readme:
Sorry about the delay in posting this issue. A cat was using the computer.

While cooling my heels in the next room (I can hardly wait to see what FedEx delivers to Mister Boots next week), I’ve been paying entirely too much attention to the End of the World and am now on first-name terms with Nouriel Roubini, Joe Stiglitz and Yves Smith (who I had been assuming until recently is a man but is rather obviously not).  Anyway, I’m finally to the point where I kinda sorta understand credit default swaps, which is pretty scary in itself and which I take as Nature’s way of telling me to go back to bed.  If anyone cares, my personal take on all this is that the US economy has been broken for a long, long time, and re-inflating the housing bubble (or conjuring up a whole new bubble) is not a productive long-term strategy.  I can’t imagine what the answer to all this might be, but I think it would be nice if it involved rebuilding our rail system.  I like trains.

Onward. Before I forget, it is no longer necessary to create an account on this site and log in to leave comments on the columns.  If you have already created an account and picked a login and  password, you might as well just go ahead and forget both of them.  The old system was confusing and never worked for a lot of people, so now anyone can wander in here and comment on anything.  The catch is that I have to moderate the comments, so it may be a day or two, or more, before your comment appears online.

Lastly, if you are not yet a subscriber to this site, please consider becoming one.

Roughly 30,000 people visit this site every month, which is great. Many of you are repeat visitors, which is wonderful. This site has been a free resource for the internet community for almost 15 years, and I love producing it.

In the beginning, this site was just an addendum to my work for newspapers and writing books. Unfortunately, the collapse of newspapers and book publishing has coincided with my increasing disability from ms, and the small income from this site has become more important than I ever would have imagined.  So if you can swing $15 per year, it would be truly appreciated.

And now, on with the show…

Whoa Nellie.

Dear Word Detective:  Growing up in New England from English and Scottish heritage, the merry-go-round was referred to in my family as riding the “Darby (or Dobby) Horses.”  Where did that term originate? — Elizabeth.

Whoa, flashback time.  I must have been to dozens of carnivals and amusement parks in my life, but nothing can compare to my first love, Playland in Rye, New York, just across the state line from where I grew up in Connecticut.  Playland, located on the shore of Long Island Sound, first opened in 1928, and retains a simplicity and innocence close to its original form (undoubtedly because it is owned and run by the Town of Rye itself).

Playland boasts two merry-go-rounds, both perfectly preserved masterpieces of the art, one the Grand Carousel with elaborately carved horses and a majestic Italian band organ.  The other, built in 1926, is one of only three “Derby Racer” carousels still in existence.  Derby Racers were merry-go-rounds where the horses actually moved forward and back (as well as up and down) as the carousel spun at three times the usual speed.  The Playland horses no longer move forward and back, but the Derby Racer ride is still too strenuous for many people (as one Playland visitor wrote online, “If you ride this thing once a day for two weeks, you’ll have abs like Chuck Norris”).

The Derby Racer ride took its name (as did the Kentucky Derby) from “Derby” as commonly used in the name of races since the founding of a famous annual horse race by the Earl of Derby in Derby, England in 1780.  The “derby” hat (also called a “bowler”) was at one time traditional racetrack head wear.

“Darby” is a common alternate pronunciation and spelling of “Derby” in England, so it’s possible that your family was using the term “Darby horses” based on the racing motif of carousels.

It’s more likely, however, that your family meant “Dobby horse,” which is an old English term for what we would call a “hobby-horse,” a wooden replica of a horse, today usually just a horse’s head on a stick used in play by children.  “Dobby” is itself an old English dialect term (a variant of the name “Robbie,” as is “hobby”) for a simple, silly person, perhaps of the sort to be amused by such a contraption.

Dobby-horses and hobby-horses were, however, originally far more elaborate wicker replicas of horses fastened around the waists of actors in theater productions in early England, allowing them to simulate riding a horse.  Thus any replica of a horse came to be known as a “Darby horse” or “hobby-horse,” and referring to a carousel as “the dobby horses” makes perfect sense.

By the way, when we refer to an activity such as stamp collecting as a “hobby,” the original sense was that the “hobbyist” is as obsessively devoted to his pastime as a small child who rides his horse’s head “hobby-horse” for hours on end.

Huh?

Dear Word Detective:  Over the years I have frequently puzzled over the origin and actual meaning (if any) of the interjection “why,” as in “Why, you dirty, rotten, no good….”  The noun and adverb seem obviously related, but the interjection does not.  Why “why?”  When I was about 20, I had a buddy, Al, with whom I would get into long, detailed, abstract conversations exploring utter nonsense at great length (mostly while drinking coffee at the Waffle House).  One evening, I made a particularly penetrating metaphysical conjecture, asking “why is so and so?”  Al, quick to trivialize my question, said, “Why not?”  That frustrated me and my inquiry.  Demanding to know why his question was better than mine, I blurted, “Why ‘Why not?’, why not ‘Why?’?”  Our discussions were always pretty deep; usually about knee deep. — Phil.

Wow.  You drank the coffee at Waffle House?  I’m surprised you both didn’t end up asking, “Why am I crawling across the parking lot in horrible pain?”  Just kidding.  I actually like Waffle House, especially their cheese-smothered hash browns.  And the world needs cheap restaurants that are open all night.

“Why” is a remarkable little word.  It might well be the quintessential “human” word, expressing as it does the search for the reasons things happen, an activity usually associated with people rather than our animal companions.  Of course, there are indications that many animals reason far more than once thought (and some humans considerably less), but human progress, such as it is, has largely been due to our reluctance to accept “because” as an answer.

Given that one of the first questions humans asked was something like “Why is that pterodactyl staring at me?”, it’s not surprising that “why” is a very old word, derived from the Indo-European root “quo,” which also gave us the useful “what” and “who.”  As an adverb, “why” is used to introduce a question (“Why did you leave?”) or, in various forms, to refer to either a question or an answer (“If I told you why, you’d hate me”).  “Why?” and “Why not?” are abbreviated uses of this adverbial form, with the remainder of the question omitted because it is obvious from the context (“Should I go?”  “Why not?”).  As a noun, “why” can refer to either a question or an answer (“The region not of life’s how, but of life’s why,” 1907).

“Why” is used as an interjection in two ways:  as an expression of surprise, often with overtones of disagreement or protest (“Why, I’m as patriotic as anyone”), or expressing emphasis (“Of course you should go. Why, I’ll drive you myself”).  These uses of “why” are of fairly recent vintage, dating to the 16th century.  The form “Why, you dirty, rotten, no good….” expresses both surprise and emphasizes the statement that follows (e.g., “… I oughta punch you in the snout”).

This use of “why” as an interjection is purely idiomatic; it really doesn’t involve “why” as the prelude to a question, and there’s no way to trace the logic, if any, of this use.  It doesn’t make sense, but many usages in English don’t.  It’s just the way we’ve used the word since the 1500s, which makes it established English usage.  So, at this late date, the answer to “Why ‘why’?” is simply “Why not?”

Besides, the last time I tried, something growled at me from the corner

Dear Word Detective:  As I was tidying up my desk, I stopped to ponder the word “tidy.” It means “neat and orderly” but it can also mean a considerable amount of something, as in “she inherited a tidy sum of money.”  Wouldn’t that be nice?  The dictionary says that it comes from “tidi” meaning “in season or healthy.”  Can you shed some light into this history? — Margherita.

Why, sure.  Incidentally, you and I are birds of a feather.  I’ve been attempting to tidy up my desk (the whole office, actually) for years, but I never get very far before the pondering sets in and my tidying grinds to an untidy halt.  I think my main problem is the books.  I get halfway down a stack and suddenly remember something especially good in one of them and go looking for it, and that’s it for the day.  Maybe I should take my glasses off before I try to tidy up.

“Tidy” is an interesting little word, and though all our modern English words have evolved at least a little over the course of the centuries, “tidy” has been more peripatetic than most.

The root of “tidy” is the prehistoric Germanic root “tidiz,” meaning “time,” more precisely “a specific portion of time.”  That Germanic “tidiz” is also the source of our modern English word “time” as well as of “tide.”  Although we think of “tide” today as meaning the cyclical rise and fall of the sea, that meaning only arose in the 14th century, and originally “tide” meant simply “time” or “season.”  This is the sense preserved in words such as “Yuletide,” meaning the Christmas season.  The reason for that side trip into “tide” is that “tidy” is essentially simply an adverbial form of “tide” in the old “time” sense.  Thus, when “tidy” first appeared in English in the 13th century, it meant “at the proper time,” i.e., “timely,” “in season” (and therefore “healthy”), or “opportune” (and therefore “excellent”).

That sense of “tidy” meaning “excellent” then evolved into meaning “of good character, brave, worthy,” but by the 19th century had been diluted to meaning “pretty good” or “pretty big,” a sense we still use in speaking of a “tidy” fortune, not billions but enough to live on comfortably.

Applied to persons, “tidy” during the 18th century meant “neat in dress or habits,” and applied to a household, “neatly arranged and in proper order” (“There was not a neater, more scrupulously tidy, or more punctiliously ordered house in Clerkenwell,” Dickens, 1840).  This is the adjective sense of “tidy” that gave us, in the 19th century, the verb “to tidy,” meaning “to make clean and orderly, to arrange neatly.”  So “tidy,” a word that originally meant “at the proper time,” came to mean “neat and clean.”

Poets in power ties?

Dear Word Detective:  When most people are looking for work they are trying to “get hired,” but when a musician or band is looking for employment, they are trying to get a “gig.”  What gives?  Where did “gig” come from? — Ron J.

Dude, get with the program.  Every job is a “gig” today.  Calling your job a “gig” is a way of saying “I’m not really emotionally invested in my job, which I find boring and soulless, and I’m only doing it so I can act/write novels/play jazz saxophone on the weekends.”  And it’s not just laconic “baristas” at Starbucks.  I’ve heard corporate lawyers describe their positions as “gigs.” Personally, if I had a job that paid a half-million a year, I’d superglue myself to that “gig.”

Considering that it’s such a short little word, you certainly get your money’s worth with “gig.”  Counting both noun and verb forms, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists and defines thirteen separate “gigs.”  Some of these “gigs” are clearly related, but the trick is figuring out exactly how.  “Gig” is a tricky little word, and, as the OED notes, “the identity of the word in all senses is very doubtful.”

The first incarnation of “gig,” around 1225, was to mean “a flighty, giddy girl,” although this sense may well have been based on an earlier sense of “gig” meaning “something that spins or whirls” (as later found in “whirligig”).  The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that “gig” may be onomatopoeic or “imitative” in origin, meaning that the word itself was meant to suggest something small that whirls.  This sense of “gig” later came to also mean “an odd person, a fool” as well as “a joke” or “a state of boisterous merriment and fun” (“in high gig”).

Another sense of “gig” appeared in the 18th century meaning “light one-horse carriage,” perhaps based on the “bouncing, whirling” sense of the earlier “gig.”  The same word was later applied to a small boat used to ferry crew to a larger ship, and a small spear used to catch fish was also called a “gig,” although the connection of this to other “gigs” is unclear.  Is it just me, or is this a lot like wandering through a darkened room, stumbling over furniture?

In any case, we now arrive at 1926 and the first recorded appearance of “gig” in print in the “musical engagement” sense.  The OED (and all other major dictionaries) label this usage as “origin unknown,” but there seem to be two theories.  One traces this use to an earlier sense of “gig” meaning “a gambling bet” (possibly from the use of a spinning wheel in some original “gig” game), which then was generalized to mean “a business undertaking,” and then applied to a musical performance.

The other, which I tend to favor, ties “gig” in the musical engagement sense to the original “spinning” meaning of the word, perhaps influenced by the Old French “gigue,” meaning “dance,” which also gave us “jig.”  Since playing at dances is how most musicians in history have made their livings, the use of “gig” to mean such a job makes perfect sense.

Blast from the past.

Dear Word Detective:  While this is not of earth-shaking importance, I hope you can “hope” me out of this quandary.  As I was growing up during the Great Depression in rural East Texas, my grandmother used the word “hope” to mean “help.”  She also used the word “help,” but maybe with a slightly different meaning.  Was this just ignorance on her part, a holdover from her Irish heritage or is there an etymological basis for this usage?  She wasn’t the only one who used “hope” in this sense; many aunts (pronounced “aints”) used the word in the same sense. –   Morgan, New Mexico.

Thanks for a great question.  It may not be earth-shaking, but it’s exactly the kind I like, namely one that leads me down an unfamiliar trail.  My initial suspicion was that this was simply a question of unusual pronunciation (on a par with “aints” for “aunts”) that had become standard in a region, but it turned out to be a more complicated and interesting story.

George Bernard Shaw is often quoted as saying that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language,” referring to the many differences between US and British vocabulary and usage.  But if  Shaw had spent a few months hitchhiking around the US (there’s a screenplay for you), he’d probably have concluded that America actually spoke at least fifty varieties of English all by itself.  American English is a patchwork of dialects, many of which can seem pretty mysterious to an outsider, and it’s not unusual to find a regional word or usage, unknown in (or long ago dropped from) the mainstream national vocabulary, alive and well outside our large cities.  Fortunately, there are scholars cataloging and preserving these regional quirks.  The most ambitious project in this field, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), now stands at four large volumes and its dedicated staff is still out there collecting.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that your grandmother was not ignorant or eccentric, and she was far from alone in her use of what sounded like “hope” to mean “help.”

Our modern English word “help,” both the noun and verb form, is very old, drawn from the Old English “helpan” (meaning “to help”), which in turn was derived from the Proto-Germanic root “kelb,” which also produced the equivalent of “help” in a number of other European languages.  The general sense of “help” has been “to aid, to assist,” with various related meanings added along the way, such as “to help” meaning “to serve food to,” which gave us our modern “helping” meaning “a portion of food.”

In modern usage, the verb “to help” follows the standard English conjugation form in number and tense (I help, she helps, they help, they helped, etc.), but it was not always so simple.  “Help” retained, in various English dialects, the old forms of irregular English verbs (as in “begin/ began/ begun” or “sleep/slept”) well into the 18th century, and the traces of this “irregularity” persist in some regional dialects, including in the American South (which, for linguistic purposes, includes Texas).  The specific archaic form of “help” that persists to this day in the region is “holpe,” “holp” or (tada!) “hope” used as various tenses of “help.”  This “hope” is indistinguishable in pronunciation from “hope” meaning “wish for.”  So your grandmother was actually saying “help,” but she was saying it in a very old way.

Doom express.

Dear Word Detective:  Why do we say that someone is “going to Hell in a handbasket”?  Why a “handbasket”?  What exactly does the full expression mean? — Sharm.

Well, it means that person is in a heap o’ trouble, on a slippery slope, circling the drain and on the road to perdition.  But before we all get to gloating, we should note that a lot of us seem to be “handbasketeers” today.  A quick search of Google News turns up more than 300 recent news media uses of “hell in a handbasket,” including this cheery note from the New York Daily News: “The economy is going down the drain, the cost of living is going through the roof, and low-income New Yorkers are going to hell in a handbasket” (July 11, 2008).  And things are no better Down Under, to judge from the Australian newspaper The Age: “It’s hell in a handbasket time, or so it seems judging by the recent rush of bad news on all fronts” (July 20, 2008).  It looks like buying stock in a handbasket manufacturer may be your best bet at this point.

I first tackled this question back in 1996, with limited success.  Unfortunately, the origin of “going to hell in a handbasket,” meaning “to deteriorate, especially rapidly,” hasn’t become any more certain in the years since.  We do know that the phrase is an American invention, and that it first appeared in print, as far as we know, in 1865:  “Thousands of our best men were prisoners in Camp Douglas, and if once at liberty would ‘send abolitionists to hell in a hand basket.’”

The question, of course, is “why a handbasket”?  Is there something particularly diabolical about handbaskets (small baskets with handles, usually used for carrying fruit or flowers) that makes them suitable for conveying one to Hades?  The answer appears to be no, since “going to hell in a handcart” seems to be a popular variant in Britain, and “going to hell in a bucket” is popular on the internet (as well as a wide variety of lame puns such as “going to hell in a Hummer” and “in a handbag”).

I think the addition of “in a handbasket” (or “handcart”) served two purposes.  The first is simple alliteration, always a good way to make a phrase catchy and memorable.  The second, the idea of being carried to hell in a basket or cart, makes the journey more concrete in the listener’s mind, since “go to hell” by itself is a worn phrase hardly anyone takes literally anymore.  The basket or cart also implies swift and irrevocable transport to doom.

Amuse yourselves.

Dear Word Detective:  Recently in reading a P. G. Wodehouse story I found him referring (twice!) to someone as “twiddling his fingers.”  I always thought that one could only twiddle one’s thumbs.  Did the British of Wodehouse’s era discover some new talent?  And what does “twiddle” mean anyway? — FJW.

Oh, no, there are all sorts of things one can twiddle.  As a child, I used to pass hours twiddling my toes, my fingers and my ears, sometimes simultaneously.  And when I worked in an office, I mastered the art of twiddling a pencil like a miniature drum major’s baton, a pastime I truly enjoyed until my officemates began to wonder aloud if said pencil would fit up my nose.  I still like to twiddle Brownie the Dog’s ears.  I find this enormously entertaining but she doesn’t seem to appreciate it, even when I show her how funny it looks in the mirror.  And no, I don’t plan to grow up anytime soon.

One of the things I love about the folks who run the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is their ability to lend an air of solemnity to definitions of even the silliest words in English, including “twiddle”: “To cause to rotate lightly or delicately; to turn (anything) about, especially with the fingers; to twirl; to play with idly or absently; also, to adjust or bring into some place or condition by twirling or handling lightly.”  Is it just me, or does that make “twiddling” sound like something you’d actually need lessons to do?

The roots of “twiddle” are, thankfully, both simple and poetic.  “Twiddle” is  onomatopoeic (or “echoic”) in origin, the sound of the word itself intended to evoke the light, twirling action of “twiddling,” and (to quote the OED again) “intended to combine the idea of ‘twirl’ or ‘twist’ with that of trifling action, as in ‘fiddle,’ ‘piddle.’”  In the case of “twiddling” one’s thumbs, the usual routine is to interlock the fingers of your hands while resting them in your lap or on a surface in front of you, and twirl your thumbs around each other. “Twiddling one’s thumbs” is such a universally-recognized expression of extreme boredom that it would almost certainly get you thrown off a jury if the judge caught you doing it.

“Twiddling one’s fingers,” however, is open to interpretation.  Your thumbs are, of course, legally fingers, so perhaps Wodehouse simply meant the standard gesture of boredom.  Then again, it is easy to add one’s index fingers to the mix, so maybe that’s what he meant.  By the way, I have just now tried it with all my fingers simultaneously and I seem to have hurt myself, so there are, apparently, limits to “twiddling.”

Incidentally, “piddle,” to which “twiddle” is linked by the OED, meant originally “to fool around, to work ineffectually,” and is also “echoic” in origin.  “Fiddle,” however, while also used to mean “to play with” or “to act frivolously,” was originally a perfectly serious synonym for “violin” and actually comes from the same medieval Latin root (“vitula”) as “violin” itself.

Scratch that.

Dear Word Detective:  Every now and again it is my utmost pleasure to “run across” your website.  At this juncture I am looking for the origin of the term “scott free” and, alas, you do not have the answer.  I hope that you will come through for me soon. — ncarolinafran.

Well, there you go.  More evidence that I’m just a digital wallflower, waiting patiently by the side of the web, hoping that strangers will happen by my rickety little stand and read my glittering prose, perchance to tell their friends and someday propel me to Hollywood fame and fortune as the George Clooney of etymology.  As a marketing strategy, this plan has clearly not caught fire.

As for your question, however, I can steal the slogan of the Staples office supply chain and declare “Yeah, we’ve got that.”  I actually did a column on this question back in 1999, which is, even as we speak, snoozing peacefully in my online archives at www.word-detective.com.  But 1999 was a long time ago, so it can’t hurt to revisit the topic.

The reason you didn’t notice the answer to your question in our archives is that the phrase is properly spelled “scot-free,” with only one “t.”  That correction, of course, raises the next question many folks have about “scot-free,” which is its relation to Scotland (and the Scots who live there).  There isn’t one.  Really.  No connection whatsoever.

The “scot” in “scot-free” is an English word taken from Old Norse, where it meant “tax or assessment.”  In the Middle Ages in England, each town levied a general tax on residents which was called the “scot.”  If for some reason a citizen was ruled exempt from the tax, he was said to  go “scot-free.”  This tax-related literal sense of the phrase first appeared in the 13th century.  But by the 16th century “scot-free” was being used in its more general modern sense of “exempt from punishment, responsibility or blame” (“She should not, for all the trouble she has cost you, go away scot-free,” 1740).

Speaking of words that sound as if they must have something to do with Scotland but don’t, “scotch,” meaning “to abruptly deflate or disprove” a rumor or theory, is another. This “scotch” comes from the Old French word “escocher,” meaning “to cut.” In this case it meant to “cut out” or destroy a rumor. It is, in fact, the same non-Scottish “scotch” as is found in the name of the children’s game “hopscotch,” referring to the playing lines cut into or drawn on the ground.  And while we’re at it, butterscotch candy doesn’t come from you-know-where. It’s called that because it is made from butter and used to be cut (“scotched”) into small pieces.

Please don’t foam.

Dear Word Detective:  We are renovating our 1926 beach cottage in Laguna Beach.  Two of our workmen have used the word “screed” for a long straight board used to ensure the flatness of a surface.  Is this word the same as the word used for a “lengthy speech” or “harangue”?  If so, what is the connection? — Jim Brown.

“Screed” is a great word, isn’t it?  Of course, like many great words, “screed” is a heavily loaded term, which is what makes it so much fun.  Used in its primary modern meaning of “a very long speech or piece of writing, often in a ranting or polemical tone,” it signals that the writer who labels a speech or essay a “screed” was less than convinced by the “screed” in question.  A reader complains, for example, to the Los Angeles Times about a recent op-ed (“It’s hard to know where to start responding to Benkof’s hate screed, disguised as it is in the cloak of reasonable argument”), while over in Austin the newspaper takes to complaining about its own readers (“Among the anonymous postings was one screed that accused the upset Hazy Hills residents … of all sorts of bad things without supporting evidence”).  The use of “screed” to characterize an opponent’s words is thus a vivid illustration of the first rule of civilized political discourse, which is, of course, “I am passionate and right, but you are nuts and wrong.”

One might imagine, given the contentious connotation of “screed” applied to words, that the sort of “screed” your contractors employ took its name from the use of such a long, flat board to whack one’s opponents.  But the actual origin of the word is, fortunately, perfectly peaceful.

The root of our modern “screed” is the Old English “screade,” meaning “a piece cut off.”  The same root also gave us our modern English words “shred,” “scroll” and “shroud.”  In fact, “screed” is regarded as simply a variant form of “shred,” which preceded “screed” in English by about three centuries.

When “screed” first appeared in English in the 14th century, it meant simply “a fragment cut or torn from the main piece” or, a bit later, “a strip of torn cloth.”  This sense evolved over the centuries to include the use of “screed” to mean “a strip of land” or “a border,” as one might add a fancy border to a piece of cloth or paper.  In the late 18th century, this sense of “long strip of something” produced “screed” meaning “a long list, a lengthy discourse or diatribe, or a gossiping letter,” and our modern polemical “screed” was born (“Mr. Manson threatens a long screed of poetry on the subject,” 1812).

At about the same time, however, the earlier “long strip” sense of “screed” was put to use by plasterers, who applied the term to a variety of devices, including long, straight strips of wood, that they used to ensure that a plastered surface, such as a wall, was perfectly even.  In the building trades today, “screed” is used for nearly any kind of device or arrangement used to ensure that the finished result is level (“A screed of cement and sand is laid later to provide a smooth and level surface for whatever floor finish is to be used,” 1956).

Are we there yet?  HuhHuhHuh?

Dear Word Detective:  My mother is fond of calling the nervousness one feels the night or day before a trip as being “journey proud.”  She says it is a Virginia (especially Richmond) anachronism, but I cannot find its derivation anywhere.  I would appreciate your help on this matter. — Clay Witt.

Good question.  I hadn’t heard “journey proud” before, but it’s a great expression, and I certainly know the feeling.  I remember as a kid being so wound up the day before we went on vacation that I couldn’t sleep.  As a matter of fact, I don’t remember sleeping once we were on the road, either.  I do remember sneaking over to the motel room window at 3 a.m. to watch the trucks roar by.

“Journey proud” is indeed considered archaic today, but it’s not all that ancient.  As recently as 1972, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) reported that the expression was said to be a common “Old South” locution still occasionally heard.  But “journey proud” must have been more widespread in the US at one point, because the earliest citation for it in DARE, from 1891, is “I have heard New Englanders speak of a person as ‘journey-proud,’ meaning that one is so elated on the eve of a journey as to care nothing for food.”  The phrase was also common in England during the same period (“In Cheshire, .. a village good-wife, describing her farm-labourer husband’s first visit to Manchester, declared that he was ‘that journey-proud that he couldn’t eat a bite o’ breakfast’,” 1908).

The “journey” in “journey proud” means simply “trip,” but the “proud” differs slightly from the normal meaning of the word, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “Feeling pleasurable satisfaction over an act, possession, quality, or relationship by which one measures one’s stature or self-worth.”  The “proud” in “journey proud” is an older English dialect sense lacking the normal self-congratulatory aspects of “proud” and meaning simply “very pleased and excited” (“She will be proud to have her tooth stop aching,” 1895).  There is, however, a secondary meaning of “journey proud,” which first appeared in the 1950s, which employs the modern “I’m wonderful” sense of “proud” and means “conceited because one has traveled.”

“Journey,” by the way, is an interesting word in itself, derived from the Old French “journee,” meaning “a day’s work or travel,” and ultimately from the Latin “diurnus,” meaning “of one day” or “daily.”  A “journey” was thus originally the distance that could be traveled in one day, or, later, in a specified number of days (“a three day journey”).  This original “by the day” sense of “journey” persists in the term “journeyman,” meaning a worker who has served an apprenticeship and works for hire by the day.  The term thus has nothing to do with wandering from town to town looking for work.

Lemme outta here.

Dear Word Detective:  Where did the words “hoos-cow” and “pokey” originate as slang for jail? — Siobhan Taaffe.

Oh boy, jail.  Also known as the slammer.  The tank. The big house.  The clink.  The joint.  The Graybar Hotel.  The cooler. Stir. Inside.  Gosh, you’d never guess that the US has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, would you?  So it’s not very surprising that we have so many slang synonyms for “correctional institution.”  By the way, every time I hear the euphemism “correctional institution,” I picture a training school for proofreaders, which is ironic because I once worked with two proofreaders who were eventually dragged away by the FBI for insider trading.

Much as I like the spelling “hoos-cow” (“Hoos cow is that in the cafeteria?”), the standard form of the word is “hoosegow” (although there are more than a thousand Google hits for “hooscow,” so that may change).  “Hoosegow” is a souvenir of our close connection to Mexico, a modified form of the Mexican Spanish word “juzgado,” meaning “jail.”  The original meaning of “juzgado,” interestingly, was “tribunal” or “court,” and the word is derived from the Latin “judicare,” meaning “to judge” (and from which our “judge” and “judgment” also derive).  “Hoosegow” first arose in the the western US, probably in the 19th century, although the first occurrence of the word in print found so far is from 1908.

“Pokey” as slang for “jail” dates to early 20th century America and is actually a variant form of “pogey,” a 19th century English word for “poorhouse” or “welfare hotel.”  The roots of “pogey” are largely a mystery, but the word may be related to the adjective “poky,” an interesting word in itself.  The original sense of “poky,” in the 18th century, was, logically, “something that pokes,” i.e., projects or points out (as in a “poke bonnet,” a style of the day that featured a prominent brim).  In the 19th century, the word came to mean “cramped or confined,” as a small room might make a resident feel “poked at” by the walls.  Since jail cells are not known for their generous elbow room, this is probably the connection between “poky” (cramped) and “pokey” (jail).

“Poky” also acquired the meaning of “dull, narrow-minded and slow” here in the US, probably from that same sense of “cramped.”  “Poky” today is a useful little word that can be applied to anything from horses (“Plop, plop, plopity plop… The feet of Father Ready’s poky old saddle horse slowly ate upon the weary miles,” 1932) to computer programs (“HyperCard is quite poky when running on a standard 1-megabyte Mac Plus, even from a hard disk,” 1989).