Over here?

Dear Word Detective:  Some time ago I was reading My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse, a treasure trove of obscure and quaint idioms and slang terms as I’m sure you know.  In the chapter “The Unbidden Guest,” Bertie describes an unannounced visitor as “measuring about 6 feet from the O.P. to the prompt side.”  While it’s clear from the rest of the paragraph that she is, shall we say, a full-figured woman, what precisely are the “O.P.” and “the prompt side”? — Andrew Buckland.

Thanks for a great question.  The stories of  P.G. Wodehouse are indeed a rich source of obscure and nearly obsolete words and expressions, as well as being enormous fun to read in their own right.  I was reluctant for many years to venture into the world of, as I thought at the time, “some rich twit and his butler.”  But after a friend convinced me to take the plunge, I didn’t come up for air until I had read a hefty chunk of what Wodehouse wrote (and we’re talking about a man who wrote more than ninety books).  I left off reading Wodehouse about fifteen years ago, but it may be time to start again.  There certainly isn’t anything on TV.

Not to make my job sound easier than it is, but something quite serendipitous happened when I began to research this question.  I already had a strong hunch about what Wodehouse meant by “from the O.P. to the prompt side,” but on a whim I plugged the whole phrase into the full-text search engine of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Lo and behold, there was the same quotation from My Man Jeeves listed as a citation for the abbreviation “O.P.”  That, kiddies, is what we call “on a silver platter.”

Both “prompt side” and the abbreviation “O.P.” come from the theatrical stage.  Especially in amateur productions, even the best actors are apt to forget a line occasionally, and the task of rescuing the moment by “prompting,” giving visual or audible clues, falls to the “prompter” (or sometimes the stage manager) standing offstage in the wings.  Traditionally, the prompting is done from the left side of the stage (as one faces the audience), also known as “stage left.”  The abbreviation “O.P.” stands for “opposite prompt,” meaning the other side of the stage, i.e., “stage right.”  Both terms date back at least to the 18th century.

Thus, when Wodehouse described his character, Lady Malvern, as “measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side,” he was leavening an otherwise bland exaggeration with the sort of clever turn of phrase that makes his stories so addictive.

And we don’t need a library.  We’ve got satellite TV.

Dear Word Detective:  I have heard the term “jerkwater town” and never thought much about it.  I inferred from the context that it was a small place that didn’t amount to much.  I recently encountered this in a book and began to wonder what its origin is.  Do you know? — Jo Ann Chase.

Yes, I am intimately familiar with the phrase “jerkwater town.”  The town nearest to us here in rural Ohio, East Bump, neatly matches the description given in the Journal of Genetic Psychology in 1936: “It was one of those jerkwater towns that have one lawyer, one drug store and no traffic cops.”  The only differences are that East Bump has no lawyer that I know of, and it does employ a police officer to guard against incursions from West Bump, although he only works part-time.  It also boasts a Post Office, two really awful restaurants and a seedy bar sporting, for some bizarre reason, a pirate motif.  Aaarrgh, Matey.

In any case, you inferred correctly about the connotation of “jerkwater.”  Something that is “jerkwater” is considered small, inferior and insignificant, with overtones of provincialism and hickdom.  Although most commonly applied to small, isolated (and thus presumably uncultured) towns, “jerkwater” can also describe anything considered unsophisticated, a “dead end” or “not up to snuff,” from schools (“It won’t be easy for him to get another job if he’s fired … Maybe at some jerkwater college at half what he’s getting now,” 1970) to vaudeville acts (“Vaudeville teams — from the jerkwater acts to specialists,” 1950).

The original logic behind “jerkwater” has long been gone from towns like East Bump, which is a shame.  In the early days of railroads, when the locomotives were steam-powered, the boiler’s supply of water needed to be refilled fairly often.  Large towns and cities had water towers by the tracks, and topping off the tank was simply a matter of pulling under the spigot and hooking up.  In smaller rural towns, however, such amenities were lacking, and a train crew in need of water faced the chore of fetching it by hand from a nearby stream.  As one account explained in 1945, “… train crews, when the water got low, often had to stop by a creek, form a bucket brigade and jerk water from the stream to fill the tender tank.”  “Jerk” in this context refers to the rough, sudden movement of lifting a bucket, often on a rope, from the creek.

In the late 19th century, trains that ran on branch lines through rural districts where such a ritual was routine became known as “jerkwater trains,” and the routes as “jerkwater lines.”  Almost immediately, “jerkwater” came to be a slang synonym for an isolated rural town served by such a line, and by 1897 “jerkwater” had taken on its modern meaning of “provincial, backward and insignificant.”