The known unknown.

Dear Word Detective: As I write, there is a lot on the news about a plane landing rather short of the runway at Heathrow in London, fortunately without any serious injuries to anyone. Pundits of various kinds are speculating about what the “black box” flight recorders will reveal. On the back of that, people are ruminating about where the phrase “black box” came from, as they are bright orange and have never been black, so far as anyone knows. Explanations so far seem to be a bit short of the target, as was the plane. — David, Ripon, England.

Well, it’s good to hear that no one was seriously hurt. But I’m still not getting on any airplanes. I actually haven’t been on a plane since 1994, and nothing I’ve heard about air travel in the years since then has made me eager to have my shoes searched. If I’m going to be treated like a criminal, I’d like it to be for doing something fun, not for flying to Newark.

If one were to conduct a survey among a large group of people, it’s likely that most of them would associate “black box” with the device you speak of, also (and more properly) known as a “flight recorder.” These devices, found on every large aircraft, monitor and record a wide variety of information about the course of the aircraft’s journey, including the craft’s altitude, speed and heading, as well as the functioning of the hundreds of mechanical and electrical systems that keep the thing aloft. The “black box” only becomes important, of course, if something goes wrong, and the devices are built to withstand the heat and impact of a crash so that the cause of the mishap can, with luck, be identified. But, as you say, the “black boxes” are routinely painted bright orange so they can be more easily found at a crash site. So why “black box”?

The reason is that the “black” in “black box” doesn’t really refer to the color of the device, but to the aura of mystery associated with it. The first known use of the term in print was back in the 17th century, when “black box” was used to mean “coffin” (“She had been in the black Box (meaning the Coffin) e’re now,” 1674). The “black” in that instance referred not to the color of the coffin, but to the “blackness” inside, both the darkness and the mystery of death itself. That aspect of “mystery” is central to “black box.” The first use of the term in regard to aircraft was in the Royal Air Force during World War II, when “black box” became airman’s slang for the mysterious boxes (actually navigational equipment) mounted in their planes. No one in the crew understood how the gizmos did what they did — they just did it without any action on the part of the crew.

The term “black box” has since come to mean any device or process whose purpose or effect is clear to the user, but whose actual means of operation are a mystery. Television sets, for instance, are “black boxes” to most consumers (that “no user-serviceable parts inside” sticker on the back drives home the point). Despite advances in neuropsychology, the human brain remains, in large part, a “black box.” And the US electoral system, quite apart from the question of electronic voting machines, remains a “black box” to many voters (not to mention, every so often, a “Pandora’s box”).

Cross at the green, not in betw…

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the phrase “to throw one under the bus”? — Brenda Varney.

Good question, and, it would seem, a timely one as well. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV these days without hearing of someone being “thrown under the bus.” Last year CNN’s Jack Cafferty declared that “Rather than face Senate confirmation hearings over his reappointment as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Bush White House has decided to simply throw General Peter Pace under the bus.” Elsewhere, the E-Commerce News warned that a new song royalty scheme would “… throw large webcasters under the bus and put an end to small webcasters’ hopes of one day becoming big.” And a letter to the New York Times cautioned the paper not to “throw doctors under the bus … as the cause of health care costs.”

“To throw someone under the bus” is defined as meaning “to sacrifice; to treat as a scapegoat; to betray,” but I think the key to the phrase really lies in the element of utter betrayal, the sudden, brutal sacrifice of a stalwart and loyal teammate for a temporary and often minor advantage. There is no retirement dinner, no gold watch, for poor schmuck “thrown under the bus.” On the contrary, the scapegoat’s name is liable to disappear from the website overnight.

The earliest solid example of “throw under the bus” found in print so far is from 1991, although a 1984 quote from rock star Cyndi Lauper where she uses the phrase “under the bus” (without “throw”) may or may not count as a sighting. Incidentally, by far the best compilation of citations for the phrase can be found, as usual, at Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary website (www.doubletongued.org).

The exact origin of “thrown under the bus” is, unfortunately, a mystery. Slang expert Paul Dickson, quoted by William Safire in his New York Times magazine column, traces it to sports, specifically the standard announcement by managers trying to get the players to board the team bus: “Bus leaving. Be on it or under it.” The phrase does seem to be popular in sports circles, but few of the citations I have seen from sports publications carry the same overtones of casual, callous betrayal that one finds in non-sporting uses.

Consequently, I have my own theory. I don’t think the “bus” was ever the team bus. As someone who spent a lot of time standing on Manhattan street corners and narrowly avoided being expunged by speeding city buses on several occasions, to me the phrase conjures up the classic urban nightmare of being pushed in front of a bus. As a way to quickly and irreversibly get rid of someone, “throwing” them under a bus in this sense would be the ideal solution and would satisfy the connotations of sudden, cold brutality the phrase usually carries. So I suspect that the phrase has urban origins, and migrated into sports world via players from big cities.

Operators are standing by, polishing their revolvers.

Dear Word Detective: I’m sitting in a “Communicating with tact and finesse” conference and our hyper-talkative instructor is regaling us with stories of her forty years of professional life. Several times during the two-day training, she described an emotional outpouring as “venting my spleen.” I’ve heard of someone “spilling their guts,” but never venting their spleen. I’m not sure if this helps, but in 1968 she worked as an operator for the very first 1-800 number in the United States, and she’s from Kansas. — Jeff.

So in 1968, while the rest of us were perfecting our tie-dyeing skills and forging new frontiers in backyard agriculture, this poor person was chained to a switchboard answering questions about hearing aids and the like? In Kansas? No wonder she has anger issues. I am, by the way, very proud that, in my many years of working in an office, I managed to avoid every single “motivational” training course my bosses came up with. Eventually management gave up on me (obviously indicating a lack of motivation on their part).

“To vent one’s spleen” means “to express one’s anger,” usually in forceful terms and/or at top volume. “Venting one’s spleen” differs from “spilling one’s guts,” which means simply “to divulge a secret, to tell the whole truth” or “to confess.”

The spleen is, of course, one of those brave little organs nestled in the human midsection (just east of the stomach, in this case), performing those thankless tasks we don’t notice until something goes wrong and our deductible becomes relevant. The spleen’s job is to act as a sort of filter for the blood, but in medieval times, when each bodily organ was thought to be the home of one emotion or another, the spleen was regarded as the seat of melancholy (a mood we now know to reside in the wallet). There was apparently a brief period later on when the spleen was suspected, improbably, of supplying humor and good cheer, but by the late 16th century it was decided that the spleen was the source of rage and ill-temper. Thus “spleen” has for several centuries been a metaphor for “anger,” “resentment” and general crankiness.

“Vent” comes ultimately from the Latin “ventus,” meaning “wind,” and as a verb means “to emit or discharge from a confined space,” as a fan “vents” cooking fumes from a kitchen. The “vent” in “vent one’s spleen” is a metaphorical use of the verb that arose in the 17th century meaning “to relieve or unburden one’s heart or soul,” a sense we still use today (“Don’t mind me, I’m just venting”).

Is that a new clipboard, Sir?

Dear Word Detective: I have always used the expression, “What are you souping me up?” or “I plan to soup him up.” In my neighborhood (Bronx, NY), this phrase meant to “butter someone up” (not necessarily lying to a person, but complimenting them, etc., so they would go along with you or do something you wanted them to do). Well, long story short, my son-in-law thinks I made this expression up and that it is not used by anyone but my family. I cannot find this expression anywhere for verification but know that I have heard this phrase used in movies, etc., and certainly by a large group of my friends and neighbors. I just need to prove this to my SIL and now my daughter who seems to believe her hubby on this matter. — Debra.

Da noive of some people. Obviously, people making up words and phrases (especially slang) is far from rare, which is why we have so many words and phrases. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in writing this column for the past gazillion years, it’s that strange words and phrases that the neighbors and in-laws have never heard are almost always “real,” well-established locutions, and frequently have histories going back hundreds of years.

On the other hand, it is true that your use of “soup up” to mean “to flatter, to curry favor with” is not recorded by any of the dictionaries or glossaries of slang I own. “Soup” has many other uses in slang, from “in the soup” meaning “in big trouble” (probably by allusion to “in hot water”) to “soup” meaning “nitroglycerin,” “fog” or “photographic developer.” In fact, one of the most popular 20th century uses of “soup” in slang was “to soup up,” meaning to increase the power of a car’s engine, a phrase which was rooted in “soup” as old racetrack slang for stimulants surreptitiously injected into horses to make them run faster.

After searching exhaustively for some mention of the “butter up” sense of “soup up” you asked about, I finally thought to search the archives of the American Dialect Society mailing list (www.americandialect.org). Bingo (maybe). Last year, linguist Benjamin Zimmer posted to the list an article he had found on college slang from The Boston Globe in 1902. One of the phrases apparently then current was “souping,” with the example “A student who endeavors to get a high stand mark by favoritism is said to be ‘souping’ the professor….” That would certainly seem to fit with your “flatter” use of “soup up.”

Some participants on the ADS list wondered whether the 1902 reference might be akin to “wine and dine,” i.e., show a good time to someone in hopes of gaining favor. It was also suggested that “soup” in the quote might have just been a typographical error for “soap,” 19th century slang for “flatter” (as in “soft soap”).

But I think the 1902 citation is legit, and that the term “to soup up” meaning “to flatter” harks back to “soup” as slang for drugs given to race horses to make them perform better. After all, there’s no drug more powerful than flattery.

Drop a dime to meet the fishes.

Dear Word Detective: In February 1998 you answered a question on the origin of the British term “grass” meaning, roughly, “to snitch.” But where did the word “snitch,” which is much older, come from? The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s of unknown origin. Any thoughts on the word’s origin or on how it came to mean “grass”? — Jackie.

Weird. Suddenly 1998 seems like a long, long time ago. It’s probably because that’s when we moved from New York City to rural Ohio, where time moves much more slowly. Incidentally, if anyone cares, I happen to know where all those 80s hairstyles ended up.

I presume that you found my column on “grass” in our online archive, but for the benefit of those not near a computer, here’s the short form. The use of “grass” as British slang for a police informer dates back to the 1930s, and is apparently a short form of the slang term “grasshopper,” meaning the same thing. “Grasshopper” itself is rhyming slang (“a secret language” in which words rhyme with a hidden meaning) for either “copper” (i.e., a police officer) or “shopper,” one who “shops” (sells) information to the police.

“Snitch” meaning “informer” is indeed an older word, dating back to the late 18th century. But the original meaning of “snitch” when it appeared a hundred years earlier was “a fillip on the nose,” a “fillip” being what we would today call a “flick” with one’s finger or a light, sudden slap of the hand. The actual origin of “snitch” is, as the OED says, unknown, but I would suspect an “echoic” origin, i.e., the word was intended to echo the action (and perhaps the sound) of a light, snapping tap on the schnozz. Such coinages are not uncommon. “Tap” and “slap,” for instance, are both of such “echoic” origins.

By about 1700, “snitch” had progressed from meaning “flick to the nose” to serving as slang for the nose itself (“As the … egg … broke on the ‘snitch’ of the Socialist candidate,” 1902), and this was the key development in the evolution of “snitch” as slang for “informer.” The nose has long been used as a symbol of intrusion into others’ business (e.g., a busybody is described as being “nosy”), and the image of a police dog or bloodhound “sniffing out” crime or tracking criminals has been a staple of popular culture for centuries. “Nose,” in fact, has been underworld slang for a spy or informer since the late 18th century (“The first issue of forged notes, it is stated by a nose (an informer), amounted to 500,” 1830). So using “snitch,” already slang for “the nose,” as slang for “an informer” would have been a natural development.

Something’s up in the underground.

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of “skullduggery”? Is it related to grave robbing as in the 1800s for medical use of cadavers? Or is it much older? — Lyn Kin.

Ah, yes, body-snatching. The practice was so widespread in the 18th century that a device called the “mortsafe” was developed, a sort of iron cage that surrounded the coffin and prevented abduction of the occupant. Body-snatchers, who sold their product to medical schools, were known as “resurrectionists,” and some, such as the infamous team of William Burke and William Hare, were not above employing murder when the natural supply ran low.

Those readers who made it past that cheery paragraph may have noticed that I let the spelling “skullduggery” (to which my spell-checker objects) stand in the question, because the combination of “skull” and “duggery” (which sounds like an archaic form of “digging”) certainly puts one in mind of grave-robbing. But the original and more common spelling is “skulduggery,” with just one “l,” and the term actually has no connection to either skulls or digging.

“Skulduggery” today means “underhanded dealings,” “trickery” or “clandestine machinations.” The term is apparently an American invention, first appearing in print (as far as we know) in 1867 (“From Minnesota had been imported the mysterious term ‘scull-duggery’, used to signify political or other trickery.”), but since that quotation is an explanation of the term, we can assume it had been in use for some time before that. Today “sculduggery” is most often associated with cloak-and-dagger intelligence agencies such as the CIA, but freelancers and domestic political operatives have made their own splashes on occasion with “skulduggery” (“Watergate was such a sensational piece of skulduggery,” The Times (London), 1980).

While “skulduggery” may be a US coinage, its roots appear to lie in Scotland. The 18th century Scots term “sculduddery” meant “indecency” or “breach of chastity,” defined at the time as meaning specifically “fornication or adultery.” While “sculduddery” may at one time have been a serious legal term in Scotland, most written instances of the term treat it as jocular slang.

In any case, just how “skulduddery” in Scotland became “skulduggery” in the US is a mystery, although the terms do share obvious overtones of secrecy and impropriety. We also have no idea of what the roots of “sculduddery” might be. On the bright side, however, we do have “skulduggery,” a great word for those times when something underhanded is afoot.

Hit the road.

Dear Word Detective: The phase “to wend one’s [merry] way” has a meaning which appears obvious — kinda. What does the verb “to wend” actually mean and can you “wend” anything other than your way? I hope you can help; I’ve not slept all day worrying about that one. — Andy.

Hi, Andy. Your boss has asked me to ask you to stop by his office before you leave for the day. Apparently the new pillow you ordered has arrived.

It’s true that “wend” is rarely found today outside the form “wend [one's] way,” and even then it’s almost always used in a jocular or sarcastic sense (“Jones, perhaps this afternoon you could wend your way back to your desk and do some actual work”). When words come to be used only in such fixed phrases, it’s usually a sign that we’re dealing with a linguistic fossil, as in the case of “deserts” in “just deserts,” derived from the French “deservir,” meaning “to deserve.” This “deserts,” meaning “appropriate reward,” was once common in English, but today is heard almost only in that fixed phrase. (Incidentally, “desert,” the very empty place, comes from the Latin “deserere,” meaning “to abandon,” and “dessert,” post-dinner sweets, comes from the French word “disservir,” meaning “to clear the table.”)

“Wend” is just such a fossil, but, as we shall see, it has some very lively relatives. The source of “wend” is the ancient Germanic root “wand,” meaning “to turn,” which also gave us “wander” (to walk while turning this way and that), “wand” (originally a flexible, easily “turned” stick), and “wind” (to gather up by turning). In Old English, “wend” originally meant “to turn” or “turn over,” and acquired a variety of figurative meanings, ranging from “to change one’s mind” to “to translate” (to “turn” from one language to another) to “to die” (“to wend away”).

By the 13th century, however, “wend” was more often being used to mean “to go or journey in a certain way or direction,” and enjoyed a brief heyday as a popular verb in this sense. But “to wend” was always in competition with “to go,” and eventually “go” won out as the more common verb, leaving “wend” to the poets. “Wend” in fact, nearly disappeared between 1600 and 1800, when it was resurrected in the fixed phrase “to wend one’s way.”

But a final indignity awaited “wend.” Its past tense and participle forms were originally “wende” and “wended” or “wend,” but by around 1200 “wente” and “went” became popular in those roles. But when “wend” began to fade from use around 1500, the word “went” was gradually adopted as the past tense form of “to go” (which is how we use “went” today). From that point on, people who wanted to use “wend” in the past tense had to use “wended,” which is nowhere near as cool as the “went” hijacked by “go.” But, in language as in life, to the victors go (not, you’ll notice, “wend”) the spoils.

Flatfoot Jack and the Fuzz Brigade.

Dear Word Detective: If you were able to get to the bottom of this one you would deserve a medal! In Australia, at least, and, I think, elsewhere, the police are referred to by criminals and other elements of society as “the Jacks.” Long hours of searching and asking questions of other sites has produced exactly zero. How can this be, when the word is so consistently used across the board? Perhaps if you cannot answer my first question, you can answer my second. — Aliki Pavlou

Medal, schmedal. Just send me one of those kangaroo things and a dozen sheep. The roo can do the dishes and the sheep can mow the lawn. They would also give Brownie the Dog (who claims to be part Border Collie) something more tractable to herd than the cats she’s been working with.

“Jacks” as slang for “police” is indeed common in the UK as well as in Australia, but virtually unknown in the US, although “Jacks” may have a close relative in US slang.

To begin at the beginning, “Jack” is what linguists call a hypocoristic (affectionate or “short”) form of the name “John,” derived from the French form of John, “Jacques.” As a slang term, “Jack” has assembled an impressive range of meanings, from “to jack up” (to increase, from the use of “jack” as a mock-personal name for a lifting mechanism) to “jack” meaning “nothing” (as in the eloquent double-negation “You don’t know jack about cars.”).

“Jack” as also been used, since at least the 16th century, as a stand-in for “the common man” or “a fellow,” as in “every man Jack needs a job.” The slang use of “Jack” specifically to mean “police officer” dates to the late 19th century (“A couple of men who were in plain clothes in the tap-room of a public-house, and were suspected by the ‘gaffer’ of being ‘Jacks’,” 1899).

This use of “Jack” to mean “police” seems to have been derived, again as a “short form,” from the use of “John” also as slang for “policeman,” and here things get interesting. This “John” was itself short for “John Darme” a joking Anglicization of “gendarme,” French for “police officer.” So “John Darme” became “John,” which became “Jack” as slang for “cop.”

But wait, it gets better. At least in Australia and New Zealand, “John Hop” was once also slang for “police” via rhyming slang, an underworld “secret language” where the phrase spoken rhymes with the hidden meaning. “John Hop,” of course, rhymes with, and signifies, “cop.” A contraction of “John Hop” (“jonnop”) is still current Australian slang for “police.”

In the US, “John” as slang for “cop” crops up only in “John Law” as the personification of the police and legal system (“We go mooching along the drag, with a sharp lamp out for John Law,” Jack London, 1906). It is possible that “John Law” harks back to the “John Darme” joke, but it may simply spring from the use of “John” in the US since the late 18th century as a personification of the average fellow (“John Q. Public,” etc.), a role now more often filled by “Joe” (as in “Joe Sixpack”).

Looking for the real fake.

Dear Word Detective: I just ran across your own old query about “fugazy.” In case it hasn’t been cleared up, see the Wikipedia entry, second paragraph. — Thomas.

Golly, has it been ten years already? Time flies when I haven’t a clue. Well, I guess it’s time for one of those “The story so far” things.

Back in 1997, I was writing a weekly column called “City Slang” for the New York Daily News, and my editor, a genially deranged specimen named Jack, had frequent opinions about what words I should explore. One day, Jack went to see the movie “Donnie Brasco,” and noticed a scene in which Johnny Depp, playing an undercover FBI agent infiltrating the mob, tells Al Pacino that a diamond Al is trying to fence is “fugazy,” by which Depp’s character means “fake.” I think Jack may actually have left the theater at that point to call and let me know my next column would be about “fugazy.”

Fast forward a few days, and I had seen the movie myself and talked to everyone I know who might know the term, including cops, experts on the Mafia, and people actually “connected” to the mob. No dice. The only “fugazy” anyone knew was Fugazy Continental, a local limousine rental firm famous for its cheesy commercials in the 1970s and 80s (and now its cheesy website at www.contlimo.com). There were, however, several internet sites that claimed the term was actually US GI slang from the Vietnam War and, properly spelled “fugazi,” an acronym for “Fouled Up (actual expletive scrubbed), Got Ambushed, Zipped In (into a body bag), the worst-case result of a bad firefight. There was also, it turned out, a punk band called Fugazi that cited the supposed GI slang term as the inspiration for its name (as reported on the Wikipedia page you mention). But the GI term, even if legitimate slang (several combat vets wrote me to say they’d never heard it), did not match the sense of “phony” the word carried in the Donnie Brasco script. And the earliest use of “fugazi” in print found so far is from 1980, long after Vietnam.

I reported all this and asked for help from my readers, and over the past ten years I have received emails with tidbits of information and possible sources, but no clear path to “fugazy” (or “fugazi”). Many folks suggested it might be related to the Italian “fugace,” meaning “ephemeral,” but the linguistic “form factors” aren’t quite right. On the other hand, it may have been filtered through Sicilian dialect and its form modified in the process. On the third hand (this is giving me a headache), some of the people connected to the film have said that they simply made up the word, meaning that “fugazy” is a fake word for “fake.” But former FBI agent Joe Pistone, the real life “Donnie Brasco” on whose book the film is based, uses “fugazy” five times in his book, so that (and other testimony by Italian-American correspondents from Brooklyn over the years) indicates that it is real mob slang. So, after ten years, the “fugazy” picture is still clear as mud.

My personal hunch is that “fugazy” is a real mob slang term, and that it began as a mocking reference to the Fugazy Continental limousine service and its low-rent “look like a rich guy” ads. A smooth operator who picks up his date in a Fugazy limousine might impress her for an evening, but sooner or later she’ll realize it’s all an act. As someone who was subjected to Fugazy ads for years, I can certainly testify that I, at least, associated the word with “fake” long before “Donnie Brasco.”

Whiplash in the library.

Dear Word Detective: I came across the word “boustrephedon” years ago in an Inspector Morse mystery. The author of that series, Colin Dexter, imbued Morse with the same passion for crossword puzzles and obscure words that he enjoyed, and could be counted on to insert an interesting or little-used term into each new book. I can safely say I have only seen this word in print two or three times in the 15-or-so years since I first read that book. I have the definition, can you supply some background? — Tisa Philbin.

Good question, and I’m so glad someone finally asked about “boustrephedon,” one of my favorite prehistoric mammals. The “boustrephedon,” which flourished during the Late Devouring Period, resembled a mastodon in many respects, but lacked the mastodon’s legendary social finesse and was shunned by other animals of the period. The roots of the boustrephedon’s name gives a clue to the problem. The Middle English word “bouse” meant “to swill alcohol, to drink heavily” (giving us the modern English “booze”), and you can guess the rest. Long story short, the sight of a four-ton hairy elephant reeling drunkenly through the primordial swamps apparently drove several other species of the day to voluntary extinction.

OK, none of that is true (except the derivation of “booze”). But “boustrephedon” is a seriously cool word. “Boustrephedon” is the writing or printing of alternate lines of text in opposite directions — left to right, then right to left, and so on down the page, as opposed to the standard left to right used in English or the right to left used in Hebrew, for instance. Boustrephedon is a very old style of writing found in the inscriptions and texts of many ancient cultures around the world.

“Boustrephedon” is a Greek word, appropriately so, since early Greek texts were written in this style. “Bou” means “cow or ox,” and “strophe” is “the act of turning,” making “boustrephedon” an adverb meaning “turning like an ox in plowing.” Fields today are still plowed, albeit usually with tractors, in such a back-and-forth fashion, but “boustrephedon” today is primarily used in a looser sense in technical contexts. Some computer printers, for instance, are said to print “boustrephedonically,” but the words, though put to paper right to left on every other line, are still spelled in the standard left to right form. And if you live in a grid-based neighborhood (such as midtown Manhattan), your mail carrier almost certainly executes his or her route in a “boustrephedonic” pattern.

With all thy getting, get out of town.

Dear Word Detective: As there is a new TV game show on called “National Bingo Night,” that got me to thinking. I imagine that “bingo” meaning “success or understanding” comes from the shout made in the party game of the same name when you win, but where does the game name “Bingo” come from? — Harry Crawford.

Is it just my imagination, or is TV increasingly coming to resemble life in the world’s most boring small town? We’ve got mortifying “talent” (or lack thereof) shows, “surrogate moms tell misfits how to dress” shows, “clean your room” shows, and several televised weight-loss tournaments, one specializing in humiliating D-list celebrities. What’s next? Extreme quilting? I’m holding out for “Bake Sale Autopsy.” That I would watch.

I actually have a bit of a soft spot for Bingo, probably because I am fond of games where I don’t actually have to think, even a little, to win. “Rock, scissors, paper,” for instance, confuses the heck out of me. “Paper wraps rock”? Is it somebody’s birthday? Rock beats paper in real life, doesn’t it? Never mind.

“Bingo,” of course, is a game played in groups, sometimes quite large, where players have cards marked with numbers arranged in a grid. When the announcer (or “caller”) calls a number that occurs on a player’s card, it is marked. The first player to mark an entire row of a card wins, and announces that fact by shouting “Bingo!”

The origin of the word “bingo” seems to pose a classic chicken-or-egg question: is the game called “Bingo” because game winners shout it, or do folks shout “bingo!” as an interjection in other situations (expressing, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it, “the sudden completion of an event, occurrence of an idea, or confirmation of a guess”) in imitation of winning the game Bingo?

Unfortunately, there is no clear winner here. The two uses (game name and interjection) appeared in print at roughly the same time, the interjection “bingo” in 1927 and the game name in 1936. An argument in favor of the game coming first is that Bingo itself is a form of Lotto, which dates back to at least the 18th century. On the other hand, “bing” has a history as indicating sudden action since the 1920s (“Now I do this kind of thing On the wing, on the wing! Bing!”, James Joyce, Ulysses). This “bing” is almost certainly “echoic” in origin, meant to imitate the sound of sudden impact or explosion. “Bingo” is also a 17th century slang term for brandy (as in “stingo and bingo,” strong ale and brandy).

My suspicion is that the interjection “bingo” came first, growing out of “bing,” and was adopted as the name of the game because (a) winning is sudden and exciting, and (b) the game resembles Lotto, making the “o” ending appropriate. But the game of Bingo certainly popularized “bingo” as an interjection, so, at least in that sense, everybody wins.

I’m still waiting for my Mister O’Malley.

Dear Word Detective: In “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” Damon Runyon refers to the main character as “a guy with no Barnaby whatever in him.” I’m stumped. What could “Barnaby” be? I can find no other explanation or citation of this phrase. Can you enlighten me? — Thomas.

Thanks for an interesting question, one which, I’ll admit, caught my eye because it invoked the name of Damon Runyon. Most folks who recognize his name today (a dwindling number, I fear) know Runyon as the writer behind “Guys and Dolls,” the great Broadway musical made into a classic film in 1955. But Runyon also wrote more than twenty books and countless stories, newspaper articles and poems, many chronicling the world of speakeasies, gangsters and gamblers in New York’s Times Square in the period during and just after Prohibition.

I tracked down Runyon’s “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” online, and it’s a classic Runyon story set largely in a Times Square speakeasy at Christmastime. The relevant passage, for our purposes, is “Anybody in town will tell you that Dancing Dan is a guy with no Barnaby whatever in him, and in fact he has about as much gizzard as anybody around, although I wish to say I always question his judgment in dancing so much with Miss Muriel O’Neill, who works in the Half Moon night club.”

So, who is this “Barnaby”? My first thought was of Crockett Johnson’s wonderful comic strip of the same name, which featured a small boy named Barnaby and his unconventional fairy godfather, the cigar-smoking Mister O’Malley (left). I suspected that by “Barnaby,” Runyon perhaps meant a credulous person likely to believe in fairies. But Johnson’s Barnaby didn’t appear until 1942, and “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” appeared in Collier’s Magazine in 1932, which would rule out that source.

A more likely explanation is that Runyon’s “Barnaby” was a modified form of the slang term “barney,” meaning “a uselessly stupid fellow” or “a dolt” (rooted in the English dialect term “barney” meaning a rigged horse race or a stupid or dishonest person). The peerless humorist S.J. Perelman used “barney” during the same period (“A flock of dumber barnies than the clerks at the Sub-Treasury I never met,” Don’t Tread on Me, 1929). Runyon was never shy about modifying vocabulary (and basic rules of grammar) to suit his characters’ voices, so “barney” becoming “Barnaby” on the narrator’s tongue is not a stretch. His use of “gizzard” in that passage, incidentally, was slang of the day for “courage” or “spirit.” So to describe Dancing Dan as having “no Barnaby” but plenty of “gizzard” in him was to say he was clever and had nerve to spare, a description borne out in the course of Runyon’s story.