Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Well, that was fun.

Back in the first week of April, I was putting together this issue when I noticed that some comments needed approving. So I started combing through them as usual, approving the sane ones and nuking the spam, when I noticed that one of the less coherent spam comments could not be deleted. As they say on Law & Order, DUM dum. That ain’t right.

So I decide to think on it for a while (which is my response to almost every crisis that doesn’t involve either loaded weapons or the fire department) and went back to updating the site. Which is when I noticed that the entire site had suddenly gone bananas. Password-protected subscriber-only posts were appearing on the front page (not good), the Ask a Question page was non-functional (really bad), and the Index of one zillion pages suddenly consisted of just two entries, both in the category of “Odds & Ends.” Boy howdy. OK, now I’m freaking out.

You may not know this, but when you read a blog or other site running on WordPress, what you’re seeing is actually data pulled from a separate MySQL database. Everything on this site — posts, comments, categories, dates, etc. — is data in tables in that database. So evidently My Little Database is borked. No problemo! I have site backups created every day by a plugin and stashed elsewhere in my hosting account at Pair.com. I’ll just fire up the old FTP program, fetch them and restore the whole shebang. Uh, no. Apparently the permissions on that target directory got changed at some point and all my backups since March 2011 have been sliding straight into the bit-bucket. They don’t exist. It is now 3 am and I am seriously starting to freak.

So I write to support at Pair.com. And they answer about five minutes later. At 3:30 am! I love Pair. They say they have a backup, but it’s a general server backup, so no guarantees. And, in fact, it makes things worse. So I go back to square one, install the latest version of WP, restore the site to what it was a year ago, and start manually editing the database.

As it stands now, the site contains everything it should, but there are gaps in its memory (sounds familiar). If you’re looking for a particular word or phrase, the search box at the top of the left column is probably the best way to find it. I’m going to keep working on it. As to how all this happened, I don’t know. It may have been a botched hack (I was using a version of WP that apparently had vulnerabilities) or it could have just been a toxic conflict between two of the dozen or so plugins that I use to make the site run. Part of my problem is that I’ve been tinkering and adding things for years, and I am no longer sure just how everything works. As to why this all took so long to sorta-fix, it’s because my eyes have been on the fritz lately, making it hard to see much of anything.

Anyway, we’re up and running, at least. This issue is a bit short, but I will do my best to produce a proper May issue withing the next two weeks. If you’d like to boost my morale, you might consider subscribing.

And now, on with the show.

Mindtwisters.

Dear Word Detective: What’s the deal with “nonetheless” or “nevertheless”? We all know what they mean, but when you reflect on the separate words, “none the less,” it makes no sense whatsoever (another weird, perhaps related, contraction). — Lee Hixson.

That’s a good question. But it’s also a bad question (Bad question! Bad!), because it gives me a headache when I think about it for more than a minute or two. There’s something about this whole class of jammed-up words that seems slippery and difficult to think about methodically. I vividly remember a friend of mine asking me, and this was at least fifteen years ago, to explain what in the world the word “notwithstanding” really meant (and why anyone had decided it meant that). That question ruined my whole day.

“Nonetheless,” “nevertheless” and “notwithstanding” are all English adverbs of considerable age. “Nevertheless” and “notwithstanding” first appeared in print in the late 14th century, and “nonetheless” in the early 16th century. These three are actually the survivors of an entire passel of words and phrases with the same general meaning in use at at various times but now obsolete, including “natheless,” “nautheless,” “naught the less,” “noughtwithstanding” and “notagainstanding” (“gainstand” being an archaic word meaning “to resist or oppose”).

All of these words mean roughly the same thing: “despite that,” “in spite of that” or “all the same.” The constituent parts of each word (“not,” “never,” “the,” “more,” “less,” etc.) are not a mystery; “withstand” is our familiar English word meaning “to resist or oppose, usually successfully” (“You have not the will to withstand your aunt,” 1882). But the sense of these words can be hard to explain precisely because they have acquired an idiomatic meaning over the years a bit different from the simple sum of their parts.

The key to “nonetheless,” “nevertheless” and “notwithstanding” is that they all require and refer to an antecedent statement, which may or may not be referred to elsewhere in the sentence. “Nonetheless” “notwithstanding” and “nevertheless” mean that what has been said or known (call it “X”) does not prevent, diminish or invalidate, etc., the fact that the primary statement “Y” is true, valid, etc. (“Limo services Los Angeles have been in demand for years. Nonetheless, their business is fairly limited…,” 10/01/11). The first statement makes the second “none the less” (or “never the less”) true.

“Notwithstanding” is a bit odd in that it means that the primary assertion does, in fact, “withstand” the other statement or condition (“Notwithstanding his previous convictions for fraud, Bob was given a license to practice law”). The thing to remember is that no matter how strange these words may seem, they’re all ultimately just synonyms for “despite” or “in spite of.”

“Whatsoever” is another weird word, but it’s a bit easier to explain. “Whatsoever” is simply a more ornate and emphatic form of “whatever,” meaning (as a pronoun) “anything at all” (“In a few months we shall have stores of whatever we want,” 1832) or (as an adjective) “any” (“The Governor-General has been stripped of whatever little authority he retained,” 1887). Given the current dominance of “whatever” as a catch-all response indicating a pose of insolent apathy (“He said I was fired and I’m like ‘Whatever’”), I’m a bit surprised that we haven’t seen the emergence of “Whatsoever” for those times when you truly, madly, deeply don’t give a hoot.

Stop whining and keep bailing.

Dear Word Detective: A reference book about nautical navigation says that the root for “spring” (tides) is from the Viking word for “lack of.” For “neap” (tides) it says the meaning is from the Viking word for “abundance.” I am having trouble verifying this statement; can you help? — Philip.

Gee, I miss the ocean. Although I live in rural Ohio now, I grew up on Long Island Sound. Literally. My family set me adrift in a small, leaky dinghy when I was twelve, and for weeks I lived off the flotsam and jetsam of passing merchant ships. Fortunately, I was adopted by a school of talking dolphins, who taught me to catch fish in mid-air and other crowd-pleasing tricks, and eventually I got a job at Sea World. That turned out to be excellent training for journalism, and here we are. Now I’m gonna go back and actually read your question.

Well, that’s strange. I really did grow up near the Sound, even sailed my own little sailboat as a kid, but I’d somehow missed learning about “neap” and “spring” tides. We just paid attention to when the tide was going to be “high” or “low,” mostly so we’d be able to avoid running aground on sand bars at low tide. “Neap” and “spring” tides are a bit more special than just “high” and “low.”

A “neap tide” occurs just after the first and third quarters of the moon, when the high tide is at its lowest point, i.e., the lowest height above “low” tide (and thus there is the least difference between high and low tides). Apparently at those times the moon, earth and sun are arrayed so that the gravitational pull of the sun does not add to the pull of the moon as it usually does. “Neap” first appeared in Old English (in the form “nepflod,” or “neap flood”), and the origin of the word is a complete mystery. By the way, I’d be a bit leery of the navigational advice of an author who claims “neap” comes from a “Viking” (presumably Old Norse) word meaning “abundance.” Not only is there no evidence for that, but it doesn’t even make sense. How would the lowest high tide be considered “abundance” of anything except wet sand and dangerous reefs?

It is true that “neap” appears to have relatives in German, Swedish and Danish, but those words were probably ultimately borrowed from English, so that’s no help. The one theory that seems plausible ties “neap” to the English words “nip” and/or “neb” (meaning the bill or beak of a bird). You could make a case that when the level of high tide converges with that of low tide, the difference between the two narrows like the beak of a bird, or perhaps something that is “nipped,” squeezed together sharply.

A “spring tide” is the opposite of a “neap tide,” i.e., the point just after either a full or new moon when the high tide reaches its highest point above the level of low tide. Again, the story related in that book doesn’t make sense. Why would the highest high tide come from a word meaning “lack of?” I think the dude has his theories backwards. And as for where the “spring” in “spring tide” came from, that’s easy; we don’t need no stinking Vikings. It’s the common English word “spring.”

The noun and adjective forms of “spring” come from the verb “to spring,” which first appeared in Old English as “springan,” meaning “to burst out, rise up suddenly, leap, etc.” The season we know as “spring” gets its name from the notion of life (plants in particular) bursting forth after being dormant during the winter. But that usage didn’t actually arise until the mid-16th century. The earliest use of “spring” as a noun was in reference to the kind of “spring” where water issues or wells out of the earth, and it is this “rising water” sense of “spring” that gave us “spring tide,” also first appearing in the mid-16th century.

Interestingly, “spring tide” was initially also used to mean “the time of the season of spring” or “springtime.” That’s because the word “tide,” which came from the same Germanic root (“tidiz”) that gave us “time,” originally just meant “time” or “a specific period of time.” So “Yuletide,” a synonym for the time around Christmas, simply means “the time when the Yule log is traditionally burned,” i.e., Christmas. “Tide” wasn’t applied to the periodic fluctuations in ocean levels until the 14th century.

With all thy going, get lost.

Dear Word Detective: I understand (unless you tell me otherwise) that the principal parts of the verb “to go” are really parts to two different words: “go” and “wend,” viz. “went,” the past tense of “to go,” being the pluperfect of “wend.” If that is so, what, originally was the simple past of “to go” and how did “went” sneak in there? And was (or is) “to wander” related to “wend” in some way? — David Hendon.

Whoa. Excuse me, for a minute there the room was spinning like a roulette wheel. Oddly enough, when it stopped, my mind (which resembles a small steel ball to an uncanny degree) settled on a famous line from Saki (pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916)) about the difficulty of retaining household staff: “The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.” I’m sure you’re all thinking, along about now, “My, what a clever man. I wish I had literary quotations leaping into my mind right when I need them.” Unfortunately, I originally remembered that line as involving a maid, not a cook, and consequently wasted about an hour looking for the source of a quotation that didn’t actually exist. But even my mangled version involved two senses of “go” and one of “went,” so I still get ten points.

“Go” is, of course, one of the oldest and most basic English words, first appearing in Old English as “gan,” based on the Indo-European root “ghe.” The general connotation of “to go” is to move, either literally or figuratively, in most senses away from a point (contrasted with “to come,” generally expressing movement towards the speaker’s position). Summarizing all the uses to which the English language has put “go” is seriously impractical here (the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists 48 senses of the word, most with at least four or five sub-senses). We are, after all, talking about a word, originally connoting physical motion, that is now regularly used (sense 44) to mean “To pass into a certain condition. Chiefly implying deterioration” (OED), as in “to go rogue,” “to go missing” and “to go medieval on someone.” The first “go” in that Saki quotation (“as cooks go”) reflects sense 15, “To have ordinarily a certain degree or range of value, amount, excellence, etc.” (“It was a good enough luncheon, as hotels go,” 1872). The second “go” reflects the original basic sense of “to leave a place.”

“Wend” also first appeared in Old English (in the form “wendan”), from Germanic roots carrying the general sense of “to turn or go.” In use as a transitive verb, “to wend” meant to turn something or change its direction. In intransitive use, however, it eventually meant not just to turn, but “to turn away, go, depart,” especially “to travel in a certain direction.” This is the primary sense in use today, and when we speak of “wending our way home” we’re really just saying “going home,” although “wend” tends to carry a connotation of a more casual pace and perhaps a more roundabout route than usual. (“Wend,” as you suspected, does indeed come from the same Germanic roots that produced “wander.”)

In Old and Middle English “go” (“gan” at that time) only existed in the present tense “ga” and the past participle “gegan”; for the past tense we used “eode” (later, in Middle English, “yede” or “yode”), which actually belonged to another long-obsolete Germanic verb also meaning “go.” The verb “to wend” (“wendan” in Old English) was a bit more conventional, with the past tense and past participle of, respectively, “wende” and “wended.” But, beginning in the 13th century, those forms sometimes appeared as “wente” and “went,” and those spellings eventually became standard.

During this same period of time, “to go” and “to wend” came to be used as synonyms, and “wend” actually began to fade from use, at least in the present tense. So it’s not surprising that people started using the past tense of “wend,” which was “went,” as the past tense of “to go.” Poor little “wend,” having been effectively robbed of its past tense “went,” developed a new past tense, “wended,” still in use today.

So, long story short, the past tense of “to go” is “went,” not because “went” developed organically from “go,” but because people using “go” just decided to use it. It’s a long and confusing story, but it’s also a vivid illustration of the fact that English was developed by the people speaking it, not by some committee or commission.

Whoa!

Dear Word Detective: I’d like to put in a plug for “taken aback,” as opposed to its apparent replacement, “taken back.” I think this locution is the work of people who don’t quite “get” the original phrase and therefore assume that it, rather than their understanding, is deficient in some way. Thus they feel free to “fix” the problem based on their own extensive understanding of our native tongue. “Taken back” appears several times in the stage directions — not the dialogue — of the pilot script for a TV show that debuts in mid-September. I just finished reading it last night, and I winced every time I came across it. I could almost see putting it in the mouth of a character — to show how ill-educated he or she is. How a professional writer who was no doubt paid big bucks could commit such a crime against form and sense is beyond me. — Joe.

Scriptwriters, don’t you just love ‘em? Sometimes I think studios recruit them in shopping malls. Last week I was watching the new Fox series “Terra Nova,” in which people in 2149 travel back 85 million years to escape their dying civilization and to pet dinosaurs, when I heard one of the characters tell the hero, an ex-cop, that the new world needed more police officers “not so much.” It’s good to know that today’s trendy catch phrases will still be current in 138 years. Oh, well. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Whatever.”

I agree that finding “taken back” in stage directions is quite a bit worse than seeing it in dialogue. It’s actually very depressing, because it indicates that the person who wrote the script had heard (and perhaps misheard) the phrase, but apparently never read it, and you cannot have read much worth reading without encountering “aback.” If it’s any consolation, there seem to be a lot of people online reacting to “taken back” with shock and horror.

“Aback” first appeared in Old English as the adverbial phrase “on baec” meaning simply “to or at the rear,” describing either motion or position. (That “baec” also gave us our modern noun “back”) “Aback” was used in this sense in modern English, particularly in the phrases “to hold aback” (to restrain or hinder) and “to stand aback from” (to stand aloof from, or avoid). Both of these phrases shed the “a” prefix by the late 17th century, and today we just say “hold back” and “stand back.”

“Aback” in the modern sense found in the phrase “taken aback,” meaning “suddenly surprised” or “stopped by surprise,” is one of those rare English phrases that actually sprang from the decks of square-rigged sailing ships. A sailing ship is “taken aback” when, because of either a shift in the wind or an error by the crew, it is suddenly sailing directly into the wind and the sails are blown back against the masts, halting all progress. In the worst-case scenario, the ship is actually pushed backwards by the wind, which can be very dangerous, especially in rough weather.

The sailing phrase “taken aback,” with its connotation of a sudden reversal, was a perfect metaphor for that moment when the unexpected happens and the wind is suddenly figuratively blowing in your face, rocking you back on your heels (“I don’t think I was ever so taken aback in all my life,” Dickens, 1842). This figurative use first appeared in the mid-19th century and “taken aback” has become so common an idiom that few people are aware of its nautical origins.

“Taken back,” on the other hand, at best has all the semantic impact of returning something to Target. The phrase “taken back,” unlike “taken aback,” has no single strong idiomatic meaning. It could apply to one person “taking back” a gift, an army “taking back” territory, a person “taking back” an insult to a friend, and so on. “Larry was taken aback by Laura’s accusation” is clear and vivid. “Larry was taken back by Laura’s accusation” is confusing nonsense. That a highly-paid scriptwriter apparently does not know the difference is both infuriating and depressing.

Second prize is two bowls.

Dear Word Detective: What is the connection between “grueling” and “gruel”? One might describe eating gruel as boring, insufficiently nourishing, or even nauseating — but grueling, not so much, unless gruel has changed since when I was an orphan. — Patrick Bowman.

Hmm. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but I wasn’t aware that being an orphan was something one outgrows. In any case, it’s funny you should mention gruel. I’ve noticed that a lot of the upscale decorating salons and pet grooming parlors in the strip malls around here have gone belly-up lately due to the economy, and have been replaced, if at all, by payday lenders and dollar stores. So I think the time is right to open a chain of low-cost eateries serving delicious, nutritious gruel, perhaps with a crust of bread for big spenders. The ad slogans write themselves (e.g., “Good buy? Gruel World!”), and the main ingredient is, after all, pretty near free. I think fifty-cent bowls and free wi-fi would be a hit.

The funny thing about gruel (ok, maybe not funny, but interesting) is that, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it doesn’t really sound that bad: “A light, liquid food (chiefly used as an article of diet for invalids) made by boiling oatmeal (or occasionally some other farinaceous substance) in water or milk, sometimes with the addition of other ingredients, as butter, sugar, spices, onions, etc.” Onions in oatmeal? But apparently chopped meat is also often an ingredient in gruel, so chacon a son gout, as they say in France. The word “gruel,” which first showed up in English in the 14th century, does in fact come from Old French, which formed it on roots meaning “grain which has been ground.”

While gruel as defined by the dictionary doesn’t sound too bad, in practice it was often thin, watery and bland, well suited for the sick because it was easily digestible, but hardly anyone’s favorite food. It was also a staple item on the menu of prisons, asylums and orphanages, so the public perception of gruel has never been positive. Thus “gruel” has long been used in a figurative sense to mean “something (especially an argument, proposal or excuse) that lacks substance” (“Clark’s jobs plan thin gruel to Nanaimo’s down and out,” Globe and Mail, 9/22/11).

With gruel being widely considered unpleasant medicine at best, it’s not surprising that “to be given one’s gruel” and similar phrases, meaning literally “to take one’s medicine,” came to mean “to receive one’s punishment” or even “to get killed” in the late 18th century (“He gathered … that they expressed great indignation against some individual. ‘He shall have his gruel,’ said one,” Sir Walter Scott, 1815). This sense of “getting one’s gruel” as a punishment produced, in the early 19th century, the verb “to gruel,” which meant “to punish” and specifically “to exhaust or disable.” This verb “to gruel,” in turn, produced, in the mid-18th century, the adjective “grueling,” meaning “exhausting” or “punishing” in the sense of requiring extreme exertion (“After a grueling finish, Magdalen just struggled home by two feet amidst great excitement,” 1891). And it took until the 1970s, but there’s now even an adverbial member of the family (“This gruelingly competitive industry,” Financial Times, 1987).

All in all, the evolution of “gruel” into “grueling” hasn’t been entirely fair to a mild broth designed to comfort the tummies of invalids.

You go first.

Dear Word Detective: In some recent reading of several different 19th century authors, I’m finding that the term “enthusiast” appears to mean something different in these texts than in our current usage. Several times, it’s applied in description of an individual in a tone that is scathing, contemptuous, and downright nasty. Or, it’s used by a character trying to establish his bona fides by claiming “I’m not an enthusiast by any means,” for example. Can you shed any light on this difference? How did a term that today generally conveys cheerful energy and motivation evolve from one that seems to imply a moral or intellectual weakness? — Chris, Kansas City.

Well, now here’s an appropriate question for me to answer. I just happen to be known as “Mister Enthusiasm” among my friends and family, because I’m always up for tackling a task, embarking on a spontaneous adventure, or just spinning the Great Roulette Wheel of Life first thing every morning. Just kidding. My enthusiasm quotient has been at low ebb since I was twelve, when I discovered Mister Ed couldn’t really talk. A world devoid of talking animals cannot dazzle me with its tawdry pageant, so I take the Homer Simpson approach to life: “Why go out? We’ll just end up back here.”

It would seem that you have a sharp eye (or ear) for overtones. “Enthusiast” and its parent “enthusiasm” have indeed markedly changed their connotations since “enthusiasm” first appeared in English in the early 17th century. The root of “enthusiasm” was the Greek “entheos,” which meant literally “possessed by a god.” (That “theos” is also found in “theology” and related English words.) This produced the Greek words “enthousiasmos” (“divine inspiration”) and “enthousiazein” (“to be inspired or possessed by religious fervor”). “Enthusiast,” “enthusiasm” and “enthusiastic” all arrived in English with these religious overtones.

In the Puritan England of the day, however, high-octane religious fervor was frowned upon, and “enthusiast” took on a definite connotation of disapproval (“One who erroneously believes himself to be the recipient of special divine communications; in wider sense, one who holds extravagant and visionary religious opinions, or is characterized by ill-regulated fervor of religious emotion,” Oxford English Dictionary (OED)) and it was applied to people we would probably call “zealots” or “fanatics” today. John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, noted that “It is the believing those to be Miracles which are not, that constitutes an Enthusiast” (1746).

By the mid-18th century, however, the religious sense was fading, and “enthusiast” was being used in a more neutral secular sense to mean someone who was full of “enthusiasm” for a cause, a person, a principle, etc., “enthusiasm” itself having come to mean “passionate eagerness or interest” in something, usually based in a strong belief in its merits (“Bob’s enthusiasm for saving money with DIY roof repairs overcame his fear of heights, but not his balance problems”). This “big fan of” or “eager to get started” sense of “enthusiast” is the positive sense we use today. The OED does note, however, that when any of this family of words are used in a disparaging or sarcastic sense, it’s almost always “enthusiast” (“Since it was a weekend, Bob discovered that the ER was already full of DIY enthusiasts”).

Speaking of the “enthusiast” family, the “troubled teen” of the lot is definitely the verb “to enthuse,” which means either “to make enthusiastic” or “to become enthusiastic.” Labeled “an ignorant back-formation of enthusiasm” by the OED, “enthuse” appeared in the early 19th century and didn’t raise any hackles among usage mavens until 1870. Since then it has been regularly denounced, but also regularly used by such notable writers as Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen, and Julian Huxley, as well as many others who found it useful.

Up in the air, Junior Birdmen.

Dear Word Detective: Where does the phrase “to knock someone’s socks off” originate and what exactly does it mean? — Angie.

Dear Word Detective: I just used “threw me for a loop” in an intertubes comment, then wondered if it was “through me for a loop” or something else. The internet says I wrote it correctly, but took a pass on where it’s from (my search was brief). You and your readers have used the phrase, but you don’t seem to have addressed its origins. Where does (or might) the phrase come from? — TB.

Hey kids, it’s twofer! That’s right, two questions answered (we hope) in one column. And that’s just the beginning. In the coming months, we’ll be adding more and more questions to every column, until they’re stacked up like incoming flights over LaGuardia. We’re just doing our part to fight the depress…. I mean recession, by conserving pixels or something. In fact, today only, we’ll even throw in the origin of “twofer,” which originally, back in the 1890s, meant two cheap cigars sold for the price of one decent one (“two for one”).

“Socks” are, of course, short stockings covering the foot and reaching usually to the ankle, though knee-socks (which really just cover the calf) are also popular. It sounds like a lame joke, but the root of “sock” is simply the Latin “soccus,” which meant a kind of low, soft slipper (which is what “sock” meant when it first appeared in print in Old English). Our modern sense of “sock” as a stocking usually worn under shoes arose in the 14th century.

The phrase “to knock someone’s socks off” first appeared in the mid-19th century with the meaning “to beat thoroughly; to vanquish,” especially in a fistfight, implying violence so extreme that the loser would not only have his shoes knocked off, but his socks as well. The phrase was soon adapted to mean simply “decisively defeat” in non-violent contexts, such as an election, and today it is also used in the more positive sense of “to amaze, delight or strongly impress” (“Bob’s harmonica rendition of the Goldberg Variations really knocked the judges’ socks off”).

To be “thrown for a loop” or “knocked for a loop” refers to being bewildered, dazzled, disoriented and shocked by some event (“AT&T and T-Mobile were thrown for a loop last week when the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile,” CNET, 9/5/11). The phrase first appeared in print in the 1920s, and comes from what the Oxford English Dictionary terms “a centrifugal railway,” but which is, no doubt, better known as a “roller coaster.” The “loop” on roller coaster runs is the point where the coaster arcs upward through a complete circle, leaving passengers upside down at its apex. The term was initially used in the literal roller coaster sense and then to describe aerobatic maneuvers by pilots “looping the loop,” and finally in boxing to mean a powerful punch that downed an opponent, before acquiring its modern “OMG!” usage.

By way of an interesting footnote to “knocked for a loop,” many people have pointed out that the similar phrase “head over heels,” meaning to be figuratively turned upside down by something (usually love) actually makes no sense. Most of us, after all, spend all day with our heads above (“over”) our heels. In fact, the phrase, when it first appeared in the mid-14th century, took the far more logical form “heels over head,” and it was only an inept author’s reversal of it to “head over heels” in 1771 that gave us the modern form. It also didn’t help that Davy Crockett (of coonskin cap fame) used the mangled “head over heels” form (“I soon found myself head over heels in love with this girl”) in his 1834 autobiography.

Watch out for Grandma’s left hook.

Dear Word Detective: My grandmother, likely born in the late 1800′s or early 1900′s, used to say, “Well, pardon my six ounce gloves.” She was a cultured Bostonian. I can make some assumptions about what that means (not lady-like dress gloves as a wardrobe faux pas). But do you know exactly what it means, where it derives from, or even anywhere the expression has been used? — Tim Jackson.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Congratulations, you’ve won the Weirdest Question of the Month Award. Your prize, an adorable free cat, is being dispatched to your door at this very moment; please listen for a scratching noise.

I’m going to hazard a guess that you have already searched online and discovered, as I have, that there is a rock band (they describe their genre as “Metal/Hard Rock/Power Groove”) named “Six Ounce Gloves” in Fresno, California. I think we can assume that your grandmother was not a fan. But it does indicate that the phrase “six ounce gloves” was not simply her idiosyncratic invention.

I have been unable to find an instance of the phrase “pardon my six ounce gloves” in any reference work or online archive, but if your grandmother used it routinely, it may have been a catch phrase current in the early 20th century, perhaps one only briefly popular (e.g., “No way!” “Way!”). It’s also possible, of course, that your grandmother simply invented it herself on the spur of the moment and then continued to use it.

So far, I realize, all of this is quite vague, but now the story gets very specific in a very weird way. I’m fairly certain that the “six ounce gloves” to which your grandmother referred were not sub-par dress gloves. They were boxing gloves. Boxing gloves, it turns out, come in different weights. Most boxing matches today are fought with gloves weighing between 10 and 14 ounces, although “bantamweight” fights and youth boxing matches often use lighter-weight gloves as light as six ounces. The weight of a glove is proportional to its padding, so boxing with heavier gloves, where the force of a blow is dispersed over a larger area, is usually considered safer than with lighter gloves, which deliver a more focused, sharper blow. (I suspect that the band picked “Six Ounce Gloves” as a name because of its somewhat menacing connotations of “nearly bare knuckle” fighting.)

Assuming that your grandmother was not a boxing fan, the question is, of course, why she would be using a boxing metaphor. The answer may be that during the early years of the 20th century there was apparently a fad of fashionable young women taking up recreational boxing. An article from the New York Times of September 25, 1904 was titled “And now it’s the boxing girl: Six ounce gloves the thing, and she knows all about feints, clinches and side-stepping; Woman’s latest fad and its advantages.” What follows is a “how-to” guide for young women “tired of golf and handball and basketball and tennis” who want to go a few rounds in the ring to lose weight and stay in shape. Early on, the author addresses the question of gloves: “The boxing girl uses a six-ounce glove. It is heavy enough to keep her from hurting anybody, and not so heavy as to tire out her arms before she begins.”

As a young, female and cultured Bostonian of the day, it seems pretty likely that your grandmother was at least aware of this boxing fad, and even just reading such press accounts would probably have acquainted her with the “six-ounce gloves” used in the sport. I think that in using “Pardon my six ounce gloves” as a catchphrase, your grandmother probably meant “Pardon my bluntness” while delivering a possibly impolitic statement or perhaps “Pardon my rudeness” when committing an unintentional social gaffe. If so, it was actually a charmingly self-deprecatory device.

His name is Paul Revere….

Dear Word Detective: Hello Word Detective, fellow Ohioan here. I see you are enjoying August here in the Buckeye state. Normally I can come up with a pretty fair folk etymology answer to almost any idiom, but “one horse town” has me stumped. It’s also the first time I didn’t find an answer already in your archives. I hope it piques your curiosity like it did mine. — Hoodya Love.

[Note: this column was sent to newspapers and subscribers last August.]

Ohioan? Moi? Um, OK, but my heart remains at 82nd and Broadway, in a booth at Cafe 82, the best Greek coffee shop in NYC. As for my tenure in the Buckeye State, I think James McMurtry said it best in his song “I’m Not From Here”: “I’m not from here, but people tell me / it’s not like it used to be / they say I should have been here / back about ten years / before it got ruined by folks like me.”

I am, however, sitting in the perfect venue in which to tackle your question. We don’t actually live in a town, but the one a few miles away (population 943) is currently embroiled in a fierce debate over whether to do away with the one traffic light in town. This is a town where people routinely drive their lawn tractors and golf carts to the gas station to buy beer, and some folks apparently find that light annoying.

A “one-horse town” is, of course, not simply a small town, but a very, very small town. The term is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “a small or rural town; a town where nothing important or exciting happens,” a definition many small-town residents would, of course, find objectionable.

Since “one-horse town” dates back to the mid-19th century, when most transport was still horse-drawn, one might suppose that “one-horse town” as a dismissive term for a small village might originally have implied that the town was so small that it had only one horse. (That actually wouldn’t make any sense; in a truly small town the horses would definitely outnumber the human residents, just as every single citizen of the town near us seems to own at least two cars.) But “one-horse” actually has a history quite apart from its application to small towns.

“One-horse” first appeared in print in the 1730s meaning “Of a vehicle or machine: pulled or worked by a single horse. Also, of a person: having or using only one horse” (OED). A “one-horse” carriage was a small rig, and a “one-horse” business was a humble operation (“‘One-horse farmers’ … had to struggle with the inconvenience of borrowing and lending horses,” 1887). By the mid-19th century the adjective “one-horse” had come to mean “small-scale” or “insignificant” in a general colloquial sense, and was applied to things that had no connection to actual horses, as it still often is (“Chest pains and breathlessness in a one-horse Greek airport, with the temperature nudging 105,” 2000). This is the sense of “one-horse” found in “one-horse town.” A “one-horse town” could have dozens of actual horses and still rate the name. “One-horse” even spawned the derivative term “one-horsey,” meaning “small and backward” (We liked the little-towness of Englewood. It was very one-horsey, but I loved it,” 1999).

Dead tree blues.

Dear Word Detective: In the paperback book titled: “Conversations with Anne Rice” by author Michael Riley, author Anne Rice speaks about a “cardboard dump” made to be placed in a retail store to call attention to a product, in this case her book. I went to the omphalos of dictionary searches, www.onelook.com. I did not get any help. So I looked to my list of computer network information source files and picked the computer file titled “The Word Detective.” Any information that you can come up with about the words “cardboard dump” will be greatly appreciated. — Skylar Donovan Malone.

Well, right off the bat you get ten points for using the word “omphalos,” which means literally “navel” in Greek, but also referred to a sacred conical stone in the temple of Apollo at Delphi that was supposed to mark the center of the earth. Today we use it to mean “hub” or “center.”

As for cardboard dumps, I know them well from my tenure in a regional chain bookstore many years ago in Columbus, Ohio. A precursor of Barnes & Noble, et al., the local franchise was owned by a husband and wife team of relentlessly unpleasant trolls. Our store, being across the street from Ohio State University, was considered the “literary” store in the chain. So imagine my surprise when the trolls decided one day that the first thing customers coming in to look for Shakespeare or James Joyce would see would be a enormous display, called a “dump,” made of garish pink cardboard, touting Marabel Morgan’s book “The Total Woman” (“It’s only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him”). To say that this retrograde monstrosity did not go over well with our customers would be an understatement, and to fend off the torches and pitchforks we began eagerly passing out Mr. and Mrs. Troll’s phone number. The “dump” was gone within a few days, but the writing was on the wall and I decamped shortly thereafter.

So a “dump” in the bookstore sense is a self-supporting cardboard showcase displaying a particular featured book and usually festooned with smarmy advertising copy extolling the transformative power of said book. Dumps are usually found near the front of the store, and if they usually seem to be blocking your way, that’s on purpose.

There are actually four distinct “dumps” in English, the oldest of which, from the 16th century, meant a fit of absent-mindedness or depression. We still use this “dump” when we speak of being “down in the dumps.” Next, in the 18th century, came “dump” meaning a short, fat person or animal, still used in the adjectival form “dumpy.” About the same time yet another “dump” appeared, meaning a deep hole in the bed of a river or stream. The only thing all these “dumps” have in common is the fact that their origins remain mysteries.

The “dump” that is used to mean those cardboard displays appeared in English as a noun in the 19th century, but is based on the verb “to dump,” which dates back to Middle English and is of Norse origin. That verb means generally “to throw down, drop or discard,” and the noun, quite logically, originally simply meant a pile of stuff that had been “dumped,” including refuse (as in a “garbage dump”). In the early 20th century, around the time of World War I, “dump” took on the meaning of “a place where ammunition, provisions and equipment are stored for convenient access at a later date” (“The gunners may be called upon to fire at certain targets, such as cross-roads or houses used as infantry headquarters or ammunition and stores dumps,” 1919). That “collection of supplies” sense eventually gave us the cardboard merchandise “dump,” a temporary display designed to beguile consumers.

It’s not surprising, incidentally, that you hadn’t encountered this sense of “dump” before. It’s a bit of insider jargon used by publishers and booksellers but never to customers (to whom such contraptions are referred to as “displays”). Although “dump” has been used in this sense at least since the 1960s, the word is still commonly associated with its negative slang sense of “a run-down house, business or place,” and you don’t sell many books by conjuring up images of a hovel.

@ephemeral #meaninglessbabble

Dear Word Detective: I don’t know if I’m the last to notice this but the word “trending,” which used to modify other words, e.g., “the stock market is trending down,” “homeownership is trending down,” “property values are trending down” (boy, it’s hard to think of anything that’s trending UP these days), has become a stand-alone word. It seems to mean — approximately — “becoming more popular,” “an emerging trend,” or, on the web, “frequently linked to,” “Liked” in the Facebook sense, or “recommended.” So I’ll be told that a particular shoe designer is “trending,” and I’m supposed to know what that means. I’m not an Edwin Newman curmudgeonly defender of the status quo. I understand that language is what people say, not what the rules say they should say, and language changes and evolves. But a part of me still objects when language changes in a direction that strikes the ear like a wrong note in a piano concerto. Sure, change, but why change in an ugly direction and for no apparent reason? Is there anything that the new sense of “trending” gives us that the old one, or any number of other words, didn’t? — Joseph DeMartino.

That’s a good question. Due to space constraints, I’ve had to lop off your second question, which had to do with an emerging (and depressing) mangling of the venerable word “aback,” but I’ll use that for another column. Hey, I just noticed that my spell-checker doesn’t recognize “Facebook.” I’m gonna leave it that way.

When “trend” first appeared as a verb in Old English (as “trendan”), derived from Germanic roots, it meant simply “to revolve or turn around; to turn or roll oneself about.” By the 16th century, “trend” was being used to mean “to travel around, to skirt something” (e.g., a coast), or “to travel in a specified direction or following a certain course,” as a river, mountain range or other natural feature might (“In its course to the north, the Gulf Stream gradually trends more and more to the eastward,” 1860). By the mid-19th century, based on this use, “trend” was being used figuratively to mean “To turn in some direction, to have a general tendency (as a discussion, events, etc.)” (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)). This is the standard, neutral sense of “trend” as a verb today. The noun “trend,” which arose from the verb, followed the same general course (trend?) in evolution, and now means “the general drift or direction of thought, culture, etc.” or a specific example of such, e.g., “Platinum sinks are the latest trend in high-end houses.”

I did a search of Google News back to 1800 for “trending,” and it seems to have first appeared in print around 1850 in the “traveling in a certain direction” figurative sense, always modified by “up,” “down,” etc. So stock prices might be “trending up” or “trending down,” but they were never just described as “trending.” The use of “trending” by itself to mean simply “increasing” in some sense (usually popularity) seems to have arisen in the 1980s (“‘I’ve said to lighten up on them [documentaries] because I think it [comedy] is trending now,’ Lemasters said,” 8/28/86), although the date is hard to pin down.

I’d guess (and it’s just a guess) that the assignment of a positive polarity (and unmodified “stand-alone” status) to “trending” has been due at least partly to the rise of the adjective “trendy” in the early 1960s. “Trendy,” defined by the OED as “Fashionable, up to date, following the latest trend” (“That was how it had always been and how it would go on in spite of trendy clergy trying to introduce so-called up-to-date forms of worship,” Barbara Pym, 1977), is always used to describe something popular (even if the speaker uses “trendy” in a dismissive sense). So “trending” in this new sense essentially means “in the process of becoming trendy” and thus carries, at least ostensibly, a positive sense. Trends which are not considered positive, such as a sharp rise in homelessness among the unemployed in the US, are still always described in news accounts using modifiers such as “up” and “increasing,” and no one (I hope) would be depraved enough to describe sleeping in one’s car as “trendy.”

Do we need this new sense of “trending”? Not really, but, given the popularity of “trendy” as an index of value in our consumer culture, it was probably inevitable.