Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

OK, slightly late this month. No reason to panic.

Whoa. Christmas is in a week? How did that happen? Where did we put the decorations from last year? Oh right. They’re still on the dining room sideboard. How convenient. Thank heavens we left the tree up in the living room. Just vacuum off the cat hair, be careful with open flames, and we’re good to go.

Time flies, doesn’t it? It seems like only a month ago that we took the lights off the tree in the front yard, but that was actually way back in May. Now it’s time for me to climb the ladder again, fall on my head again, and lie there like a stunned moose while the neighbors drive by and gawk. He looks dead, Ruthie. Should we stop? How late is Target open?

Before I forget, and lest you forget, let me mention for the umpteenth time this year that subscriptions to TWD-by-Email make lovely gifts, can be had for a paltry $15 per year, and, best of all, can be obtained in the comfort of wherever you’re sitting right now. If you’re worried that the tie you bought for your crazy uncle won’t be sufficiently distracting to prevent his snarky remarks about the stuffing, we can fix that. Just hit him with a Lifetime Subscription ($50) and he’s sure to be shaking his head in wonderment and awe at your perspicacity as he makes a mental note to move you to the head of the queue, will-wise. And remember, every subscription comes with our solemn guarantee of satisfaction: one peep out of the recipient of your gift and we send Vinny and Elmo out to perform a free attitude adjustment. Name one tie shop that offers that service.

Has anyone else been watching The Event on NBC? (We don’t need no stinkin’ segue.) I have the horrible feeling I’m the sole surviving viewer and that they’re going to cancel the show after I’ve invested weeks of viewing and sacrificed thousands of brain cells trying to follow the plot. That’s what happened with Invasion a few years back (a truly stupid show, I must admit) and Carnivale on HBO (which started out great and then became increasingly stupid, as HBO shows apparently always do). Anyway, The Event is worth watching if for no other reason than because Željko Ivanek is awesomely creepy in it, even creepier than he was in True Blood (feh) and Big Love (an HBO show that started out stupid and quickly became utterly unwatchable).

Bummer. Captain Beefheart died. (Of multiple sclerosis, which gave me a little jolt.) Here’s an odd thing. Back in 1971, I was working in a, uh, curio shop called Trade Winds on High St. in Columbus, Ohio. The previous owner, an import/export artist of dubious character named Oliver Hsu, had absconded a year earlier, leaving a basement full of very weird stuff (including a used military mortar which earned us a visit from the ATF when we deployed it in an ill-advised window display). One of Oliver’s less illegal treasures, however, was a mold, made from aluminum, apparently designed to produce masks in the shape of a very realistic fish head. Trout Mask Replica. Ave atque vale, Captain.

Late last night I took the dogs out and noticed that Brownie’s attention was focused on the foot of our driveway, a few hundred feet away. Turning on my trusty LED Maglight, I saw three big coyotes standing in the snow staring back. They didn’t scatter as they usually do, just stood there staring. I ordered the dogs back inside, and five minutes later Brownie began going nuts barking at the glass door on the sunporch. This morning I found fresh coyote tracks coming straight up the driveway to the dooryard. I read an article in the Times a while back that said scientists had figured out why coyotes in the Eastern US (including Ohio) are bigger than their Western cousins. Turns out they’ve interbred with wolves and should properly be called “coywolves.” Oh. Boy.

The year is old, the wind is cold, the trees whisper together.

Lastly, I’d like to thank all our readers (and subscribers!) for your generous support this year and in the past. Your contributions pay for this site and keep the kitties happy, as well as providing a sorely needed supplement to my meager stipend from the Scriveners Guild. Only your kind assistance saves me from the Marshalsea.

And now, on with the show…

And no overheating like with the tropical fishes.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the origin of the term “Crazy as a Bessie Bug” and what does it mean? — G.L.L.

Oh goody, a bug question. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Not necessarily the right person (because I loathe bugs and do my best to pretend they don’t exist), but definitely the right place. Our house seems to be bug central this summer, even more so than usual. But there’s something weird going on. Several of our usual summer visitors, such as June bugs, failed to show up this year. In their place, however, they apparently sent platoons of giant black ants, some really ugly centipedes, and, of course, more scary spiders than you’d find in a Stephen King novel. Personally, I blame global warming. Or maybe it’s all the cell phones. Whatever. I just hope we never get those giant flying cockroaches they have in Florida. Guess where I have no intention of retiring.

I thought, when I first read your question, that you might have mis-heard the classic expression “Crazy as a bedbug,” meaning flamboyantly deranged, which I’ve heard since I was a little kid. Back then I thought “bedbugs” were imaginary creatures invented by adults to scare children (“Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite!”). Now that I know bedbugs are real, I must say that the expression makes no sense, since bedbugs are, by all accounts, crafty and devious critters (and their human victims are the ones driven crazy). “Crazy as a bedbug” would only make sense if it were, like “crazy like a fox,” an inverted way of saying the person is actually very clever and thus not crazy at all.

There is, however, also the expression “crazy as a bessie bug,” meaning “agitated, irrational, erratic,” which is apparently common in the southern US states and has been since at least the late 19th century. The “bessie” bug, also known as the “betsey bug,” “betsy beetle,” “bess bug” and variants thereof, is a member of the Passalidae family of beetles and also sometimes goes by the monikers “horn beetle,” “patent-leather beetle” and “pinch bug.” Shiny black beetles, they grow to be about one and one-half inches long and have nasty-looking pincers with which they bite things. And yes, they can fly. But I’m sure they make great pets. Beetles, of course, are literally everywhere, since there are more than 350,000 species of them, which is what led the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane to note that the one thing he could infer with certainty about the Creator was that “he has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” (Yes, that tale may be apocryphal, but I like it.)

While bedbugs do their best to hide from human eyes and lurk in the nooks and crannies of furniture, etc., bessie bugs wander around in plain sight looking for rotting logs to eat. As I said, they can fly, and, more importantly with regard to the “crazy” label, they can and do create a wide variety of sounds by rubbing their wings against their bodies. They apparently actually use these sounds to communicate with other bessie bugs (a fact that should make me stand in awe of nature, yadda yadda, but actually really creeps me out).

All in all, the highly active and evidently very vocal bessie bug would seem a far more fitting example of insect “craziness,” especially in large groups, than the reclusive bedbug. In fact, I’m wondering whether “crazy as a bedbug,” first attested in print in the mid-19th century, might actually have begun as a modification of “crazy as a bessbug.” Bedbugs, of course, are far more common than bessie bugs in the cities where most people live, so the substitution of “bed” for “bess” would have made the phrase make more sense to most people. This process, called “folk etymology,” is the same “make it sound familiar” mechanism that turned “catercorner” (where “cater” was an obscure old English dialect word meaning “diagonally”) into “kittycorner” (which makes absolutely no sense, but at least everyone knows what “kitty” means).

Larchmont already?

Dear Word Detective:  Recently, while reading an issue of the British magazine The Economist (actually they call themselves a newspaper, but I suppose that’s a British usage), I came across the following sentence: “Tesla, a maker of electric sports-cars, has developed a saloon, the Model S, which is expected to sell for around $50,000.” Assuming this isn’t some sort of party bus or bar on wheels, does this type of saloon have any relation to the watering holes of the Old West? — Phil Fernandez.

They call themselves a newspaper? That is … odd. Most of the newspapers I know seem to have taken to calling themselves “blogs.” Given the current journalistic hand-wringing over the parlous state of newsprint, a magazine calling itself a newspaper seems as ill-advised as an Airedale dressing up as a ten-point buck in late October.

Speaking of “a bar on wheels,” a few months ago the New York Times reported the possible abolition of the “bar cars” on the Metro-North commuter trains running out of Grand Central terminal in Manhattan. The “bar car” is exactly what it sounds like, an entire train car set up as a rolling tavern. I’m sure this next clause will curl the hair of social scientists, but I spent many happy hours as a child wedged into a corner of the bar car, sipping ginger ale while my parents schmoozed with their friends on the 5:11 local to Old Greenwich.

“Saloon” as a type of automobile and the “saloon” seen in Westerns are, in fact, the same word, although there is a vast aesthetic and social gulf between sleek “saloon” cars and the cavernous dives so often the scenes of chaotic brawls seen in the movies. Furthermore, this “saloon” is essentially the same word as “salon,” which is used to mean everything from a refined and snooty gathering of artists to that place in the strip mall where your cousin gets her nails done.

In the beginning was the French word “salon,” which meant “large room,” especially one used as a reception room in a palace or large house. “Salon” was imported into English in the late 17th century with the same meaning, but subsequently acquired several derivative uses, including “a gathering of artists and intellectuals” (patterned on “the Salon,” an annual exhibition in one of the “salons” of the Louvre in Paris), as well as “a business offering beauty treatments or hairdressing.”

“Saloon” arose in the 18th century simply as a variant of “salon,” and in its early history it was used in all the same senses. In the 19th century, however, “saloon” started to be used to mean “a large, open compartment” on a passenger ship or railway train, such as a lounge for first-class passengers aboard ship or a “dining saloon” railway car. It was also during the 19th century that the term “saloon” started to be applied, almost exclusively in the US, to public bars. The exception was the British use of “saloon bar,” which meant a semi-private bar, a bit more upscale than the “pub” (short for “public house”) to which it was often attached (but less exclusive than the “private bar” sometimes found on the same premises).

This aura of modest exclusivity carried by the term “saloon” (at least east of Wyoming), as well as its connotation of “roomy,” led to its application in the early 20th century to a type of motor car with a completely enclosed passenger compartment capable of seating at least four people. A “saloon,” therefore, falls between a sporty model or compact car and a larger vehicle such as a limousine or today’s SUV hybrids. If it sounds like I’m also describing a “sedan,” it’s because I am. Apparently what we call a “sedan” here in the US has historically been known as a “saloon” in the UK, although the word “sedan” is gaining ground fast, which was probably inevitable. Pretty soon we’ll have all those sleepy little pubs re-branded as “saloons” and the patrons will be smashing chairs over each others’ heads just like real American cowboys.

I’ve missed you, Spot.

Dear Word Detective:  Painters and others interested in the coating of surfaces use the term “holiday” to describe a “missed spot.” What is the origin of the term? — John Weiss.

That’s a new one on me. Incidentally, this seems a good time to announce that I have discovered what I believe, based on extensive research, to be the most annoying phrase in the English language. Yes, I know most people would regard my quest for such a linguistic irritant as strange and anti-social, but no one who knows me well will be very surprised. Anyway, the phrase is “You missed a spot.” Anyone cleaning anything, painting anything, paving anything (road crews are especially grateful when I slow down to let them know), or doing just about anything that has a beginning and an end, always secretly appreciates hearing that they’re further from the end than they had thought. It’s usually not true, of course, but, since folks almost always stop to check, I like to think I’m doing my part to help them ensure the integrity of their work product. I just wish they wouldn’t throw things at me.

There’s an interesting twist in the early history of “holiday,” and it’s a distinction we still sometimes make in how we use the word. Our modern “holiday” comes from the Old English “haligdaeg,” which simply combined “halig” (“holy”) and “daeg” (“day”) into one word. But “haligdaeg” was used mean both “a consecrated day or religious festival” and “a day on which ordinary activities and work are suspended; a day of festivities,” i.e., a largely secular day off. To avoid confusion, “haligdaeg” was used to mean the secular occasions and “halig daeg,” two words, signified the religious “holy days.” This distinction has carried over into modern English, where we have used, since about the 16th century, “holiday” in a broad sense but “holy day” in only a religious sense.

“Holiday” went on, of course, to acquire a wide variety of more general and figurative meanings, ranging from simply “a break from routine” to the jocular use of the word to mean “imprisonment” (“A sentence of a month or two … a little ‘holiday’ with food and shelter and warmth,” 1901). One of the notable British English uses of the word that strikes many Americans as odd is the use of “holiday” to mean what we would call a “vacation” (“Blair spent one summer holidays with his mother Lady Mary, at Spa,” 1825).

The use of “holiday” to mean “a missed spot” appears to be that rarity in English etymology, a word or phrase that actually has a nautical origin. The original use of “holiday” in the “missed a spot” sense, back in the 18th century, was in reference to crew members painting the decks of a ship or “paying” (sealing seams with tar or pitch) its hull. “Paying” (from the Middle French “poier,” to smear with pitch) in particular was an arduous, intensely unpleasant task, so even a small missed spot could be, sardonically, considered a “holiday” (“A holiday is any part of a ship’s bottom, left uncovered in paying it,” Grose, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785).

This use was later generalized to cover a missed spot in any task, including daily household chores (“Holidays: parts left untouched in dusting. ‘Don’t leave any holidays.’” Jago, Dialect of Cornwall, 1882). Of course, if you leave enough “holidays” in the wake of your  assigned task, whether it’s dusting, accounting or paving, you might soon find oneself on a permanent “holiday.” So I’m actually doing folks a favor by pointing out the spots they’ve missed, right?

Oldie but goodie.

Dear Word Detective:  Do you have information on the origin of the word “ruthless”? I was told that the origin of this word is from Scripture, The Book of Ruth. Ruth was merciful, considerate, loving and caring. The opposite, or to be “ruthless,” would certainly fit the definition of “ruth-less.” I would appreciate your comments. — Carolyn Perlman.

Now there’s a name I haven’t run into in a while, at least attached to anyone under 45 or so. But according to babynamewizard.com, Ruth was, back in the early years of the 20th century, the fifth most popular name for a girl baby in the US. By 2008, however, it ranked 257th. It’s just the opposite with my first name. In the 1950s, Evan ranked 507th, which is probably why I was in my twenties before I met another Evan. In fact, several of my teachers tried to convince me that my name was actually “Kevin.” At the moment, however, Evan ranks 38th in the US. I’m not sure how I feel about this, especially since Evan is becoming a popular name for girls. I guess I miss being special. Maybe I’ll change my name to Nigel (815th) or Cletus, which was 913th in the 1950s and seems to have faded entirely off the chart in the 1960s. Splendid isolation, rara avis, nonpareil, that’s the ticket.

The story you have heard about the word “ruthless,” although it seems to make perfect sense, is not true. There is no connection between “ruthless” and the name Ruth, which was a popular Hebrew name in Biblical times. But, I hear you ask, if the “ruth” in “ruthless” isn’t the Biblical Ruth, what does it mean? We don’t speak of nice people being endowed with lots of “ruth,” do we?

Well, not at the moment, but we used to. “Ruth” was a common word in Middle English, first appearing (as “reuthe”) around the 12th century, meaning “pity or compassion,” and in the 13th century we spoke of a person who was kind, charitable, and just generally felt your pain as being “ruthful.” (“Ruthful” has also been used at times to mean “inspiring compassion or pity,” i.e., pathetic, as well as “expressing grief” as in “ruthful weeping,” but these are secondary senses.)

A person who lacked those qualities of kindness and charity, whose only concern was for personal gain and never shed a tear for the victims of his greed, has been, since the early 14th century, known as “ruthless,” literally lacking the quality of “ruth.”

The “ruth” in “ruthful” and “ruthless” is a noun formed on the verb “to rue,” meaning “to feel sorrow or regret” (“And yet … no sooner was alone, Than she for loneliness her promise rued,” 1885), and which is still in wide use today (although perhaps not as much as it should be). “Rue,” in turn, came from the Old English “hreowan,” which meant “to afflict with sorrow, pity or regret,” and which was rooted in old Germanic and possibly Norse words. “Rue” is perhaps most often found today in phrases such as “rue the day” (or hour, etc.), meaning, of course, to regret a decisive event which took place at that time (“France, thou shalt rue this houre within this houre,” Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, 1595).

While “ruthless” is alive and well in popular usage today (and “ruthlessness” is even celebrated as a virtue on Wall Street), the sweet and gentle “ruthful” has almost entirely faded from our collective memory. The Oxford English Dictionary labels the word “archaic,” and its most recent citation for its use in print dates from the early 19th century. A search of Google News today for “ruthful” produces the epitaph “Your search – ruthful – did not match any documents,” which a quick perusal of the grim headlines confirms. It seems that this world could do with a “ruth transfusion” as soon as possible.

Creeps me out.

Dear Word Detective: You use the word “wimwams” from time to time. I’ve looked here and there, and tried to find it in your archives, but I can’t find anything on it. Google (when I try it) sends me zero results … how odd. How odd, when it’s clear what you mean by the word. — George.

It is odd, especially since I could have sworn that I wrote a column on “wimwams” at some point, but it is indeed not to be found in our archives at www.word-detective.com. Perhaps I dreamed writing it, the way I sometimes dream I’m back at my old job in New York City, trying to explain why my lunch hour has lasted twelve years. Or perhaps I actually did write it, and my computer quietly ate it.

On the other hand, if I’ve actually been using “wimwams” in my columns for years without ever explaining it, I’ve been following in the family tradition. I picked up the word “wimwams” from my mother, Mary D. Morris, who used it frequently and probably learned it growing up in Ohio. But my mother collaborated with my father, William Morris, on this column for many years, and when the two of them produced the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (HarperCollins, 1988), guess what word they didn’t include? I guess the first rule of “wimwams” is that you don’t talk about “wimwams.”

Part of the problem you faced in tracking down “wimwams” elsewhere is my fault, because I’ve been using a variant spelling of the word, which is more usually rendered as “whim-wham” in the singular (although the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) also lists “whym-wham,” “whim-whom” and several other forms). The OED gives two definitions for “whim-wham”: “A fanciful or fantastic object … a trinket,” and “A fantastic notion, odd fancy.” The third definition, recognized by other dictionaries, is the sense I learned from my mother, that of “the jitters” or “the willies,” as in “The brakes on that old car give me the whim-whams.” This sense is almost always found in the plural, preceded by “the.”

By now those of you not futzing with your iPads will have noticed the word “whim” sitting there right at the front of “whim-wham,” and thereby hangs a tale. A very confusing tale. “Whim” is, of course, a well-known word meaning “a sudden fanciful impulse” (“Larry bought the condo on a whim because he liked the shape of the bathtub”) or “an eccentric idea.”  Thus “whim” fits nicely with the “odd fancy” definition of “whim-wham,” and a now-obsolete definition of “whim” (“A fanciful or fantastic creation”) matches the first definition of “whim-wham” precisely. “Whim,” in fact, may simply be a shortened form of “whim-wham.” Or maybe not.

The problem is that while “whim-wham” has been found in print around 1529, almost a century before “whim” and the related “whimsy” appear, “whim-wham” is clearly what linguists call a “reduplicated” form, involving the repetition of an initial word with a minor variation, as in “dilly-dally” or “hocus-pocus.” The base word here is clearly “whim” or “whimsy,” but if “whim-wham” really appeared before “whim,” we’ve got a problem. It’s possible that this chicken-and-egg tangle will be cleared up someday, but for the moment all we can say is that “whim-wham,” “whim” and “whimsy” are closely related.

As for where the “jitters” sense of “whim-wham” comes from, it has been suggested that  “whim-wham” might be a relative of the Old Norse word “hvima” (meaning “to glance around wildly with the look of a frightened person”), which certainly sounds to me like someone stuck in a speeding car with bad brakes.

Furthermore…

Dear Word Detective:  I was shocked to see no origin on your website of the word “forte,” which is always mispronounced. It is actually correct to say “fort” (no “ay” sound for the “e”) unless you are using it as a musical term. It means “strength” (“My forte is painting”) and comes from fact that sword makers could make any part of the sword the strongest according to what you are fighting. The weakest part of the sword was called the “foible” (“I have many foibles,” i.e., weaknesses). — Dale.

Well, as I frequently have occasion to tell folks, it’s a big language with lots of words, and it’s gonna take me some time to work my way through all of them. On the other hand, I’ve been writing three columns per week for seventeen years, so that’s 2652 words and phrases I’ve gotten around to explaining. Y’know, I did that multiplication just now expecting the result to be inspiring, but it’s actually kind of scary. At an average length of 500 words per column, that’s one million, three hundred and twenty-six thousand words (1,326,000), or more than five times the length of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Good heavens. I could have been a literary immortal (or at least Stephen King) instead of arguing over “that” versus “which.”

Oh well, might as well keep digging. Your point is a good one, though your conclusion about the pronunciation of “forte” is open to debate. Before we get to that, however, let’s take a look at “forte” and “foible.”

There are actually two “fortes” in English, one that we adopted from French, the other from Italian. The French word “fort” (meaning “strong,” from the Latin “fortis”) gave us the “forte” meaning “strong point” or “thing at which a person excels” (“Mr. Selwyn had a forte for horse-racing,” 1870), as well as such common English words as “fort” (meaning “stronghold” or “fortified structure”), “force” and “fortify.” But you’re correct that the first use of this “forte” in English was to mean the strongest part of a sword blade, usually the part closest to the handle. And you’re also right about “foible,” which we adopted from Old French and use today to mean “quirk” or “weak point of one’s character,” but which originally meant the weakest part of a sword blade, usually the half toward the tip. This section was also known as the “feeble,” another word rooted in that Old French “foible.”

The other “forte” is, as I noted, from Italian, and also means “strong,” but is used in English exclusively as a musical term to mean “loud.” This “forte” is also found in the term “pianoforte” (from the Italian “piano e forte,” literally “soft and loud”) of which our modern English “piano” is a shortening.

The Italian musical term “forte” is indisputably pronounced in English, as it would be in Italian, in two syllables with the “e” given a long “a” sound (for-TAY). “Forte” in the sense of “strong point,” however, is from French, and, going by the French model, should be pronounced “fort,” one syllable. (Actually, to be truly faithful to modern French, it should be pronounced “for,” without the “t”.)

Purists over the years have made a point of distinguishing the pronunciations of the two “fortes,” singling out the pronunciation “for-TAY” for “strong point” for condemnation as being at best slightly gauche and at worst a crime against civilization itself. As usual in language correctness campaigns, very few people have been listening, and the pronunciation “for-TAY” is rapidly becoming standard. In fact, 74 percent of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel recently polled preferred the two-syllable “for-TAY” pronunciation. At this point, I’d say that either pronunciation is acceptable, but that more people will understand you if you bite the bullet and say “for-TAY.”

But nobody mentioned the eels.

Dear Word Detective: I recently had to give a presentation on basic navigation to a sailing class, and I was suddenly struck by the names for the channel-markers. I never had noticed them before, but for some reason the more I thought about them the weirder they got.  Green markers are round and called “cans,” which has some measure of reason to it, I suppose.  Red markers are triangular and called “nuns.” Everyone I have asked has been baffled, and numerous books on seamanship have proved useless. A crew of puzzled salts would appreciate your wisdom. — Hannah Upchurch.

Hey, “red, right, return,” am I right? When I was just a wee lad, my parents insisted I take seamanship (as it was then called) classes before being allowed to pilot my little sailboat out onto Long Island Sound alone. That particular mnemonic phrase, meaning to keep the red channel markers to starboard when entering a harbor, is virtually the only thing I remember from those courses.

I had heard channel markers called “cans” before (many of them look like oil drums), but “nuns” is a new one on me. There are, it turns out, two “nuns” in the English language. One is by far the most common, meaning a female member of a religious order, particularly in the Christian church. This “nun” is rooted in the post-Classical Latin “nonna,” which originally was a child’s term of reverence and affection for an older woman, and may be related to “nanny” and “nana.” This sense of “nun” has a number of extended uses, e.g., in the names of birds, moths, shells, etc., that are considered in some respect to resemble the “habit,” or vestments, of a nun.

The other “nun” in English is “nun” meaning “a child’s spinning top,” a use that first appeared in the 16th century, and this is where things start to get strange. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) also lists the term “nun buoy,” first appearing in the early 18th century, and defines it as “A buoy which is circular in the middle and tapering to each end,” which seems to fit the “nun” channel markers in your question. The OED traces the “nun” in “nun buoy” to “nun” in the sense of “child’s top” (which such buoys do resemble) but then declares the logic of that “spinning top” use of “nun” to be a mystery, pointing vaguely in the direction of the religious “nun.”

The simplest explanation of “nun” meaning “top” is that a spinning top might be said to resemble the triangular shape of a nun’s habit, and that may well be the answer to your question about “nun buoys” as well. But there is another intriguing possibility.

The “dreidel” is a four-sided spinning top that is used in Jewish children’s games, especially during the holiday of Hanukkah. Dreidels have also historically been used in adult games of chance. The four sides of the dreidel are marked with letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are said to stand for words spelling inspirational sayings (usually “A great miracle happened there,” referring to one day’s supply of oil that burned for eight days in the temple in Jerusalem) or bearing other religious significance. In dreidel games, whichever letter is pointing up after a player spins the dreidel decides whether the player wins the whole pot, half the pot, nothing, or owes the pot. The Hebrew letters on the dreidel are “nun,” “gimel,” “he” and “shin.” Given that the dreidel is a very ancient toy, it seems reasonable to wonder if “nun” as a term for a child’s spinning top might have come from that first Hebrew letter on the dreidel, “nun.”

A bite to remember.

Dear Word Detective:  While traveling through Central Illinois I heard someone use the word “whomperjawed,” as in “Don’t get all whomperjawed on me.” Just curious if there was an origin or popular use at one time for the word. — Brian.

Central Illinois, eh? I was having a bit of trouble picturing what that might be like, since the only bit of that state I’ve experienced is Chicago, so I looked it up (on Wikipedia, so I can only hope the internet isn’t pulling my leg). According to the Wiki-elves, Central Illinois is mostly flat prairie dotted with small towns where the locals grow corn and soybeans and watermelons and gather weekly to worship a variety of pagan gods in bizarre and frightening rituals. Just kidding about that last part. I’m sure it’s just like here in Central Ohio, and everybody worships football (with bizarre and frightening rituals). Incidentally, did you know that the word “rural” comes from the Latin “ruralis,” meaning “of the countryside,” based on “rus,” meaning “country,” which also gave us “rustic”? Now you do.

It’s unclear from the remark you report exactly what the speaker meant by “whomperjawed,” but the two leading candidates would probably be “Don’t start acting aggressive towards me” and “Don’t start acting weird or uncertain; don’t waver.”

If you were to look up “whomperjawed” in a typical dictionary, you’d almost certainly draw a blank. Part of the problem is that the word exists in an unusual and frustrating number of forms, from “wopper-jawed” to “wapperjawed” to even “lopperjawed,” all both with and without hyphens. Even the few dictionaries that do list the word seem uncertain on its meaning; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites a 19th century collection of East Anglia (England) dialect as defining “wapper-jaws” as meaning “a wry mouth; a warped jaw,” and a dictionary from 1891 defined it as meaning “a projecting under-jaw.” Taken to mean a jutting jaw and a combative posture, it’s possible that “whopper-jawed” could be used to mean “pugnacious.” This seems to be the sense Mark Twain used in an 1863 letter: “He is a long-legged, bull-headed, whopper-jawed, constructionary monomaniac.”

The more common sense of the word, however, seems to be “out of alignment, askew,” as one might describe something poorly-constructed or dilapidated (“Bill took three months to finish those bookcases, and within a week they were all whopperjawed”). Applied to a person, assuming nothing notable about the person’s jaw, the most likely meaning would be that the subject was acting “weird” or “squirrelly.”

As you’d expect with such an elusive word, the origin of “whopperjawed” is a bit hazy, but the key appears to lie in what is evidently the original form of the term, “wapper-jawed.” This was pretty clearly a development of a much older (16th century) term, “wapper-eyed,” meaning someone who either blinked a lot or whose eyes rolled indicating dizziness.

Wapper-eyed,” in turn, rested on the obsolete English dialect verb “wapper,” meaning “to blink” or “to move unsteadily” (“Wapper-eyed, goggle-eyed, having full rolling Eyes; or looking like one scared; or squinting like a Person overtaken with Liquor,” 1746). The verb “to wapper” may be related to the Dutch “wapperen,” meaning “to swing, oscillate, or waver,” and may also be related to our modern English verb “to wave.”

“Whopperjawed” and its many variants are used today, to the extent that they are, almost always in reference to things that are askew or don’t fit together as they should, and, as far as I can tell, only rarely applied to people, which makes your experience in Central Illinois linguistically intriguing. Perhaps next time you pass by, if it’s not too much trouble, you could ask what the heck they meant by that.

Not bad with cheese.

Dear Word Detective:  As a long-standing fan of the old Grand Ocean Liners, I was plowing my way through the fascinating book “The Sway of the Grand Saloon” by John Malcolm Brinnin. I was taken by the sheer weight of British idiom in the book, but a couple stood out and have me puzzled. The first is a reference to the dining table as the “Groaning Board.” Why “groaning”? Is it under the weight of the food or the reaction of the passenger to that food? The second is in reference to the poor fare available on early steamers: “a smoking mess of hot rare collops.” I don’t know why, but just reading that makes my mouth water. Should it? — Dave Wilke.

Hooray for the true ocean liners (not modern cruise ships, those floating palaces of suburban excess). I will be forever grateful to my parents for taking my sister and me to England aboard the Queen Elizabeth (the original, not the QEII) when we were quite young. The trip took seven days, as I recall, and I loved every moment of it. The trip back, on the smaller and less glamorous H.M.S. Mauritania, was interesting primarily because the Mauritania, unlike the Elizabeth, lacked gyroscopic stabilizers, a fact which lent a special excitement to the late summer storms in the North Atlantic.

Apart from my first experience with bread pudding, which I loved, I don’t really remember the food on either ship. But I’m sure there was plenty of it, because Cunard Lines was not known for starving their passengers into mutiny. Thus I suppose referring to the dining table aboard a liner as a “groaning board” might be appropriate.

As a popular English idiom, “groaning board” simply means a dining table laden with a large amount of food. By extension, “groaning board” is also used to mean “feast,” especially on a food-centered occasion such as Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving here in the US. “Groaning board” can also used to mean “a large amount” or “a surfeit” of anything positive or pleasant, and it seems, not surprisingly, to be a staple metaphor of newspaper food columnists (“A groaning board of books proves we are what we read: The larder is stocked with tomes that cater to our obsession with the how, what, where and why of our food habits.” Toronto Star, 2/28/09).

The “groan” in “groaning board” (which dates back to the 17th century) refers, as you guessed, to the creaking and groaning noises produced by the wood of the table under stress by the weight of the food. The use of the word “board” for “table” was standard at the time, as tables for feasts were often literally long boards held up by trestles. This is the same “board,” by the way, found in the phrases “room and board” and “boarding house,” in each case referring to the inclusion of at least some meals in the deal.

I was afraid that a “collops” would turn out to be something disgusting, perhaps an unpleasant sort of seafood or goat gonads or the like, but it actually sounds appetizing. “Collop” is simply a very old (14th century) term for a meal of bacon and eggs (or ham and eggs). By the 15th century, “collop” (which comes from Old Norse and is related to the Swedish “kalops,” meat stew) was being used to mean the meat alone, and today it’s often used to mean simply a piece of bacon. Faced with “a smoking mess of hot rare collops” as the entirety of their shipboard meal, of course, it’s easy to see why paying passengers might be a little peeved.

But a search under “cats and Christmas trees” is definitely worth your time.

Dear Word Detective: I recently listened to a crank call in which an eight year-old Dublin girl attempts to retain the services of a demolitions company in order to destroy her school. It’s amusing both in the sophistication of the girl (most of my crank calls at that age involved rude noises) and the willingness of the company to play along with the gag. (Like most things that have ever produced images or sound, it’s available on YouTube.) During the call, the girl uses the phrase, “Fill your boots, man!” which seems to mean, “Go for it!” I’m curious about the origin of that phrase, and if it’s Irish only. For that matter, where does “crank call” come from? — Greg Charles.

Ah yes, where would we be without YouTube? At this point, I’d be willing to give it a try. Actually it’s not so much the videos that bother me, although I definitely wasn’t invited to the meeting where we decided to give every certifiable crackpot on the planet a digital video camera. But what gives me the wimwams are the viewer comments on the videos, which make a monkey house at feeding time sound like the Algonquin Round Table.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of old-school journalism, I went to YouTube and listened to the call, which apparently took place at least three years ago, meaning the girl is now old enough to vote. Seriously, I doubt that she’s just eight. In any case, I’d actually call this more of a Prince-Albert-in-a-Can “prank” call than a “crank” call. “Prank calls” are jokes or tricks, either on the person answering or on the poor schmuck who winds up with forty-five pizzas on his porch. “Crank calls,” which often begin “longtime listener, first-time caller,” are phone calls from “cranks,” deranged individuals who earn the title by being mentally “bent” or “crooked” like a crank used to work a machine.

“Fill your boots” is definitely not restricted to Ireland, although it does seem most popular in Britain, Canada and Australia. It’s especially associated with football (what is called “soccer” here in the US), where it’s used primarily to mean “score lots of goals and win lots of games.” Owing at least in part to the popularity of that YouTube video, and probably to the current World Cup competition, as well, the internet is awash at the moment in speculation about what “fill your boots” means and where it came from.

I’ve found “fill your boots” used with two basic meanings. It’s used, as in your example, as an exhortation to “Go for it!” or “Get up and get going! Just do it!”  But it’s also used in the more particular sense of “take as much as you want” or “take advantage of the situation” (“There’s an open bar and a free buffet, so fill your boots, boys.”).

There is, unfortunately, no clear answer as to where “fill your boots” came from or originally meant. It is possible, and this is perhaps the most logical of the various alternatives, that “fill your boots” originally simply referred to putting on one’s boots in preparation for doing a task, and, by extension, to being equal to that task. If so, it would be related to the idea of “filling someone’s shoes,” taking another person’s place and being able to do their job.

It’s also been suggested that plundering armies in some unspecified “olden days” would fill their tall boots with loot (which may sound a bit silly but the term “bootleg” does indeed come from the practice of concealing contraband in one’s boots, so it’s not impossible). At the less-plausible end of the scale, there’s the suggestion that back when men wore knee-length boots, a determined drinker in a tavern might reach the point where repeated trips to the loo became tiresome and “filling one’s boots” was an easy alternative. Just how such behavior could possibly translate into “Just do it!” in a positive sense awaits explanation. “Fill your boots” also seems to be a fairly recent phrase, as I haven’t been able to find a use before 1990.

My guess is that the first origin I proposed, that of “put on your boots and get going,” is the source, quite possibly used in a military context as an exhortation to a group of soldiers. The “take all you want” usage would then be an extension of the “Act fast!” connotation of the original phrase.

The Nose knew.

Dear Word Detective: Any idea where the word “schnozzola” originated? It sounds vaguely Italianate, and is, of course, forever linked with Jimmy Durante, but where did he get it to begin with? I learned the word (and still use it when it’s warranted, which is far too little these days) during my childhood in Manhattan in the 1940s, and suspect it isn’t as prevalent at it once was. Any ideas out there? — Robert

That’s a great question, at least in part because it contains the magic words “Manhattan in the 1940s.” I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, albeit a bit later, and Manhattan to me was Emerald City, Xanadu, Shangri-La and Disneyland rolled into one, though I knew better than to try to shake Goofy’s hand. The dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, the jumpseats in Checker cabs, and the hot dogs and beans casserole at the Horn & Hardart Automat were all miracles to me, and if a single one of the so-called time machines I’ve bought on eBay had worked, I’d be back there right now. Eventually I lived and worked in New York City for more than twenty years, but the city wasn’t the same, and, sadly, it’s even less so now.

Now that I’ve dated myself as a dinosaur of a different sort, I suppose I ought to explain who Jimmy Durante was. Born in Brooklyn to an Italian-American family in 1893, Jimmy Durante was first a vaudeville star and then an immensely popular star of radio and TV from the 1930s through the 1960s. Durante was a talented singer, dancer and comedian, but his real stroke of genius was to transform his enormous nose, which would have been the kiss of death to a lesser artist, into a beloved American cultural landmark. Durante referred to his nose as “the schnozz” or “the schnozzola,” and used his pride in the appendage as the focus of many of his comedy routines.

Incidentally, it’s never too late to learn something, in this case assuming that Wikipedia is trustworthy on the subject. For much of his career, Durante bracketed his appearances with his theme song, “Inka-Dinka-Doo,” and his somewhat mysterious sign-off phrase, “Good Night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” Much speculation over the years as to the meaning of the phrase was settled by Jimmy’s explanation in 1966 that “Mrs. Calabash” was his nickname for his first wife Jeanne Olsen, who had died in 1943.

While Durante was Italian-American and “schnozzola” certainly sounds, as you say, vaguely Italianate, it’s not. “Schnozzola” is simply a jocular elaboration of “schnozz,” an Anglicized form of the classic Yiddish word “shnoitsl,” meaning “nose.” Go a bit further back and you’ll find the German word “Schnauze,” meaning “nose or snout” (which is related to the word “snout” itself and which underlies the name of the “Schnauzer” breed of dog).

Since Durante got his start in vaudeville, it’s not surprising that he was familiar with the Yiddish “schnozz.” It’s possible that he appended the suffix “ola” to “schnozz” because it seemed to echo his Italian heritage, but it’s equally likely that he was simply falling into step with the “ola” naming craze that consumed the US during much of the early 20th century. Although “ola” is essentially meaningless in itself, its use in names such as “Pianola,” “Victrola,” “Motorola” (which originally made car radios), Shinola and Crayola made “ola” a very popular naming element at that time.

Interestingly, the formerly positive connotation of “ola” shifted around 1960 with the eruption of the “payola” scandal in US radio (in which disk jockeys were discovered to be taking payoffs to play certain records). Overnight, “ola” became as clear a marker of scandal as the suffix “gate” later was in the 1970s and 80s, producing such terms as “ghostola” for the use of ghostwriters and “plugola” for paid celebrity endorsements. It’s likely that only the popularity of “granola” (which dates back to the 1880s) and Crayola crayons eventually detoxified “ola” in the popular vernacular.