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Trivia

All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

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Naughty or nice.

It’s August and still going strong.

Dear Word Detective: Did the phrase “naughty or nice” originate with the lyrics of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”? If not there, where? — Ed.

Good question, and a seasonal one as well. I just hope I can get that tune out of my head before next spring. But at least it’s a tune. If I may geeze for a moment, does the fact that current pop music so notably lacks anything resembling a melody mean that Generation i-Pod has naught but tuneless moaning getting stuck in their heads? Poor things. No wonder they look so depressed.

I think it’s pretty doubtful that the pairing of “naughty” with “nice” came first in Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, given that they are both very old words and the song was written in 1934. There’s also the appealing alliteration of the words, especially enticing since “naughty” and “nice” are generally considered opposites. But the song definitely codified the phrase in the modern popular lexicon, to the point where it’s hard to hear the phrase without starting to hum the song.

Not bad for a song that was essentially written by accident. According to an article in Kiwanis Magazine, famed songwriter J. Fred Coots was riding the subway in June 1934 when he ran into lyricist Haven Gillespie, who was on his way to see another composer about scoring some lyrics he’d written for “a kid song.” The other composer turned out to be out of town, so Coots and Gillespie collaborated on the song, Eddie Cantor sang it a few months later on his radio show, and the “kid song,” Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, became, and remains by any standard, a colossal hit.

I mentioned that both “naughty” and “nice” are very old words, but they also have interesting histories. “Nice,” when it appeared in English in the 13th century, meant, not “pleasant” or “polite,” but “stupid,” derived from the Latin “nescius,” meaning “ignorant.” Over time, it progressed in stages to meaning “timid,” “fussy,” “delicate,” “precise” (still used in phrases such as “nice and tidy”), “agreeable,” and finally “kind.”

“Naughty” comes from the Old English “nawiht,” meaning “nothing” (literally “not a whit”). The form “naught” is still used, as I did in the first paragraph of this answer, to mean “nothing at all.” The form “naughty” originally meant, in the early 15th century, “having nothing,” i.e., poor. For the ensuing two centuries, “naughty” was used, when applied to persons, to mean “wicked or immoral.” By the early 17th century, however, the word had softened considerably and was applied mainly to disobedient children.

Leaves (table).

Yes, this column is from last year.  So subscribe, already.

Dear Word Detective:  After Thanksgiving yesterday, my brother and I were charged with removing the table leaves from our dining table.  My brother said, “Why are these things called leaves?  They don’t look anything like leaves.”  So I have looked and looked and I can’t find any reason why they would be called that.  I hope you can help me out. — Parker Reynolds.

Ah, Thanksgiving, the holiday when tables misbehave.  This year at Word Detective World Headquarters, we noticed, bright and early Thanksgiving morning, that our dining room table was tilting sharply to the south.  This was a curious departure from the tradition in this house for things to tilt sharply to the west, the direction in which the whole structure is slowly collapsing.  I was about to venture outside to take a look at our so-called foundation when we discovered that one of the table’s legs was actually seriously cracked.  So I patched it with some mashed potatoes and it held through the day, but I think we need a new table.

It is true that the “leaves” of a table bear scant resemblance to the leaves of a plant or tree (“leaves” being, of course, the plural of “leaf”), but neither do many other things going by the name “leaf.”  We inherited “leaf” from Old English, where it carried the literal meaning of “foliage of a plant” as well as the figurative sense of “page of a book” (or, in a further extension, the words printed thereon).  This “page” sense gave us phrases such as “take a leaf from someone’s book” (to copy their thoughts or actions) and “to turn over a new leaf” (turn the page, i.e., to make a new start).  “Leaf” has also been applied to a variety of leaf-like things, such as “gold leaf,” a very thin sheet of the metal, and “leaflet,” originally a term in botany, now meaning a single sheet of paper usually bearing either advertising or political exhortation.

One of the uses to which “leaf” was put in the 15th century was to mean “a hinged part or a part attached at one edge by a hinge,” as a hinged flap on machinery, furniture or the like.  For example, the parts of a “Dutch door” (also called a “stable door,” divided horizontally to allow opening the top half while the bottom remains closed) would be considered “leaves.”

By the 16th century, this sense of “leaf” was being applied to hinged sections of a table that hang down from the side but can be raised when more surface area is needed.  Within a hundred years, this sense was expanded to include any movable element or addition to a table, such as the “leaves” that are inserted into the top of a table to increase its area.

Superstition.

Eek?

Dear Word Detective:  “Superstition” sounds like it should be greater than “stition.”  What might a “stition” be? — Paul.

Oh, about five pounds.  No, wait, that’s a henway.  A stition time saves nine?  Stition on the dock of the bay?  Come to think of it, which I’m sorry to say I have, ought there not, in line with your question, be such a thing as “understition,” a ho-hum reaction to extraordinary occurrences or clearly supernatural events?  Ah, yes, that’s the ghost of Grandma, but it’s chilly today and she probably just stopped by to get her coat from the attic.  Love what you’ve done with your hair, Grannie.

OK, seat backs in the upright position and back to work.  As I have mentioned on several occasions, words can almost never be “reverse-engineered” the way one might a vacuum cleaner or nuclear weapon.  You usually can’t just take them apart and peer at the heap of parts and figure out how they work or how they evolved.  It is true that the meanings of certain Latin prefixes (such as “super,” meaning “above”) and roots tend to be carried into the finished product.  But for every straightforward case such as “disengaged” (“dis” here meaning “not”), there’s a tricky one like “disgruntled,” where the “dis” is an intensifier meaning “very” (giving us “very gruntled,” or very displeased, “gruntling” being an old word for the grumbling and muttering of anger).

But now I’ll just neatly reverse my tack and point out that your “unscrew the inscrutable” method does, indeed, work in the case of “superstition.”  Today, of course, we use “superstition” in a fairly pejorative sense to mean a belief in magic, spirits and the realm of the supernatural.  But the original meaning of “superstition” was specifically religious, to wit, an irrational or excessive religious belief (or system of religion) based on fear or ignorance.

The roots of “superstition,” which appeared in English in the early 15th century, are the Latin “super” (meaning, as usual, “above”) and the participle form of “stare,” which means “to stand,” giving us a basic sense of “the act of standing over or above.”  Etymologists have long debated whether the logic behind “superstition” was originally “to stand over something in awe and amazement” or “to place oneself above and beyond accepted belief through zealotry.”  It has also been suggested that the original meaning was that the “superstitious” one had carried over the irrational beliefs and practices of paganism into a new religion, allowing them to “stand above” the accepted tenets of the new faith.

In any case, today’s use of “superstition” to mean an irrational belief does carry forward that sense of something “above and beyond” the things that most people accept to be true.