I mean, c’mon: egg plant? That ain’t right.

Dear Word Detective:  When I’m in one of my darker moods, my favorite song is Meat Loaf’s “Life is a lemon and I want my money back.”  Today I began to wonder where this use of the word “lemon” came from.  We use the corresponding word “Zitrone” in the same sense in German, along with the extended phrase “mit Zitronen handeln” (literally, “to deal in lemons”).  Obviously, lemons can be unpleasantly sour, but I could name quite a few things that taste a lot worse.  So, why lemons? — Holger Märtens, Germany.

There are indeed a lot of things that taste worse than lemons.  I would nominate, for example, eggplant, which pegs my personal Yuck-O-Meter (all the way to eleven, in fact).  Why anyone would voluntarily eat that stuff utterly eludes me.  Right now several thousand readers are, of course, shaking their heads and tut-tutting, “That poor deluded boy.  He’s just never had eggplant cooked correctly.  I’ll send him my recipe!”  Please don’t. I already have a wonderful recipe for eggplant, coincidentally the same one recommended by Samuel Johnson for his own least-favorite vegetable:  “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

Lemons have had an image problem pretty much ever since humans began cultivating them.  On the one hand, used as a flavoring, lemons make all sorts of yummy things possible, from lemonade to lemon meringue pie to lemon drop candy.  On the other, lemon juice on its own is acidic, sour and stings like the dickens when it gets in your eyes.  (For some mysterious reason, lemons hate me and attack at every opportunity.)  Very few people sit around munching on lemons, but that’s true of useful flavorings such as garlic and cinnamon as well.  Still, we don’t call a new car that croaks after 500 miles “a garlic,” so there must indeed be something about the lemon.

The word “lemon” comes to us from the Old French “limon,” which was derived from Arabic roots and served as a generic term for citrus fruit in general (which explains how the same root could also give us “lime”).  The use of “lemon” to mean “disappointing result” or “something unwanted” is very old, reflecting the fact that, while useful in cooking, a lemon standing alone is just a lump of sourness with a tough skin to boot.  In Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labours Lost (1598), for instance, one character proclaims, “The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty, Gave Hector a gift …,” to which another puckishly suggests, “A lemon.”

In the mid-19th century, “lemon” was used as a colloquial term for a person of a “tart” disposition, as well as, more significantly for our purposes, slang for a “sucker” or “loser,” a dim person easily taken advantage of.  It has been suggested that this latter use stems from the idea that it is easy to “suck or squeeze the juice out of” such a person (“I don’t know why it is, rich men’s sons are always the worst lemons in creation,” P.G. Wodehouse, 1931).  By 1909, “lemon” was also firmly established in American slang as a term for “something worthless,” especially a broken or useless item fobbed off on an unsuspecting customer.

It’s likely that the current use of “lemon” to mean “something that doesn’t live up to its billing” or “a disappointing purchase” comes from a combination of “lemon” in the “sucker” sense (i.e., the buyer got “taken”) and the much older sense of “lemon” meaning “something undesirable.”

Round and round.

Dear Word Detective: I remember my father using the expression “beltline” to refer to a particular highway in Minneapolis. This was back in the ’50s before any highways encircled a metropolitan area, so it puzzled me then and has since. Are we talking about something that cuts through the middle? Something that wraps around? Or something else? When did the expression start and did it apply to subways or elevated trains at first? Or did it describe highways? — Barney Johnson.

Oh boy, highway nomenclature. I haven’t considered the subject lately, but what people called roads seriously confused me as a child. I grew up within coughing distance of the New England “Thruway” (aka Interstate 95) in Connecticut, but we often spent Sunday afternoons driving on the Merritt “Parkway,” and trips to Ohio usually involved the Pennsylvania “Turnpike.” Here in Central Ohio, people refer to I-70 as “the freeway” (or just “70″), although “freeway” is also applied to the “outerbelt” circling Columbus. (In Washington, D.C., the same sort of “outerbelt” is called “the beltway,” and “inside the beltway” serves as shorthand for the social and political world of DC insiders.)

Most of these terms are fairly easy to decode. “Thruway” (originally “throughway”) for instance, refers to a limited access highway that may or may not charge tolls. A “freeway” is the same thing, “free” referring to freedom of movement, not necessarily freedom from tolls. A “turnpike” definitely extracts tolls from travelers; the “pike” was originally, in the days of horse and carriage traffic, a staff which blocked passage until turned aside when the toll was paid. “Parkways” were originally highways elaborately landscaped with trees and shrubs to give travelers a scenic view to look at before the days of in-car DVD players (my personal nominee for worst idea of the century).

“Beltlines,” however, were developed in the mid-19th century, before the advent of the motor vehicle. They were routes followed within many medium and large cities by horse-drawn or electric trams or railways that connected various areas of the city, facilitating the transport of goods and materials as well as workers. The city of Buffalo, NY, for instance, had a “belt line” railroad, built in the 1880s, that connected nineteen stations around the city to a central terminal where transfers could be made to trains to anywhere in the US. New York City had several horse-drawn tram lines in the 19th century, but in 1887 more than a thousand horses perished in a fire at the Belt Line Railroad Company stable.

Such “belt lines” tended to form a closed loop, like a buckled belt, although not necessarily forming a ring around the edges of the city as modern “outerbelt” highways do. The idea was that a passenger (or cargo load) could board the tram or train at any point on the route and ride the loop as far as was necessary.

I think your father’s use of “beltline” to refer to a specific highway almost certainly came from the fact that the road formed such a closed loop, or something close to it. It may be that the highway actually followed an old “beltline” rail or tram route.