readme:

Are we having fun yet?  Silly question.  Incidentally, before I forget, anyone wishing to truly understand the Global Financial Meltdown and, in particular, the finer techniques of getting people to buy things that don’t actually, y’know, exist, would profit (pardon the word) from a perusal of The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man by David Maurer, which I ran across a few years ago. Maurer, a linguist, spent much of the 1930s talking to con men all over the US, documenting in detail how their schemes, often extremely clever, worked. The book was originally published in 1940, just as the age of classic cons was coming to a close, but Maurer might be surprised to see how many of the methods he documented have their echoes in the high-finance flim-flammery afoot today.

Onward. Many thanks to all our readers who have lately subscribed or otherwise contributed to TWD.  Your support made all the difference when our 12-year old car recently broke down and required a hefty infusion of moolah to convince it to resume its creaking journey into epic decrepitude.  Anybody know where I can get a used horse, just in case?

As usual, the eighteen columns in this issue first appeared in newspapers (and were sent to subscribers) more than six months ago, so please take that fact into account when you spot weird references to then-current events.  I may not know the day of the week, but I do know the election is over.  Subscribers, of course, don’t experience this annoyance.

By the way, if you’re still looking for the perfect present for someone who has more than enough cat sweaters, I suggest The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation’s Greatest Magazine (Book & 8 DVD-ROMs), which used to cost about $100 but can now be had new for less than $20.  The interface can be a bit annoying, but the content more than makes up for any awkwardness.  I love this thing.  Lately I’ve been browsing issues from the early 1960s, and I’m amazed at how many cartoons I recognize.  (And now I get them).  The advertisements are also absolutely fascinating.  I had no idea that so many steamship lines were still running the New York to Southhampton route at that point.  It’s truly a window into a lost, and arguably better, world.

And now, since I see that my assistant, Miss Freedle, has the pool filled and the ring of fire blazing nicely, on with the show…

Little cat feet.

Dear Word Detective: So, I’m shoe shopping online and find a nice pair of “sneakers” I want to purchase. All of a sudden I realize that I have no idea why I should need shoes for sneaking. Walking, jogging, frolicking — yes. Sneaking…er, not so much. Does the name “sneakers” have anything to do with sneaking, or perhaps they’re called sneakers as a joke because the rubber soles tend to make noise. Who knows? Well, hopefully you do. — Clandestine Chris.

Yes, I do. But first, a word about online shoe shopping. A few years ago I would have said that shopping for shoes online was silly, since you can’t exactly try them on by holding your feet up to the screen. Then I took a chance and ordered a pair of “Brown Bear” chukka boots from L.L. Bean. I loved those shoes, and wore them every day. But they finally became sufficiently ratty that I went online to order another pair. Oh noes!, as they say on the internet. Bean had discontinued the best shoes in the whole world! So what I want you all to do is go to the L.L Bean website, right now, and tell them to bring back my shoes. Seriously. I’ll wait here.

Thanks. You guys are the best. Now, to begin at the beginning, the word “sneak” is very old, and our modern form is a descendant of the Old English “snican,” meaning “to desire, reach for,” which became the Middle English “sniken,” meaning “to creep or crawl.” It’s worth noting that the root of that Old English “snican” also gave us “snake.”

“Sneak” as a verb in modern English has a wide variety of senses, but they all involve some aspect of stealth and/or deception. The earliest sense to appear, in the late 16th century, was “to move or walk in a stealthy or slinking manner, as if ashamed or afraid to be seen.” Not surprisingly, a person who behaved is such a manner was, by around 1643, known as a “sneak.”

Fast-forward now to the 19th century, and the neighborhood “sneak” had a new advantage — shoes with soft gum-rubber soles in place of the usual leather, an innovation that made the footsteps of the wearer nearly noiseless. Such shoes, worn for athletic activities as well as in situations where quiet was important, came to be known as “sneaks” by about 1862 (“The night-officer is generally accustomed to wear a species of India-rubber shoes or galoshes on her feet. These are termed ‘sneaks’ by the women [of Brixton Prison]“). By the end of the century, the term “sneaker” was more common.

The use of “sneak” and “sneaker” for such shoes was a bit jocular, since most wearers had no nefarious motives or even a need for stealth. But another name for the same sort of footwear — “gumshoe” — was, by about 1908, adopted as underworld slang for a police detective who did rely on stealth and secrecy to apprehend evildoers.

Today, now that athletic shoes are a multi-billion dollar industry, the humble term “sneaker” seems to be largely in eclipse, replaced by such specific category terms as “running shoe” or “cross-trainer.” In Britain, athletic shoes in general are known as “trainers.”

Glub glub club.

Dear Word Detective: The word “swimmingly” means, idiomatically, “with great ease and success.” Where does this definition come from? Is swimming supposed to be the epitome of ease? I can imagine plenty of people have trouble swimming. I bet they would be offended if you used the word “swimmingly” to mean “with great ease and success.” In the event that this unintentional insult occurs, I’d like to be able to tell them the history of the word. — Caroline.

Hey, I’ll make you a deal. If you run into someone who is visibly offended by use of the adverb “swimmingly” because they, personally, cannot swim, send them to me and we’ll have a chat. While there were, obviously, some idioms popular in years past that are rightly regarded as offensive today, I think that a non-swimmer taking offense at “swimmingly” would be simply silly. I can’t play poker worth beans, but I’m not about to bridle at being told to “put your cards on the table” or “go for broke.”

Given that most of our planet’s surface is covered with water, it’s not surprising that “swim” itself is a very old word. The Old English “swimman,” meaning ‘to move on or in water, to float,” was derived from a Germanic root that also produced the words for “swim” in several other European languages.

Since movement through water is generally smooth (unless one is thrashing about in panic), especially compared to the “clomp clomp clomp” of walking on land, “swim” has acquired a wide variety of figurative uses, many involving a sense of gliding or moving smoothly as if suspended in liquid (“She … swam across the floor as though she scorned the drudgery of walking,” 1888).

This use of “swim” to mean “glide smoothly with little apparent effort” gave us the adverb “swimmingly” in the early 17th century meaning “with smooth, uninterrupted progress; easily; with complete success” (“The interview went off very swimmingly,” 1824).

Strictly from hunger.

Dear Word Detective: I was reading a 1988 article about the movie “The Manchurian Candidate” in the Washington Post, and came across this: “Back then those two boys — Frankenheimer and Axelrod — had wrinkles in their bellies and worked and turned out this marvelous picture.” It’s a quote from Richard Condon, the author of the book that was made into the movie. I just assume that the statement implies the two had been bent over, working very hard, and thus wrinkles formed on their front sides. I’ve never heard this expression before and wondered about its origin. I had little to no luck finding anything about it anywhere. — Becky de Wit.

Thanks for a very interesting question. By the way, but was there any special reason you were reading that review in an election year? Some little bit of insight you’d like to share with us? Not that I care, personally. I’ll just vote for Harold Stassen like I always do.

“The Manchurian Candidate” is a great movie, at least the original 1962 version written by George Axelrod, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. The 2004 remake with Denzel Washington was, in my opinion, a bad idea.

I’m not surprised that you had no luck tracking down “wrinkles in their bellies.” It’s a fairly obscure figure of speech today, although it was once more well-known, at least among certain sectors of society. “To have wrinkles in your belly” was slang, probably originally among hobos, for being very hungry, specifically to be chronically underfed and thus emaciated. In the context of the quotation you cite, Condon probably meant that Axelrod and Frankenheimer were “hungry young men” full of eagerness and energy to do a good job (as opposed to overfed studio hacks). The phrase is also used in a more general sense to mean “in need of money.”

It’s difficult to date “wrinkles in one’s belly” because most compilations of slang seem to overlook the phrase. A short form of it is included in an article entitled “The Vocabulary of Bums,” published in the journal American Speech in 1929 (“Wrinkles: creases in the stomach caused by postponing too many meals”), and it crops up in a 1945 quote from famed band leader Tommy Dorsey in a biography published in 2005. Speaking to a band member who had quit the band, Dorsey said, “Got enough wrinkles in your belly? Are you ready to come back?” A positive form of the phrase (“to get the wrinkles out of your belly”) is defined in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld as “settling down to prison life,” apparently because a stretch in the slammer meant regular meals, a novelty to many new inmates. My guess is that the phrase dates to the early 20th century, although it may be much older. Hunger among poor people is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon.

Eat your iodine.

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the word “cretinism”? I have been hunting for this answer with the idea that maybe it is tied to the island of Crete and some view by the Greeks that they were some sort of giants or something, but have come up dry. Hopefully you wise people will find the answer. –Joseph Lynch.

That’s a good question. Incidentally, in your email you spelled the word “cretenism” (rather than “cretinism,” the standard form), which may be why you had difficulty finding information. If one plugs “cretenism” into Google, it does cough up about 500 web pages spelling it that way, mostly blogs and the like, but many of them serious medical sites, which is odd. In fact, the US government National Institutes of Health occasionally uses that spelling.

In any case, your hunch connecting “cretinism” to Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, is entirely reasonable, given the similarity in pronunciation of “cretin” (“KREET-in”) to “Cretan,” a native of the island (“KREET-an”). But there is no connection between the two words.

Today “cretin” is usually used as a derogatory slang term for someone perceived as being stupid, foolish or incompetent, equivalent to “moron,” “idiot” or “nitwit” (“I had to get clearance from some cretin in Human Resources to take the day off.”). The origins of “cretin,” however, lie in a true human tragedy.

The medical condition known as “cretinism” is caused by a severe deficiency of thyroid hormones (a condition known as “hypothyroidism”). In infants, this condition results in greatly stunted growth, physical deformities and cognitive impairment that ranges from slight to severe. The primary cause of cretinism is lack of iodine in the diet, a deficiency that can also cause “goiter,” a grossly enlarged thyroid gland visible as a large swelling in the neck. Hypothyroidism today is usually successfully treated with iodine supplements.

Lack of iodine in the diet (due mostly to poor soil conditions) was, at one time, common in southern Europe, especially in the rural villages of the valleys at the foot of the Alps. The word “cretin” itself is derived from the Swiss French Alpine dialect word “crestin,” from the Latin word “Christianum,” which means “Christian.”

Just why the word “Christian” was applied to such sufferers is a matter of dispute among etymologists, but the most likely explanation is that “Christian” was used in the sense of “human creature, worthy of respect” in order to make clear that those afflicted with “cretinism,” while they might look and act a bit odd, were simply people like the rest of us. “Christian” was also used in English in this non-religious sense from the 16th through the 19th century, essentially as a synonym of “fellow” or “regular guy.”

Or maybe they’re compensating for global warming.

Dear Word Detective: While reading your recent column, I reflected that the word “sneaker” was again OK to use. It seemed to be anathema for a while. One had to refer to “running shoes” or “court shoes” to be appropriate. I guess I had a light day at work because I started musing about other words from my youth that seem to be passe. Everyone wore “dungarees” that later morphed into “jeans.” I recall the lifers in the service referring to the work uniform as “dungarees.” What’s the origin of “dungaree” and who the heck was Jean? — Ed Callan.

Hmm. Wasn’t “Dungaree” a song by the Grateful Dead? I could have sworn they played it at Woodstock. Never mind. Clothing terminology seems to change every year (probably something to do with, duh, selling clothes?), and I decided a while back to ignore the whole business. I must say, however, that the quality of clothing has declined precipitously in the past few years. I’ve been wearing Wrangler jeans since I was old enough to drive, and every pair I’ve bought over the past five years seems flimsier than the last. The company seems to be aiming to eventually market blue facial tissue.

I actually answered a question about “dungarees” some years ago, but many of you were probably too taken with the Teenage Ninja Turtles at the time to pay attention, so we’ll give it another shot.

“Dungarees” is indeed simply another, now antiquated, term for what we call “jeans,” casual trousers made of denim, most often blue in color. The name “dungarees” is a relic of the British colonial presence in India. “Dungri” was the Hindi name of a particular type of thick, durable cotton cloth exported from India to England in the 18th century, originally used to make sails and tents. Eventually “dungri” cloth was pressed into service in the manufacture of work clothes, gained an extra syllable in its name, and became “dungaree.”

I doubt that if you were to wander into the average American department store today and ask for a pair of “dungarees” that the clerk would know where to look, but while the term has definitely faded on this side of the Atlantic, it seems to have acquired a new meaning in Britain. According to a draft addition to the Oxford English Dictionary dated 2006, “dungaree” over there now means “trousers with a bib held up by shoulder straps,” or what we in the US have been calling “overalls” for the past 150 years.

“Jeans,” as in “blue jeans,” has a remarkably simple origin. It’s simply an altered form of the name “Genoa,” in Italy, once an important source of the cloth. Similarly, “denim” is a mutation of “serge de Nimes,” referring to Nimes, France, also an early source of the fabric.

He’s baaack!

Dear Word Detective: A recent New York Times op-ed column included the phrase “raising Cain.” While I’ve heard the phrase before and understand it to mean “creating a disturbance” or something like that, I don’t understand what Cain has to do with it. Are we raising Cain as we would a child, and how does that make an immediate disturbance? Or are we raising Cain from the dead? (Which would undoubtedly create a disturbance, but different, I think, from what the expression intends.) When I was young and heard the phrase I envisioned cane fields and the people who grow (raise) cane, and it made no sense to me then — and still doesn’t. Or are we raising a cane (the walking stick) to bash and slash people? That would surely create a disturbance. I can’t find much on the phrase anywhere, except that Cain seems to be the accepted article to be raised. Maybe I just don’t know my Bible well enough, but could you explain how this phrase came to be? — Barney Johnson.

Good question, and you’ve done a thorough job of outlining the various possibilities. I like the one about raising one’s cane to bash people, but that may be because I have always had a soft spot for the stereotypical cranky codger shouting, “Hey kid, get off my lawn!” Of course, today most of those guys probably just stay inside and vent on their blogs.

I’m no Biblical scholar either, but in this case, while knowledge of the story of Cain and Abel is necessary to understanding “raising Cain,” it is not by itself sufficient to explain the phrase. To recap the relevant bits of the Bible, Cain and Abel were the first sons of Adam and Eve, and grew up to be a farmer and a shepherd, respectively. After God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but rejected Cain’s, Cain, in a fit of jealousy, murdered his younger brother. Cain was then condemned by God to wander in exile for the rest of his life and marked (with the “mark of Cain”) to prevent any other man from doing him harm.

However, as I said, that story doesn’t really explain the phrase “to raise Cain,” which means “to disrupt, to cause a disturbance, trouble or confusion” (“Topsy would hold a perfect carnival of confusion … in short, as Miss Ophelia phrased it, ‘raising Cain’ generally.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1862). “Raise Cain” invokes an older sense of “raise,” dating back to the 14th century, meaning “to summon or cause a spirit to appear by means of incantations” (as if “raised from the underworld”).

This sense of raise has also been used in a figurative sense of “create a disturbance” since the 18th century, with various “spirits” and other personifications of disorder being “raised” as the object of the phrase. Thus we have spoken of “raising the Devil” or “raising Ned” (an old folk name for the Devil), “to raise Hob” (a demon), and, still frequently, “to raise hell.” Specifying “Cain” in the phrase dates back to the early 19th century, and employs Cain as a symbol of the sinful side of human nature. All these phrases are more or less equivalent, but “raising Cain” may have remained popular because it has the advantage of not offending folks who would find “raising hell” a bit too strong.

I’ll drink to that, whatever it is.

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the word “spa”? Today’s Los Angeles Times claims that Wikipedia says this is a “backronym” and that the word actually comes from the Belgian town of Spa, a famous bath location in Roman times, whose name may have come from the Latin word “spagere” meaning “to scatter, sprinkle or moisten.” Yet another site claims that the modern word “spa” found its way into the English language through the old Walloon word “espa,” which referred to a fountain and that from “espa,” the English derived “spaw.” Can you possibly “spawn” a coherent theory from all this? — Jackie.

Wow. There’s a lot going on in that question. Among other things, it sounds like the LA Times is now using Wikipedia as a source, which is worrisome news for those of us who enjoy finding actual facts in our newspapers. On the other hand, given the spavined state of print journalism these days, the Times newsroom may now consist of little more than three lonely schmucks and an internet terminal.

I’ve never been entirely clear on exactly what a “spa” is, and it turns out to be a word with many meanings already and probably new ones coined weekly. As a child, I associated “spa” with ritzy resorts in Europe, the sort of place dissolute Hollywood stars would go to relax and flop around in mud baths. At some point, I gathered that such places usually involved a spring or well offering mineral water claimed to have medicinal benefits. In the 1970s, however, the then-new “hot tub” was often advertised as a “home spa,” which struck me as equivalent to naming a basset hound “Secretariat.” And today, the category seems to have collapsed completely, with strip malls in the US offering storefront “spas” that seem little more than glitzed-up beauty parlors.

Wikipedia is famously undiscriminating and credulous when it comes to word origins, and their entry on “spa” is no exception. Just for starters, the Latin word for “to sprinkle” is “spargere” (which gave us the English “sparse”), not “spagere.” But, oddly enough, the very first line of their entry, before they start entertaining silly theories, is correct. The word “spa” is derived from the town of Spa in Belgium, celebrated for its medicinal spring waters since the Middle Ages.

Pilgrimages to Spa to drink the waters were so popular in Europe that by the early 17th century “spa” was being applied to any place where such a medicinal spring was located and marketed to tourists. At some point, it was decided that soaking in such waters was also beneficial, so “spa” came to mean anyplace that featured heated baths, as well as, eventually, backyard hot tubs. By the 1960s, “spa” had expanded, especially in the US, to include health clubs featuring steam rooms and exercise equipment. In certain parts of New England, in fact, “spa” is used as another name for “soda fountain.”

Shakes on a plain.

Dear Word Detective: Immediately after the mid-April, mid-continent earthquake, I heard a news commentator use the word “temblor.” I presumed that he had misspoken either “trembler” or “tremor,” but afterwards I saw the word in print in an article regarding the same event. My American Heritage Dictionary (published in 1976, edited by your father, as I believe) lists the word and says that it is from Spanish “temblar.” How long has this been in use in English, and (nothing against Spanish) why do we need this word, besides the Latin “tremor” and Old English “quake”? I presume that in California news people get tired of saying the same word over and over, so come up with different terms; but here in mid-America, where tornadoes are nearly as frequent, “tornado,” “funnel,” and the occasional “twister” seem to fill the need just fine. — Charles Anderson.

Ah yes, the Midwest earthquake of April 18. It was centered in Illinois and supposedly felt in our area of Ohio, but I slept through it and it didn’t seem to have broken anything in the house. Then again, when you live with cats like ours, coming downstairs in the morning to find broken crockery and books all over the floor is hardly uncommon, so I might not have known if it had.

By the way, your American Heritage Dictionary is the second edition; my father, William Morris, was Editor-in-Chief of the first edition, published in 1969. He was not fond of the second edition, which he felt had compromised his work, but though highly of the third edition.

Your email uses the spelling “temblor,” as does the current fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, but the Oxford English Dictionary also spells it “tremblor,” so there’s yet another word for Action News 6 at 5 to deploy. It’s interesting, by the way, that here in the Midwest we usually worry about atmospheric eruptions (tornadoes, etc.), while in California it’s largely geologic malfunctions (earthquakes, mudslides, etc.) that cause trouble. If they’re now sending us their earthquakes, I definitely think we should at least share our cicadas and June bugs. I hate June bugs.

Onward. Both “temblor” and “tremblor” do indeed come from the American Spanish “temblar” (or “temblor”), derived from the Latin “tremere,” meaning “to tremble or shake.” The same family tree also gave us the English words “tremble,” “tremor” and “tremendous” (originally describing something so awful as to inspire fearful trembling). The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for “temblor” is from 1876 (“The temblor has swallowed him,” Bret Harte, “Gabriel Conroy”), and for “tremblor,” 1913. As for why we need either word, I suppose we don’t, really.  But given the Spanish cultural heritage in California, it’s natural that the word would have developed and be widely known.

No comment.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve been looking all over the internet but can’t seem to find a precise answer to explain the origins of the word “engram.” According to the Church of Scientology, it is a word “discovered” by their founder L. Ron Hubbard. But I could have sworn I’d seen it used in science fiction novels published long before it was ever mentioned in “Dianetics.” I’ve heard it in Doctor Who, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, various classic science fiction novels, and pretty much any geek reference I can think of. Not only that, but in many dictionaries, it’s defined as a word used in psychology. If L. Ron Hubbard did invent the word, I don’t know why psychology would be so quick to adopt it, given Hubbard’s well-known hatred of psychology. I would love it if you could explain the true origins of that word so at long last I’ll know for sure whether it’s truly science, or just science fiction! — Ike.

Oh boy, Scientology. I think I’m gonna need a new email address. But I think I can clear up your questions fairly easily. As far as I can tell, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, never claimed to have actually invented the word “engram,” although he did eventually use it to mean something a bit different than what it had theretofore meant.

“Engram” originated as a term in neuropsychology meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “a memory-trace; a permanent and heritable physical change in the nerve tissue of the brain, posited to account for the existence of memory.” The term was coined in the early 20th century by Richard Semon, a German biologist, who believed that as memories form they leave actual lasting physical traces or changes in the brain, which are then re-activated in recalling the memory. The word “engram” is taken from the Greek “en” (in) plus “gramma” (letter), giving the sense of something “written into” the brain. Much energy was apparently devoted in the following decades to poking around the brain looking for these “engrams,” but today neuroscientists generally agree that memory is a far more complex and diffuse system than simply things being written into the brain.

Evidently Hubbard, in his “Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health” (1950), originally used the word “engram” in the standard neuropsychological sense of “memory,” but later refined the concept to define “engram” specifically as a sort of stored moment of psychic pain which must be uncovered and resolved (in a process Scientology calls “auditing”) in order for the person to live a happy life.

By the way, whatever became of “zarf”?

Dear Word Detective: Here’s a term to add to your lonely “Z” column. What is a “zoot suit” and what is the origin of the term? — Bill.

Ah yes, the poor lonely “Z” column in our archive index. The “B” and “C’ columns, and even the “W,” list a gazillion words, but “Z” has been limping along with naught but “Zulu time” and “Zydeco” for years now. No wonder it’s depressed. I’m surprised that the category even responds when you click on it. Anybody know an anti-depressant beginning with “Z”? I suppose there’s Zoloft, but that’s just a boring, made-up word. Maybe I should do a column on “zing.”

A “zoot suit” was a type of men’s suit popular in the 1930s and 1940s, especially among African-Americans and Hispanics. The “zoot suit” boasted high-waisted trousers very wide at the knees but pegged tightly at the ankles, and an unusually long jacket with very wide lapels and heavily-padded shoulders. Standard accessories included a keychain looping from the belt nearly to the knees, and a wide-brimmed hat, optimally sporting a long feather in the band. A quote commonly ascribed to Malcolm X described the “zoot suit” vividly as “a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic’s cell.”

As you can guess from that description, the “zoot suit” was not everyday wear, but usually reserved for parties or a night on the town. The origin of the “zoot suit” itself is a bit fuzzy, but the style seems to have evolved in the Harlem jazz scene of the 1930s, where such suits were originally known as “drapes.”

By the 1940s, the “zoot suit” had become popular in the Latino communities of the West Coast, and the stage was set for the style to take center stage as a symbol of friction between the Chicano and white communities of Los Angeles. The “Sleepy Lagoon murder trial” of 1942, in which twenty-two young Chicano men were wrongly accused of a gang murder, made national news and transformed the “zoot suit,” until then considered a cultural curiosity, into a symbol of menace and disorder to the larger society. The following year, a series of violent confrontations between Mexican-America youths and white sailors made national news as “the Zoot Suit Riots.” The Sleepy Lagoon trial became, in 1979, the basis of the hit Broadway play “Zoot Suit” by Luis Valdez, who directed the film version in 1981 which starred Daniel Valdez and Edward James Olmos. It’s a great film, by the way.

Given the colorful history of the “zoot suit,” the actual origin of the term is surprisingly prosaic. “Zoot suit” is simply what linguists call a “reduplication with modification,” a joking repetition like “okey-dokey,” of the word “suit,” making “zoot suit” essentially just “suit suit.”

Or maybe raccoons.  I’ll bet they’re good at it.

Dear Word Detective: I was just searching your archives for the origin of “O.K.,” which you handled quite succinctly, and discovered to my amazement that there are no words under “X.” What about “xenophobic” and “xenon”? Does no one care whether or not they are related or where they came from? — John Pearson.

Well, lookie there. Apparently it’s National Neglected Letter Week. We just finished adding a “Z” word to the Word Detective website archives at www.word-detective.com, and now we’re wrestling with “X.” Does this mean we’re done and my career (such as it is) is winding down? Cool. I’ll have more time to devote to farming. Right now, I’m thinking of raising alpacas. Has anyone out there had any luck teaching them to rob banks?

Onward. I, for one, do care deeply whether “xenophobic” and “xenon” are related. Perhaps I’m unduly invested in the idea of an orderly universe, but the thought of millions of completely unrelated words bouncing around chaotically gives me a headache. Fortunately, “xenon” and “xenophobic” are close cousins. By the way, the “x” beginning both words is pronounced as a “z.”

The root of both “xenophobic” and “xenon” is the Greek “xenos,” meaning “strange” or “stranger.” Coupling “xeno” with the (also Greek) “phobia,” meaning “fear,” we get “xenophobia” meaning “fear of strangers” or, more commonly, “fear of or extreme antipathy toward foreigners.” Oddly enough for a word based on ancient Greek elements, “xenophobia” is a relative newcomer to English, only making its first appearance in print in 1909. “Xenophobia” is one of those words which, although neutral in itself, carries a pejorative tone in modern usage and is more often employed in partisan accusations than in civil discourse. The current debates in the US over immigration and foreign trade policy, for instance, have been peppered with accusations of “xenophobia.”

“Xenon,” being an odorless, invisible, inert gas making up a minuscule part of Earth’s atmosphere, is considerably less controversial. Xenon was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris Travers, the same guys who had earlier discovered neon and krypton (thus paving the way for both Las Vegas and Superman).

In naming “xenon,” Ramsey and Travers were reflecting the fact that the gas was “strange” in that it was very heavy, as gases go, and possessed some other odd characteristics. Similarly, the name “krypton” is based on the Greek “kryptos,” meaning “hidden,” because it is rare, and “neon” on the Greek “neos,” or “new,” because it was previously unknown. These three gases are, by the way, among the six “noble gases” (“noble” in this case being used in an archaic sense of “stable” or “not reactive”), and the other noble gases (argon, helium, and radon) are also named from Greek roots (respectively, “argos” (idle, inert), “helios” (sun), and “radius” (ray, as radon is formed from the decay of radium).