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 ... and your little dog, too. readme:
Oh, ye of little faith. I promised that there would be a proper December Issue before month’s end, and here we are.
I carried over the modified meme-version of our logo graphic this month. Oddly enough, I made that graphic before I saw the Wizard of Oz one, though I definitely had that caption in mind.
My absolute favorite of the breed, however, is the Magritte treatment below. My first thought on seeing that was “Gee, that would make a great shower curtain.”
Speaking of little dogs, our pal Pokey, the little yellow doggie that wandered in about twelve years ago, is showing her age. She appears to be almost entirely deaf, mostly blind, and somewhat demented to boot, though Pokey was never the brightest bulb on the porch even on a good day. The good news is that she remains indefatigably cheerful; when she detects that you are putting food in her bowl, she bounces into the air, all four feet off the floor, tail wagging as madly as it did the first day she was here.
 Unfortunately, Pokey’s vision, or lack thereof, is a problem because she follows me all over the house. She always has, probably because she was dumped in the woods to starve and is understandably insecure even after all these years. The first few weeks she was here, in fact, she slept on a futon in my office and I had to sit with her and tell her bedtime stories every night so she’d settle down and sleep. Well, I probably didn’t really have to, but I did. Anyway, she can climb stairs just fine, and so she does while I work in my office on the second floor every day. But she’s very reluctant to descend the stairs, as she really must at least a few times a day.
So I have to help Pokey downstairs, a process that involves coaxing her to the head of the steps, then gently grasping her collar and supporting her just enough to encourage her, but not so much as to make her panic and start thrashing around. Meanwhile, I have my own problems going downstairs, so I have to grip the banister with my other hand and try not to lose my balance. I’m starting to think a winch and a basket might be a better idea. The scary part is when we approach the bottom of the stairs and Pokey decides, every so often, that she’s sick of the whole laborious process and might as well jump. From the fourth step up. With me attached. I ought to sell tickets.
Continue reading this post » » »
Woo Hoo.
Dear Word Detective: Whence came the term “Blue Plate Special”? I’m reasonably sure that it is unrelated to “Fashion Plate.” I checked your archives for “Blue Plate” with a singular lack of success. Since Delftware decorations are generally blue and the plates, etc., were more expensive and exclusive than the undecorated versions and therefore “special,” I wondered if this could be the origin of “Blue Plate Special.”– Charlie Fox.
Close, Grasshopper, very close. But you’re right on the mark about the lack of any connection to “fashion plate,” meaning a person who pays great, perhaps excessive, attention to wardrobe and appearance. “Fashion plate,” which first appeared in the mid-19th century, compared such people to the “plates,” high-quality printed illustrations, that appeared as advertising in magazines and store windows. This use of “plate” came from the etched or engraved printing plates that produced the illustrations, and such printed “plates” were frequently used to sell upscale clothing, etc., making “fashion plate” a synonym for the height of luxury and fashion.
“Blue Plate Special,” on the other hand, is a US phrase which connotes economy rather than extravagant luxury. It was commonly used from the 1920s through the late 20th century in mid-range restaurants and diners to mean a daily special consisting of a complete meal (usually meat, one or two vegetables, potato, etc.) sold at a reduced price. The attraction for the customer was a complete meal at a low price, and the restaurant could base the special on ingredients it either happened to have on hand (perhaps combined as meat loaf, goulash, etc.) or could obtain in quantity at a good price.
The origin of “Blue Plate Special” is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to a 1961 Merriam-Webster definition of “blue plate” as both “A restaurant dinner plate divided into compartments for serving several kinds of food as a single order” and “A main course (as of meat and vegetable) served as a single menu item.” It’s certainly possible that some restaurants used that sort of plate to serve the all-in-one daily “Blue Plate Special.” But was the original “Blue Plate Special” actually served on a blue plate, and, if so, why?
The most plausible explanation I have found of the origin of “Blue Plate Special” (courtesy of, in large part, the American Dialect Society mailing list) traces it to the Fred Harvey Company in the late 19th and early 20th century. Beginning in the 1870s, Harvey developed a chain of restaurants at stops on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad route from Chicago to Los Angeles, a line best known for the famed Santa Fe Super Chief railway liners. Harvey’s restaurants (many of which became hotels) were known for their cleanliness and consistently high quality of food, both of which had been rarities to train travelers prior to Harvey’s arrival on the scene. One of Harvey’s smartest moves was to establish a corps of “Harvey Girls,” professional workers vetted, trained and housed by the chain in dormitories overseen by “house mothers” who enforced a curfew. The rigorous standards of the Harvey chain made transcontinental train travel palatable to travelers who would have blanched at the thought just a few years earlier, and the Harvey Girls became so popular that in 1946 Judy Garland starred in “The Harvey Girls,” an MGM musical based on the chain. When dining cars were eventually added to Santa Fe trains, they were run by the Fred Harvey Company as well.
Before the advent of the Fred Harvey restaurants, travelers had to depend on what they could grab in brief stops at stations. Harvey Restaurants excelled at the quick, efficient service needed, and apparently offered a “Blue Plate Special” to travelers in a hurry. There is some evidence that the term, which had appeared at least by 1919, originally referred to the faux-Wedgewood plates with a blue design used by the Harvey chain. It’s possible, of course, that “Blue Plate Special” originated somewhere other than the Harvey restaurants, but the fame of the Harvey chain would explain how the term spread so widely so rapidly.
Look, Hope, it’s the think with feathers!
Dear Word Detective: When I first saw someone use the phrase “[he's/she's/they've] got another thing coming,” it was on the Internet, and as such I assumed it was a simple mistake on the part of the writer. But for some reason I became sensitized to the phrase, and started seeing it everywhere, even in print media. I have always known the phrase as “He’s got another think coming.” But when I polled my friends, they all seem much more familiar with the former (“thing”) than the latter (“think”). Which is it? — Michael Duggan.
Um, yes. Next question. Seriously, could you please pick a different question, perhaps something that won’t lead to inter-reader fisticuffs? A few years ago I answered a question about the idiom “all told,” which some people evidently believe, quite fervently, to properly be “all tolled.” It’s not. It’s “all told,” employing an antiquated sense of “to tell” meaning “to count, keep track of, or add up” (the same “tell” as in “tell time”). And “toll” does not and never has meant “total up.” Anyway, when the column appeared on my web site (www.word-detective.com), folks started arguing in the comments and are still slugging it out three years later. I’ve actually had to delete more than a few ad hominem attacks. Good heavens, I wrote the thing, and even I don’t care that much.
The devilish thing about the “told/tolled” squabble is that “tolled” not only sounds just like “told,” it sounds like it might be right. The same “close but no cigar” situation applies to “another think/thing coming.” It’s almost always used in the form “If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think/thing coming,” meaning “you are greatly mistaken, and circumstances are about to prove you wrong” (“If you think I’m staying in a lead-lined nissan hut with you and Grandad and a chemical bloody khazi you’ve got another thing coming,” Only Fools and Horses, BBC, 1981). It’s become such a common saying that you can often get by with just the second half (“Well, Bob’s got another think coming”).
But now it’s time to don my catcher’s mask, pith helmet and oven gloves and open the envelope. And the winner is … “another think coming.” It first appeared in print in 1898, while “another thing coming” didn’t show up until 1906. True, that’s only eight years, but the Oxford English Dictionary declares quite definitively that “another thing coming” comes from “a misapprehension of ‘to have another think coming’.”
Then again, much as I love the gang at Oxford, arguments from authority haven’t really floated my boat since junior high. There is, fortunately, a simple explanation of the “misapprehension” which leads many people to gravitate to the “another thing coming” camp.
For “another think coming” version to conform to our basic sense of English grammar, “think” would have to be a noun, not a verb. But “thing” is already a noun, so “another thing” seems natural. “Another think”? Weird.
But guess what? “Think” is a noun as well as a verb. “Think” the noun first appeared around 1834 meaning “an act or period of thinking” (“Let’s have a cigar and a quiet think,” 1891), and, by 1886, “a thought” or “an idea” (“A thing must be a think before it be a thing,” 1887). We rarely see this noun form of “think” today (outside of this particular phrase), but in the late 19th century when the phrase became popular, “another think coming” would have been understood as equivalent to “another thought coming,” i.e., a change of mind.
So why not just say “thought” in the first place? Because it would have ruined the symmetry of the phrase, which depends on the first “think” (“If that’s what you think”), a verb, matching the second “think” (“… you’ve got another think coming”), a noun. That’s what gives the phrase its zing. Substituting “thing” for that second “think” ruins that balance and really doesn’t make any sense. You can’t say “another thing” if there wasn’t a first “thing.”
Of course, if the noun form of “think” had been more popular back in the 1890s, the “thing” version wouldn’t have popped up almost immediately and be, judging by Google, far more popular today. So it’s probably too late to start a campaign to restore “another think coming” to its rightful place, but the whole story might win you a few bar bets.
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Trivia
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Unfortunately, Pokey’s vision, or lack thereof, is a problem because she follows me all over the house. She always has, probably because she was dumped in the woods to starve and is understandably insecure even after all these years. The first few weeks she was here, in fact, she slept on a futon in my office and I had to sit with her and tell her bedtime stories every night so she’d settle down and sleep. Well, I probably didn’t really have to, but I did. Anyway, she can climb stairs just fine, and so she does while I work in my office on the second floor every day. But she’s very reluctant to descend the stairs, as she really must at least a few times a day.
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