Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Sorry I’m bit late this month. I got caught up in the Woodstock 40th Anniversary celebration hoopla and lost track of time. Yes, I actually was at Woodstock, although I can’t claim to have heard most of the music. My primary memory is of spending 45 minutes, on several occasions, stepping over people while trying to make my way to the Porta-Potties, then another hour trying to find my way back to where I had been sitting with my sister and her friend. After 24 hours of this, we bailed out of the main bowl and spent the rest of our time at the Hog Farm encampment over the hill, where there was a smaller secondary stage and things were much less stressful. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate crowds?

Anyway, I did have my trusty Nikon F with me, and took some snaps, of which this is my favorite, because it really captures the experience of being there.  Click the image for a larger version:

A Sunday Afternoon in the Park on the Iffy Brown Acid

What I didn’t know until after the whole thing was over and we were home was that my cousin John was actually the Operations Manager at Woodstock (he shows up at several points in the movie). I don’t know how much good that knowledge would have done us at the time, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt.

Onward.  I don’t know whether its because of the recession (ha), the depression that afflicts many of us because of the recession, or just some sort of cosmic doldrums due to sunspots, but the number and quality of questions I receive has dropped precipitously this summer.  So if there’s a word origin or weird phrase you’ve always wondered about, please send it in, with as much ancillary detail as possible (e.g., where you encountered it, other explanations you’ve heard, etc.).  I really do depend on y’all for grist for this little mill, so dust off those brain cells and get cracking, mmmkay?

Similarly, we are always, as we say, dependent on the kindness of strangers, so please consider subscribing.  Great thanks, of course, to all those who have contributed this past month.  It’s scary how much difference $15 can make.

Lastly, could somebody please update KNewsticker for the new version of KDE or rewrite it for Gnome so I can run it in the current version of Ubuntu?  Thanks.  If this doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about it, but you don’t know what you’re missing.  KNewsticker is an awesome Linux news ticker application (free, of course) that scrolls RSS feeds of your choosing in a long, narrow window, just like the “news zipper” in Times Square.  If you see an interesting story, clicking on it opens it in your browser.  There’s a similar BBC ticker for Windows, but it only shows BBC stories (and I don’t do Windows).  I have KNewsticker set up to show headlines from Reuters, the NYT, Slashdot, the AP, Agence France-Presse, the Register and the Wall St. Journal.  I love this app.  It just sits at the top of my screen and I always know what’s going on without clicking around the web.  But it really needs to be updated so I can update my system.

And now, on with the show……

All thumbs and more.

Dear Word Detective:  Having spent a moment here and there twiddling my thumbs, I recently became curious about “twiddle’s” origins.  Your archive appears to have left this important issue unaddressed.  The etymology dictionary says “twiddle” is of unknown origin and means “to trifle.”  I have never trifled my thumbs!  Not even once.  From where “twiddle” and how did it get applied to thumbs? — Barry Longyear.

Hmm.  Not once, eh?  Sure about that?  I must inform you that we have surveillance camera footage of you trifling your thumbs at a traffic light in Saskatoon in August of last year, you know.  You seemed to be having quite a good time, trifling up a storm.  Never been to Saskatoon, you say?  Yeah, right.  Nobody’s ever been to Saskatoon.  It’s in Saskatchewan.  In Canada.  Like Baltimore with polar bears, I hear.  Well, you’ll be visiting there shortly, Mister Thumb-trifler.

It is true that the Online Etymology Dictionary (www.etymonline.com) lists “twiddle” as “origin unknown,” but we don’t throw in the towel so quickly around here.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the verb “to twiddle” back to around 1540, when it first appeared meaning “to be busy about trifles,” the noun “trifle” here meaning “something of little consequence.”  By 1676, “twiddle” had reached its modern meaning of, to quote the OED again, “To cause to rotate lightly or delicately; to turn (anything) about, especially with the fingers; to twirl; to play with idly or absently; also, to adjust or bring into some place or condition by twirling or handling lightly.”  You really have to admire folks who can put that much energy into defining a word like “twiddle,” don’t you?

By 1846, the OED says, we had arrived at the phrase “to twiddle one’s thumbs,” meaning to rotate them around each other (usually with the other fingers of one’s hands interlaced) or, in a figurative sense, to idly waste time.

As to the roots of “twiddle,” the OED suggests that it is onomatopoeic or “echoic” in formation.  We usually think of onomatopoeia as meaning that the word sounds like the thing it denotes, like the words “bang” and “whoosh.”  But onomatopoeia can also suggest the look or action of the thing and even invoke other words.  The OED suggests that “twiddle” might have been intended to combine the idea of “twirl” and “twist” with “that of trifling action,” as in “fiddle” or “piddle.”

Incidentally, the verb “to trifle” in this sense means “to play with,” but it originally, in the 15th century, meant “to cheat or deceive,” specifically by telling a false story, which, I understand, they frown on in Saskatoon.

Prevaricating pony.

Dear Word Detective:  Where does the political term “stalking horse” come from?  What does it mean?  I have heard of a person stalking someone, but a horse? — Joy.

I guess you haven’t met many horses, have you?  They say that an elephant never forgets, but horses give them a run for the money in the seething resentment sweepstakes.  Probably the best example of the ability of a horse to hold a grudge was TV’s Mister Ed, who, after his show was canceled in 1966, was repeatedly arrested for vandalizing CBS executives’ cars in the studio parking lot.  Ironically, Ed later went on to a very successful second career in securities trading, and today, having changed his name to Sumner Redstone, he actually owns CBS.

None of that is true, by the way, which I wouldn’t take the trouble to explain had I not recently encountered high-school graduates who believe we fought against Great Britain in World War II.

Given how important horses have been to the advancement of human civilization, it’s not surprising that English has a wide range of equine idioms.  We speak of a relatively unknown participant in an election contest being the “dark horse” candidate because in racing parlance a horse is “dark” if nothing is known about its racing history.  A pompous, self-righteous person is said to be on a “high horse,” a reference to the days when nobility would usually only encounter the common folk from atop their riding horses.  To “put the cart before the horse” means to do things in the reverse of their logical order, and “to look a gift horse in the mouth” refers to the old practice of judging a horse’s age by inspecting its teeth.

A “stalking horse” in current usage is a decoy or pretext, something put forward to disguise the true intent or purpose of an action.  In an election, a “stalking horse” is a candidate who enters the race in order to distract or divide the opposition and ease the way for the “real” candidate (“In fact, some suspect that the former governor is kind of a stalking horse for Bernhard,” WWLTV, 01/13/09).  In corporate takeovers, firms sometimes use “stalking horses,” dummy corporations, to buy up stock in their target without tipping off the company’s management to the threat.

Since horses have been notably absent from public office since the days of Caligula (and rarely, Mister Ed notwithstanding, take over companies), these are figurative uses of the term “stalking horse.”  But the original literal sense, in the early 16th century, did involve real horses.  “Stalking horses” were trained to allow a hunter to dismount and then use the horse as a blind to conceal his presence as he “stalked” the game (which apparently did not notice that it was being approached by a six-legged horse).  The term was expanded fairly quickly to cover any sort of portable blind (often with horses or other animals painted on it), and by the end of the 16th century had acquired its modern figurative meaning of “underhanded pretext.”

Just a taste.

Dear Word Detective:  What is a “skiff” of snow?  What is derivation of the word “skiff”? — James S. Bow.

That’s a good question.  Since we’re on the subject, what ever became of snow?  I know it snows in places like Michigan and upstate New York, but we live in Central Ohio, and it almost never really snows here.  Of course, I define “really” in terms of my childhood in Connecticut, where it would snow three or four feet at a time and you could build totally awesome snow forts that would last for weeks.  Here anything more than four inches is considered a big deal, and I haven’t been able to build a decent fort in years.

As a matter of fact, we seem to be enjoying, if that’s the word, a “skiff” of snow even as I write this.*  It’s snowing, but so lightly that you have to look twice to be sure.  The end result will be about an eighth of an inch of snow, just enough to make the snow and ice already on the ground fresh, fuzzy and lethally slippery.  So a “skiff” of snow is a light flurry or cover of snow, but you can also have “skiffs,” light showers, of rain, or even a “skiff” of light wind.

The first thing to occur to most people on hearing this use of “skiff” is whether the snow-shower sort of “skiff” might somehow be related to “skiff” meaning a small, light boat of the sort often carried by larger ships for various purposes (ferrying passengers to shore, etc.).  After all, the nautical “skiff” has the same relation in size to the larger ship as a light “skiff” of snow would bear to a real snowstorm.  Alas, metaphor fans, such is not the case.  The nautical “skiff” is not related to the snow “skiff.”  The boat “skiff,” which first appeared in English in the late 16th century, comes from the French “esquif,” which in turn was derived from the Old High German “scif,” meaning “ship,” which came from the same ancient Germanic root that gave us the word “ship” itself.  A slight detour through Dutch at one point also gave us the word “skipper” for the captain of a ship.

The “snow” kind of “skiff” comes from an entirely different source.  The noun “skiff” is drawn from the Scots verb “to skiff,” meaning “to move lightly and quickly, barely touching the surface” (“Neat she was … As she came skiffing o’er the dewy green,” 1725) or “to glide or skim” (“Rude storms assail the mountain’s brow That lightly skiff the vale below,” 1807).  Just where this verb “to skiff” came from is a mystery, but it seems to be related to the verb “to scuff” in the sense of “to brush against something lightly.” “Scuff” is at least partly onomatopoeic or “echoic” in origin, formed in imitation of the sound of the action.

—-

* This column was originally published in January 2009, when you would have been able to read it if you were a subscriber.

Birdbrain 2.0

Dear Word Detective:  Where did “twitterpated” come from?  I understand it to mean “being quite silly in love, as a teenager.” –  Carol Campbell.

That’s a good question, but something just occurred to me.  I have a lot of questions too, and you folks might be able to help me out.  First up is one that has bothered me since childhood (no kidding): English muffins described on the package as “fork-split.”  Does that mean that they’re already “fork-split” (and should thus pull apart easily, which they never do), or that you’re supposed to split them with a fork?  I’ve always used a fork to pry them apart, but I can’t stand the feeling that I might have been wasting my time all these years.

I suspect that if “twitterpated” has lately popped up in the popular vernacular, it has at least something to do with the popularity of the social networking internet service called Twitter. Users of the service can send short text messages (called “Tweets”) to a group of friends (or to the entire world) describing exactly what they’re doing at every moment during the day.  (At the risk of being labeled anti-social in our Age of Exhibitionism, I cannot imagine a better illustration of the difference between “can” and “should.”)

“Twitterpated,” however, has nothing to do with Twitter, and, in fact, predates the service, which debuted in 2006, by exactly 44 years.  We can be certain of the date because “twitterpated” is a word invented by the scriptwriters responsible for the classic Walt Disney full-length cartoon “Bambi,” which appeared in 1942.  Early on in the film, Bambi, a young male deer, is conversing with his friends Thumper (a rabbit) and Flower (a skunk) about the odd springtime behavior of the animals around them, who are all pairing off with mates.  A passing owl explains that the animals are “twitterpated,” and adds, “Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime. For example: You’re walking along, minding your own business. You’re looking neither to the left, nor to the right, when all of a sudden you run smack into a pretty face. Woo-woo! You begin to get weak in the knees. Your head’s in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather, and before you know it, you’re walking on air.”  Thus to be “twitterpated” means to be addled, boggled, dazed and confused by infatuation.

Although the Disney writers did invent “twitterpated,” it was not as big a novelty as it might seem.  The verb “to twitter” has meant to chirp like a bird since the 14th century, “twitter” itself being an imitation of such a sound.  Since the 17th century, “twitter” has also meant “to tremble in anticipation or excitement” or “to long after or desire something or someone.”  “Pate” is a very old word for the top of the human head (from the Latin “patina,” dish) or the brain, and such combinations as “addle-pated” (insane) and “empty-pated” (stupid) have been insults for several centuries.  So combining “twitter” and “pated” to mean “consumed to the point of distraction and delusion by romantic longing and infatuation” is actually a fairly straightforward addition to a long line of “pated” adjectives.

Anybody got a recipe for “green shoots”?

Dear Word Detective:  My wife says we are now to live on a “shoestring” budget.  In fact I had to save up to send this email.  What is the origin of “shoestring” budget? — Chris.

I feel your pain.  More importantly, however, I feel my pain, the result of tripping over a large dog in a small room darkened in order to save a few cents on electricity.  Recently it was decided that we would be replacing all the 60 watt light bulbs in the house with 40 watters.  Apparently there was a vote and the cats were swayed by some cheap tuna.  Whatever.  But when I went to fetch the bulbs at the store, I discovered that the bulb cartel had decided that I should be ashamed of myself for wanting 40 watt bulbs.  Henceforth (whenceforth?), Mister Energy Pig (me) would do just fine with 34 watt bulbs, a bizarre denomination that now occupied the old 40 watt shelf.  Recognizing an insurmountable conspiracy when I see one, I cocked a snook at the security camera and bought a dozen.  According to my calculations, we should see some savings around the time the Sun burns out.

And so it goes.  But I’m not sure that a country accustomed to associating the word “shoestring” with French fried potatoes is ready for real austerity, and certainly not with the thriftiness implied by the use of “shoestring” you’ve encountered.

“Shoestring” in the sense of “a very small amount of money” or “very little capital” or “a slender margin” dates back to the late 19th century, although “shoestring” in the literal sense, meaning the cord used to tie a shoe, first appeared in the early 17th century.  A business begun and operated in its early days “on a shoestring” has long been, of course, a staple of the lore of capitalism (“Every business man who has made a big success of himself started on a shoestring,” 1932), although it’s worth noting that no one is fond of a business that fails to progress past that marginal stage.  And with more and more individuals finding themselves struggling to live from day to day “on a shoestring” (a Google web search for “living on a shoestring” finds more than 17,000 hits), whatever romance once attached to the phrase (“Australians in England, youth-hosteling on a shoestring,” The Thornbirds, 1977) is fading fast.

Just why a shoestring should be the symbol of a precarious existence has been the subject of debate among etymologists for years.   But shoestrings are notable in a number of respects that  make them good symbols of an “iffy” lifestyle.  They are humble but nearly universally-known items to begin with, they are thin and won’t hold a lot of weight, and they tend to break at the most inconvenient times.  There was also a time when the truly thrifty would save broken shoestrings for use around the house, making “shoestring” shorthand for an existence where even items that others would consider trash become valuable.

You’re doing it wrong

Dear Word Detective:  I went to the dictionary last night to check the difference between “careen” and “career” (as verbs).  In my mind I had the words as interchangeable and was curious if the difference (ending in “n” vs. ending in “r”) was merely an etymological typo.  Then, on reading the definition for “careen,” I saw the phrase “heel over” which is strikingly similar (in spelling and definition) to “keel over” and again points to another word-morph — especially considering that my dictionary indicates “careen” comes from the Greek for “keel.”  The question, I guess, is how did “careen” and “career” and “heel over” and “keel over” evolve to be such similar words? — Rick Ceschin.

Although “careen” and “career” as verbs are often used interchangeably today, they are, in fact, quite separate words.  Strictly speaking, “careen” means “to lean over, to tilt,” while “career” as a verb means “to rush at full speed” (with implications of recklessness).

“Careen,” which first appeared in English in the late 16th century, originally meant “to turn a ship on its side for caulking, etc.”  The root of “careen” is the Latin “carina,” meaning “keel of a ship” (originally “nutshell,” from the similarity of a ship’s hull to a nutshell).  The use of “careen” in the more general sense of “to tilt” dates to the late 19th century.

“Career” as a verb meaning “to move at full speed” is actually the same word as the noun “career” meaning “profession or course of employment or activity.”  The root of “career” is the Latin “carrus,” meaning “wheeled vehicle” (which is also the source of “car”).  One Middle French derivative of “carrus” was “carriere,” meaning “racecourse,” and when the noun “career” first appeared in English it meant “racetrack,”  the “course of life” meaning being a later metaphorical development.  So it makes sense that the verb “career,” reflecting that original “racetrack” meaning of the noun, would mean “to race at top speed.”

Interestingly, “careen” and “career” began to be used interchangeably only in the early 20th century, just about the time people noticed that a motor car rounding a curve at high speed (“careering”) tended to tilt quite a bit (“careening”).  Purists still draw a distinction between the two words, but it’s really a losing battle at this point.

“Heel” and “keel” are also two entirely separate words, though as verbs their meanings are very similar.  “Heel” as a verb meaning “to tilt over” comes from the Old English “hyldan,” meaning to incline or “list” as an unbalanced ship might.  (This “heel” is unrelated to the noun “heel” meaning the rearmost portion of the foot.)  “Keel” as a verb (“keel over”) comes from “keel” as a noun meaning the lowest longitudinal timber of a ship or boat (i.e., the absolute bottom of a ship’s hull), drawn from the Old Norse word for it, “kjolr.”  To “keel” or “keel over” originally, in the 18th century, meant to roll completely over, as a ship overturning and showing its keel.  Today we use “keel over” to mean “suddenly collapse” or “fall over.”

Cellar feller.

Dear Word Detective:  Can you tell me the derivation of the word “guy” as in “Guys and Dolls.”  I am told it is a contraction of a Yiddish word meaning “fellow” or “man.”  It apparently reflects the growth of the language from Hebrew via Russia and German. — Brian Steven.

That’s a good question, but I think we’re going to have to change your “apparently” to “supposedly.”  You don’t say where you heard or read that theory about “guy” being a contraction of a Yiddish word, but it’s not true.  The only explanation I can think of for that misunderstanding is that someone noticed the resemblance of “guy” to “goy,” which is a designation used among Jews for a person who is not Jewish, i.e., a gentile.  “Goy” in this usage  comes from the Hebrew word “goy” (plural “goyim”) meaning “people, nation.”  Interestingly, “gentile” also comes from a word meaning “people” or “nation,” in this case the Latin “gens.”

Meanwhile, back at “guy,” the real story is a fascinating one.  The first thing to note is that “guy” is not only an informal English term for “man” or “fellow.”  “Guy” is also a proper name for men, pronounced “gy” (with a hard “g”) in English, but “gee” (also with a hard “g”) in French.  I mention French because the name “Guy” is from Norman French and is related to the same Germanic root that gave us “guide.”  And that, in turn, is relevant because the same “guide”  root gave us the English term “guy wire” (or line, or rope), the long cables that keep tall antennas and the like from falling over.

The fact that “Guy” is a proper name is important because “guy” in the sense of “fellow” is an eponym, a word formed from the proper name of a person, in this case a person named “Guy.”  This original “guy” was Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 was hanged for his involvement in what came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot.  Fawkes and his co-conspirators had planned to blow up England’s Houses of Parliament while King James I and many of the aristocracy were inside.  Fawkes was apprehended at the last moment, in the act of lighting the fuses on barrels of powder that had been smuggled into a cellar beneath Parliament.

The foiling of the Gunpowder Plot made November 5, “Guy Fawkes Day,” a national holiday in England.  The crude effigies of Fawkes burned on bonfires amid raucous celebration were known as “guys,” and “guy” eventually came to mean “a figure or person of bizarre appearance.”  Since the story of Guy Fawkes was not well known in the US, however, we adopted “guy” in the 19th century as just a synonym for “man” or “fellow.”  In the past few years, “guy” has become largely gender-neutral, and waiters in particular seem fond of addressing a table of men and women as “you guys.”

Incidentally, in the popular 2006 film “V for Vendetta,” the character “V” wears a mask based on a caricature of Guy Fawkes, and the film begins, as I recall, by invoking a popular poem written in the wake of Fawkes’ plot: “Remember, remember the fifth of November, The gunpowder, treason and plot, I know of no reason, Why the gunpowder treason, Should ever be forgot.”

Noteworthy.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the origin of the term “Tin Pan Alley,” and what does it mean?  I’m guessing it has to do with the Great Depression (the first one, not the current one).  — Nathan Keyes.

Depression?  Bummer.  But you know, whenever I’m depressed, it always makes me feel better to go over to the poor part of town, ask around until I find a few forlorn investment bankers, and slip them a few trillion dollars.  Just seeing their little snouts light up in joy makes it all worthwhile.  Actually, it occurred to me awhile back that being stuck on a small farm in the middle of nowhere, as we are, may soon have its advantages (provided, of course, that  we can figure out how to raise something besides cats).  Where do you get pepperoni seeds?

Onward.  “Tin Pan Alley” is a popular term for the music industry, especially the songwriting and publishing part of it (as opposed to the recording industry).  Linguistically, the term “Tin Pan Alley” is a “synecdoche” (sih-NEK-doh-key), a figure of speech in which a specific thing or place stands in for a broader category, as the term “Wall Street” stands for the world of high finance and the stock market in general or “Hollywood” stands for the movie industry.  Like Wall Street, Tin Pan Alley is a real place in New York City, specifically a stretch  of West 28th Street, where, at least in the first half of the 20th century, music publishers had their offices and many of the great songwriters plied their trade.

Though a pan made of tin certainly conjures up images of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New York songwriting district has been known as “Tin Pan Alley” since at least 1903.    An article published that year in The World (a long-defunct New York newspaper), uncovered by etymologist Barry Popik, noted that at that time the songwriters themselves were trying to promote the classier term “Melody Lane” for the area, but “Tin Pan Alley” had already caught the public’s fancy.

Tin Pan Alley owes its name, logically enough, to a bit of late 19th century musicians’ slang.  A “tin pan” or “tin-panny” was a cheap piano, so-called because its shallow, tinny tone was likened to beating on a tin pan.  If you can imagine a summer’s day on Tin Pan Alley in the early 1900s, filled with the cacophony of “tin-pannies” wafting from the open office  windows of a hundred music publishers, you’ll see why “Tin Pan Alley” was such a perfect name for the New York music business.

If you’ve ever had a hankering to see Tin Pan Alley proper (usually considered to be West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues) in person, you’d better act fast.  As of late 2008, five of the  Victorian brownstone buildings that remain of the original Tin Pan Alley are up for sale, probably destined to be demolished to make way for another glass and steel monstrosity.  Of course, with real estate prices now plunging, you might be able to snag at least one of the buildings for, as they say, a song.

Vroom?

Dear Word Detective:  I’m curious about the origin of the phrase “go like sixty” or “run like sixty.”  It seems to me maybe a product of the 1920s or ’30s U.S. slang.  I first encountered it in a lyric sung by Billie Holiday in an obscure song called “Here It Is Tomorrow Again,” which has at the end of one verse “So kiss me quick and run like sixty ’cause here it is tomorrow again.” I wonder where that phrase came from, but it must have been fairly common at the time to turn up in a song lyric.  Sixty miles per hour, perhaps, that being considered a very high speed of travel at the time? — Slidedaddy.

That’s a very interesting question.  Sixty miles per hour is still a pretty high speed to drive, of course, especially for some people.  They seem to have real problems above about 5 mph.  Around here the authorities have taken to painting dotted lines on the road, showing the paste eaters where they should point their cars while turning a corner.  It doesn’t work.  Isn’t it nice to know we’re sharing the road with people who apparently flunked coloring in kindergarten?

“Go like sixty” rang a faint bell for me, but I can’t say where I’ve heard it before.  My first hunch was that your suggestion might well be the correct explanation.  Even after automobile ownership became common in this country, the average speeds on our roads were much lower than today.  To “go like sixty” might have been the fantasy of every farm boy in the early 20th century, leading to the phrase becoming the equivalent in the popular vocabulary of our “light speed” today.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), however, “like sixty” actually appeared in 1848 with no reference to speed, but rather meaning “with great force or vigor.”  The four citations quoted by the OED, in fact, are evenly divided between those that use the term in reference to speed (“We ran like sixty to the front porch,” 1975) and those that use it to mean “with enthusiasm and abandon” (“That child cuts up like sixty,” 1910).  The OED then refers us to the earlier phrase “like forty,” popular since the late 17th century, meaning “with great force.”  It appears that “like sixty” is just an inflated version of “like forty,” and didn’t, at least originally, have anything to do with speed.

By a stroke of luck, I happened to come across a discussion thread about the phrase “like sixty” on Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org site, where one poster made an observation that seems to hold the key to “like forty” (and, by extension, to “like sixty”).  The number “forty” has long been used, including numerous times in the Bible, to signify a large but indeterminate  number of anything.  Noah and company endured forty days and forty nights of rain, Jesus wandered in the desert for forty days, as did the Jews for forty years in search of the Promised Land.  Many rulers mentioned in the Bible seem to have ruled for forty years.  Shakespeare used “forty” as an indefinitely large number in Coriolanus (“On faire ground I could beat fortie of them”), and we still speak of “forty winks” meaning “a good night’s sleep.”

So while Billie Holiday’s songwriter, and many of us since, may have interpreted “like sixty” as referring to speed, its predecessor “like forty” originally meant “with great force,” possibly, as in Shakespeare, with the underlying sense of “the strength or force of forty men.”

Over there.

Dear Word Detective:  So dogs “fetch,” women are “fetching,” and ideas can be “far-fetched.”  Are all these related?  If so, I think calling a woman “fetching” might be insulting. — Barney Johnson.

Well, some dogs fetch.  Our two seem unclear on the concept.  Neither Pokie nor Brownie will fetch a stick in the usual “chase it and bring it back” sense of “fetch.”  Pokie realized years ago that sticks are rarely edible, so she doesn’t even look up when one flies by.  Brownie will chase a stick with delight, sometimes even catching it in mid-air. (Yay Brownie!)  But then, her work (as she sees it) being done, she retires to the shade of the nearest tree to chew her prize into little bits of wood.  If I walk over and try to retrieve it from her, she laughs (yes, Brownie laughs) and runs away with it.  Maybe I should try throwing the can opener across the lawn and see what happens.

All three of the senses of “fetch” you mention are indeed related, and all derive from the basic sense of the verb “to fetch,” which is “to go and get something or someone, or to cause that thing or person to come to you.”   Interestingly, while there is only one verb “to fetch” in English, there are three noun forms of “fetch,” only one of which is related to the “bring it to me” verb.  Apart from the basic sense of “the act of fetching,” this noun can also mean “a contrivance or trick” (“It is no ingenious fetches of argument that we want,” 1858), an expanse of open water, such as a bay, or an indrawn breath or difficulty breathing.

The two nouns unrelated to the “go get it” verb are “fetch” as a simple dialectical variation of “fish,” and “fetch” meaning “the apparition, double, or wraith of a living person” (although this may be a form of “fetch-life,” an old term for a spirit supposedly sent to “fetch” the soul of a dying person).

Meanwhile, back at the verb “to fetch,” our modern English word is drawn from the Old English “fetian,” meaning “to go and get.”  Further back than that, things get murky, but the ultimate source was probably the Germanic root “fat” meaning “to hold.”

Most of the senses of “to fetch” in use today involve “bringing” in some sense, often figuratively, as in the use of “fetch” to mean “to sell for a certain price” (“The insolent dog fetched only five dollars at the yard sale”) or “to draw or derive” (“To fetch a parallel case out of Roman history,” 1806).  Another figurative use, appearing in the early 17th century, was the use of “fetch” to mean “to move to interest, to attract” (“Another sign of his cleverness was the exploiting of the psycho-analytical rigmarole, which will fetch 100′s of earnest imbeciles,” Aldous Huxley, 1931).  By the 19th century this also had developed into the sense of “alluring” that we use in relation to attractive people (far enough removed from the “dog” sense, I would say, not to be insulting).

“Far-fetched,” when it first appeared in the late 16th century, simply meant “fetched from afar, exotic” (“Indian pearles be greatest and more desired as being far fetched,” 1586).  By the 17th century, “far-fetched” had taken on the more negative connotation, applied to an idea, argument or story, of “not easily believed, strained, unlikely” (“Far-fetched ideas respecting English society,” Anthony Trollope, 1869).

Without feathers.

Dear Word Detective:  What’s the origin of “the skinny?” I  heard the expression used countless times.  Yet again today in the NY Times the phrase cropped up again: “The skinny on figure modeling.” Go figure. –  Sid Miller.

That’s a good question.  I actually haven’t heard “the skinny” used in years, so I went looking in the New York Times for the article you mention, which turns out to be an interview with a figure model at the Arts Students League of New York.  In the paragraph where that phrase occurs, she’s talking about a popular model who weighed 350 pounds, so I guess the Times writer saw the opportunity for a little pun.  The Times loves little puns.  To be fair, they’re not alone in heeding the siren song of “skinny” puns.  Quite a few of the results for “the skinny” on Google News are stories touting “the skinny on dieting,” “the skinny on skin care,” or “the skinny on taxidermy.”  I made that last one up.  But I did see another story offering, in dubious taste, “the skinny on the Starbucks closings,” making a play on the whole “skinny latte” thing.

“The skinny,” of course, is slang for “the straight story,” more specifically “the inside scoop, the real story that most people don’t know.”  Not surprisingly, “the skinny” is often invoked by supermarket tabloids and websites that promise to satiate the public’s apparently insatiable desire for celebrity gossip.  The fact that we will probably never know what’s really up with Tom Cruise only seems to fuel their quest for “the skinny.”

Unfortunately, etymologists have their own quest when it comes to “the skinny,” the search for its origins, and so far we’ve come up empty.  We do know that the word apparently first became popular in US armed services slang during World War II, but actually predates the war by at least a few years.

More important than the “when” of “the skinny” is, of course, the “why,” and there are a number of clues as to the logic behind “the skinny.”  We know, for instance, that in the 1930s “the skinny” was slang for ten cents, probably drawn from the phrase “one thin dime.”  In the 1920s, “the skinny” was student slang at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD, for a course in physics or astronomy, but no one has ever come up with a logical explanation for that use, either.  Both of these leads are probably duds for our purposes.

A more intriguing possibility, suggested a few years ago by a poster to the American Dialect Society mailing list, is that “skinny” in this sense comes from the Irish word “sceitheanna,” meaning “act of revealing or making known” (and supposedly pronounced as something close to “skinny”).  It’s an interesting theory, but it may indicate just a coincidental intersection between Irish and English.

One of the simplest explanations of “the skinny,” and the one I’d bet is true, is that “skinny” in this sense simply refers to “getting down to the bare skin” (as in “skinny dipping”) of the truth, unadorned by spin, artifice or tact.  So if this is the logic behind the phrase, “the skinny” is just another way of saying “the naked truth.”