When we say that someone is “cross,” for instance, we mean that the person is irritably opposing or quarreling with other people, a usage which seems to be rooted in currents or winds running across (perpendicular to) a sailing ship’s course and thus impeding its progress.

One of the meanings “cross” developed as a verb, in the early 19th century, was “to cheat, to act dishonestly towards or to betray” (“It wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been crossed. A journalist thought he could put one over on us,” Graham Greene, 1938). This colloquial use was popularized in the lower reaches of society at that time, and often employed to describe a criminal deal “gone bad” by the betrayal of one partner by the other.

A more ornate (and dangerous) species of betrayal in this world was the “double-cross,” first appearing in print in 1834, in which the malefactor pretends to be in cahoots with not one but two other parties, each of whom is trying to cheat the other. This “man in the middle” pretends to take the side of each party in the scam until the final moment, when both crooks come up empty and the “double-crosser” walks (or runs rapidly) away with the prize.

The “double” in this “double-cross” scenario refers, of course, to the fact that such a scheme is a double betrayal, as opposed to the simple “cross” of one crook cheating another. But perhaps because this sort of scenario is hard to carry out and thus fairly rare, “double-cross” almost immediately took on the far looser meaning in common usage of simply a “cross,” i.e., “betrayal by a trusted friend.” It is sometimes said that “double-cross” in this looser sense was originally justified if the deal itself was illegal or dishonest, making the betrayal of one thief by another a case of “crossing a crosser.” If that theory were true, the term “cross” would still be used to mean a simple everyday betrayal, but such use is very rare today. Even failure to speak up for a colleague in an office meeting is likely to be labeled a “double-cross.” So I’m afraid the original complex beauty of a “double-cross” has simply fallen victim to rhetorical inflation in the Age of the Drama Queen.

Count me out.

Dear Word Detective:  I am a sometimes math teacher. Occasionally, even a mathematics teacher. As such, I follow the latest and greatest on my subject and am troubled by the increasing use of the word “maths.” I know you usually look backward to enlighten us on words, but here we see a trend unfolding forward. (And to my ears, it’s a disturbing trend.) Could you explain why “math” now needs to be plural? None of my (younger) maths (?) colleagues are as interested in words as I am and so they shrug off the question. — Bill.

Kids these days, eh? I was never very good at math until a moment in, I believe, tenth grade, when a very gifted math teacher was explaining a trigonometry problem to me. Suddenly, I got it; everything became marvelously clear and I realized with a thrill that I had finally grasped the underlying beauty and grandeur of mathematics. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I promptly forgot everything I had just learned and went on to relentlessly flunk math until they let me give up. To this day I am not allowed to play with my own checkbook.

So I admire folks who genuinely “get it” and have mastered the numerical arts of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, necromancy and so on that constitute the field of knowledge known today as “mathematics.” The word “mathematics” itself, the source of all this “maths” business, comes from the Greek “manthanein,” meaning “to learn,” which is also related to our modern English words “memory” and “mind.” When “mathematics” entered the English language from French in the 14th century (in the form “mathematic”), it actually included any field that involved numerical calculation (astronomy, physics, etc.), and the broad scope of its Greek roots lives on in the English word “polymath,” meaning a person of expertise in many fields.

“Math” as a colloquial short form of “mathematics” first appeared in print quite a while ago, in 1847, although that “math” sported a period (“It rained so that we had a math. lesson indoors.”) and was thus clearly a simple informal abbreviation. “Math” unadorned appeared by the 1870s. “Maths” is a bit newer, first appearing in print in 1911.

There is no difference, however, between “math” and “maths” apart from that “s” on the end of “maths.” Occasionally you’ll hear arguments that “maths” is more proper because it’s short for “mathematics” and thus should be plural. But although the field we call “mathematics” includes multiple disciplines (such as geometry, calculus, etc.), “mathematics” is a collective noun (as is “physics,” etc.), so it’s considered singular. You can tell that from how “mathematics” is treated grammatically: we say “My favorite subject is mathematics,” not “… are mathematics.” The form “mathematics” actually represents what was a common practice, about the time of the first appearance of “mathematic,” of using the plural form of a name of a field of study as a singular noun, as in the case of “acoustics,” “physics,” “linguistics” and many others. Terms that came into English earlier, such as “arithmetic,” didn’t get that “s.”

The only truly relevant difference between “math” and “maths” is usage. “Maths” is commonly used in Great Britain, while “math” is standard in the US. I’m afraid that your cohorts’ sudden affection for “maths,” unless they studied in Britain, may be another case of Anglophiliac posturing by Americans. It’s the same sort of affectation that leads PBS addicts to speak of “the telly” and that gave us the now-omnipresent Brit invention “gone missing” on the news. But while “gone missing” arguably fills a real gap in the American vocabulary (it certainly beats the hyper-dramatic “disappeared”), “maths” on this side of the Atlantic strikes me as silly and vaguely pathetic. But you’re right; it does seem to be spreading. One participant in an online discussion of the “math vs. maths” question I came across reported having recently heard Garrison Keillor say “Do the maths” on his radio show. If Keillor actually did say it, I’m really, really hoping that he was joking.

All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.

Dear Word Detective: I’m trying to explain to my husband, who is not a native English speaker, what the meaning and usage of “anathema” is and why we use it without an article. Googling definitions doesn’t seem to help. It’s a great word, when needed, but I can’t explain how we use it, and why it seems to be the only noun I know that we use without an article. Can you help? This came up when he asked me to look up a film called Anatema (2006), a film in Albanian (my husband’s native language). — Peg.

I know the feeling. I used to have dreams every so often in which I’d be trying to explain, with no success, some weirdness of the English language (of which there are many) to someone. The dreams were pretty obviously based on my experiences doing live radio call-in shows, where whatever question the caller was asking was inevitably about something (a) I had written about in the recent past (good), but (b) I had completely deleted the details about from my noggin as soon as the column was done (very, very bad). To make matters worse, I had a distressing tendency to announce (a) before realizing (b), making myself sound like a total boob. To this day listening to anyone doing a radio call-in show fills me with anxiety.

“Anathema” is a strange little word, even by the inconsistent rules and standards of modern English. The first thing to remember about English, or any language, is that popular usage always trumps whatever rules we think should apply. If enough people do it for long enough, it becomes “correct,” or at least acceptable.

“Anathema” first appeared in print in English in the 16th century as an ecclesiastical term imported from the Latin “anathema,” which meant “something accursed, an evil or accursed person.” Oddly enough, the root of that Latin “anathema,” the Greek “anathema,” originally meant “something devoted to the gods” (from “ana,” up, plus “tithenai,” to place). Over time, however, the Greek “anathema” developed the negative meaning of “something or someone devoted to evil.” That meaning carried over into Latin, and then English, where today we use “anathema” to mean both someone who is literally cursed or excommunicated from a religious group or, more broadly, a thing or person greatly loathed or hated. For a fairly obscure word unchanged in form for a couple of thousand years, “anathema” remains remarkably popular today, and a search of Google News turns up more than 500 uses in the news today (“There was a time in America when such blatant hypocrisy was anathema to voters,” Boston Globe, 10/19/10?).

As that Boston Globe use illustrates, the odd thing about “anathema” is that, although it’s a noun, it is often (usually, in fact) used without the customary preceding article “an.” The Oxford English Dictionary classifies “anathema” as both a noun and a “quasi-adjective,” which neatly captures this usage. We use “anathema” as we might use a more conventional adjective such as “repulsive” or “abhorrent,” although we only use it in this way as the predicate of a verb (e.g., “Hypocrisy is anathema to voters,” not “His anathema hypocrisy angered voters”). Of course, we also use it as a normal noun with an article (“Bob’s drinking was an anathema to his boss”).

Why do we do such an odd, theoretically grammatically improper thing as using “anathema” without “an”? I can’t think of another word that is used in an exactly equivalent way, although some other nouns used as adjectives (e.g., “legion”) come close. The “an”-less use may have arisen because saying “an anathema” aloud is a bit awkward (and reminiscent of the great “Anne Elk” Monty Python sketch). It may have become popular because the literal sense of “anathema” as “accursed person or thing” has faded over time and all that’s left is an abstract noun that makes a better adjective. But whatever the original logic, we do it today because “anathema” without an article has become an accepted English idiom, and idioms are, conveniently for all of us, exempt from logic.