Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Well, there you go.  No sooner had I recovered from the craven clam murder attempt detailed in last month’s missive than I was laid low by the Flu from Hell, and I’m still not over it.  Bleh.  No, I’m not sure what kind it was.  We don’t cotton to doctors out here in the boonies.  If one of our kin takes sick, we just carry ‘em out into the woods, tie ‘em to a big rock, and hope the coyotes don’t get ‘em afore spring.

Anyway, I know it’s March now, but I’m still calling this the February edition because, barring some further catastrophe, I intend to put up another batch later this month.  This batch does not, however, have any of the usual odd illustrations in it, so you’ll have to get out your Crayolas and draw your own on your monitors.

Onward.  This is a real long shot, but here goes.  If anyone out there has a laptop computer of semi-recent vintage (more recent than 2005 or so) that you’re not using (but which does work, and has a CD-R or DVD drive), please consider popping it in a box and sending it to P.O. Box 1, Millersport, OH 43046.  The one I’ve been trying to use was made in — I kid you not — 1998, and it just doesn’t cut it (if it ever did, which I doubt).  The operating system is irrelevant, since I’d probably just replace it with Linux.  If somebody has an aging IBM Thinkpad, that would be awesome (cause I love that little pointer thingy), but anything functional would be appreciated.  Even that little netbook you got carried away and bought but don’t really like….  Or someone with pots of money could buy me something like this.

There’s actually a good reason for this request, having to do with my mobility (or lack thereof).  I spend a lot of time climbing up and down stairs during the day, and past a certain point it becomes very painful, so it would be nice to be able to do some work downstairs.  It would also be helpful to have when the lights go out and we have to pile in the car and drive 20 miles to the Caribou Coffee place with wifi so we can send our columns to the newspapers.

Speaking of which, the inability of the local electric co-op to keep the power on in anything more than a stiff breeze made last month’s snow-a-thon a real nailbiter around here.  The lights actually went out four or five times one night for a minute or two at a time, which usually means they’re about to conk out for good, but they miraculously stayed on.  If the power goes out, we lose lights, heat, water and most of the stove, and, since this house, dating to the 1860s, is insulated with horse hair, it quickly becomes very cold in here.

When we first moved out here, the power company came by at least once every summer to trim limbs and check the lines.  Mirabile dictu, power outages were very rare.  That kind of maintenance stopped around 2004, and now it’s not unusual to have outages ranging from two hours to two days several times per year.  People with the means to do so are installing whole-house generating systems, and I realized last month that something like that would change the way I look at snow.  Growing up in Connecticut, we had far more snow than Ohio gets, plus some pretty serious storms coming off the Atlantic.  But we never lost power, except for once when the entire Northeast went dark in the mid-60s.  So storms were kinda neat.  But out here, we spend all night waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Not fun.

We did end up losing half of a very large tree last month right outside my office window.  It split right down the trunk during one storm, with a huge limb missing my office window by inches and nearly smashing the air-conditioning unit outside the kitchen window.  I happened to be sitting on the couch in front of my office window when it broke off.   Interesting.  Then again, that tree has had a grudge against me for years.  It was the one struck by lightning a few years back, which traveled down the trunk, became ball lightning when it hit the ground, and then floated about ten feet across the yard and zapped me.  About six months later I began to exhibit the first really serious symptoms of MS.  Coinkydink?  I doubt it.

Speaking of rural drama, I ventured outside (always a bad idea) one morning a few weeks ago when the wind was blowing razor-edged snow at about 30 mph and the wind chill was down around 2 degrees. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small cat making its way across the snow toward the house, which is very unusual because most feral cats around here take off as as soon as you step out of the door.  This one, however, seemed oblivious to my presence and headed over to the leeward side of the house near a vent into the crawlspace under the front porch.  There it huddled against whatever small warmth was coming from the house.

I’ve become used to seeing feral cats on our land over the years, and I’ve developed the ability to resist the impulse to invite them inside for a cup of joe and a better life.  We have more cats than we need already (though I really can’t think of one I’d be willing to give up).  But this cat was clearly starving and in distress, so I went inside and brought it out some cat food (shoot me now), of which it ate a bit, still showing no fear of me.  Then it put its head down and seemed to pass out.  I poked it gently with my boot and it didn’t react.  At all.  It sure looked like it was dying.

Crunch time.  It’s one thing to look past a feral cat twenty feet away in warm weather.  It’s another to watch one dying in front of you.

So I got a cat-carrier out of the garage, picked up the little critter by the scruff of its neck (still no reaction), carried it into the house, and put it in the bathroom off the kitchen.  I left it in the carrier and brought it some more food, but it was unresponsive.  It clearly had pretty serious hypothermia, but all I could do was keep it warm and hope for the best.

A couple of hours later, it seemed more animated and interested in food and water, so I made it a little bed next to the sink and reached into the carrier, intending to gently pull it out.  Bad idea.  The little darling had apparently thawed sufficiently to recognize me as its mortal enemy, and as soon as my hand was within six inches of its flank, it went completely berserk and did its best to bite off the tip of my right index finger.  Yow.  Blood everywhere, a la the old Julia Child SNL skit.  My finger took weeks to heal.

Long story short, Miss Psycho Cat eventually calmed down a bit and lived in the bathroom for two weeks, and is presently residing in the corner of my office in a little pink cat bed we bought her at Target.  She lets us pet her if we are very, very quiet and move slowly.  I doubt that she was truly feral.  She used the kitty litter from day one, she plays with cat toys, and she isn’t freaked out by the presence of other cats.  I think she was somebody’s cat and then spent some months, or longer, out there on her own.  I suspect she’s actually a sweet little cat.  But I have a history of believing a lot of stupid things.

What else … I was sitting in the car at the local Post Office a few weeks ago when an SUV with handicapped tags pulled into the lot and a 60-ish man got out and opened the back hatch.  He reached in and pulled out one of those new-style fancy collapsible walkers, and, as he unfolded it, I noticed that it was festooned with all sorts of doodads ranging from things that looked like saddlebags (handy, I suppose) to a cupholder (of course) and a long leather bag-like thing I couldn’t identify hanging off the right-hand grip.  I was paying this level of attention because I now have to use a cane to walk when we go out, so, as an official gimp, I have a newfound interest in mobility technology.  (I actually have two old-style walkers out in the garage, inherited from Kathy’s mother, but they’re the uncool silvery aluminum old-lady kind. No way.)

So then the guy turns back to his vehicle, opens a hatch in the floor of the cargo compartment, reaches in, and pulls out a humongous revolver, I mean Dirty Harry .44 Magnum humongous, sticks it in what I now realize is the large leather holster on the right grip of the walker, and toddles off. In broad daylight in small town Ohio. On Federal property, no less. Whoa.

I don’t have a problem with guns, generally. Everyone out here has guns. But what’s the plan here? Not gonna take any more guff from the village pharmacist? Planning to settle a score at the Elks Lodge?  Or just free-range paranoid? This is, of course, a town that drove the Pakistani-owned Quickee-Mart out of business because they were convinced that the owner (a nice guy, in my experience) was a terrorist sleeper agent. Just another day in Weirdville, I guess.

And that’s the news from East Ratsass, where all the pizza is soggy, all the animals have attitude, and the elements themselves conspire against you.  And now, on with our show….

And they can’t dance worth beans.

Dear Word Detective:  I did it the other day, and boy, did it hurt!  What is the derivation of to “bark your shins”? — Elspeth.

That’s a darn good question, which raises another question, which is why it took me a rather long time to get around to answering your question.  Well, I’ve been busy raising a couple of dogs, with all the running around to soccer practice, dance classes and orthodontist’s appointments that entails.  But now that Brownie and Pokie are in college, I can finally read some of my back email, and here we are.  Just kidding.  They’re really just chewing up the carpet and barking at trees.  So I guess the orthodontist was a real waste.

You’ll notice that I cleverly managed to slip the verb “to bark” into that paragraph, although I’m not sure how you’d write about dogs and not mention “barking.”  It’s what they do.  In fact, I once floated a proposal (which was quickly shot down) to change Brownie’s name to “Doorbell” (a duty she performs admirably) and Pokie’s to “Barkie” (because she will bark at changes in the barometric pressure).

The sort of “bark” that dogs (and certain other animals, such as foxes) make, what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “to utter a sharp explosive cry,” is, as you might expect, a very old word, derived from the Old English word “beorcan.”  Many etymologists believe that the origin of “bark” lies in an ancient modification of the verb “to break,” conveying the sense of a sharp, sudden sound evocative of something being violently broken.  We also use “bark” in a figurative sense to mean “to speak forcefully and harshly,” as a drill sergeant might “bark” orders.

The question, of course, is whether the “bark” of a dog is in any way connected to the “bark” of your question, i.e., “to scrape or rub off the skin, especially from the shins; to abrade one’s skin.”  The answer is no.  While it is theoretically possible to “bark” your shins on an unusually coarse-haired dog, and the dog may “bark” at you when you do, the two “barks” are unrelated.  The injure-your-shin verb “to bark” comes from the “bark” one finds on trees (more specifically, as the American Heritage Dictionary says, “the tough outer covering of the woody stems and roots of trees, shrubs, and other woody plants”).  “Bark” in this “tree skin” sense was derived from the Old Norse “borkr,” and first appeared in English around 1300.

As anyone who has ever actually hugged a tree (don’t ask) knows, the bark of the average  tree is remarkably abrasive, and even brushing against a tree with your bare skin can be extremely painful.  But “barking” in the “scrape” sense didn’t come from people running into trees.  “Barking” has also meant “removing the bark from a tree” (an easy way to kill an unwanted tree) since the 16th century, and “bark” has been used as slang for “the human skin” since the 18th century (“With the ‘bark’ all off his shins from a blow with a hockey stick,” 1876).  So it is the person’s “bark” — the skin — that is being abraded and removed, much as the bark of a tree might be stripped.

The opposite of house-itosis?

Dear Word Detective:  While enjoying a cup of tea with several of my poet friends, someone described her kitchen as being “clean as a whistle,” at which point one of the women (she’s a Brit), wondered where the expression came from.  Someone suggested that it meant all impurities were blown out.  I volunteered to find out what it meant by going to my word detective guru (you).  Any ideas? — Bea.

Gee, it must be nice to live where folks actually wonder aloud about word origins.  Don’t get me wrong; living in the country definitely has its advantages.  It’s quiet, except for the nearly constant gunfire and frequent meth lab explosions.  The air is clean, if you don’t count the toxic clouds emitted by the paper mill a few miles upwind of us.  Best of all, you get to meet all sorts of wildlife, only a few of which want to kill you.  But I must admit that the conversational arts are not exactly at high tide around here.  I’m beginning to suspect that these groundhogs don’t even speak English.

Still, most of these critters are very clean; clean, one might say, as a whistle, especially the groundhogs, which are also known as “whistle pigs” for their ability to carry a tune.  Human beings, however, are generally better whistlers, and “whistling,” producing a clear, pure musical sound by blowing through one’s pursed lips, is probably humankind’s oldest musical skill.  The word “whistle” is, not surprisingly, very old, and was formed in imitation of the sound of whistling itself.  “Whistle” as a noun, of course, can refer both to the act or sound of whistling and a mechanical apparatus for generating a whistling sound.

As a nearly universal human skill, “whistling” has produced a dizzying number of idioms, from “to wet one’s whistle” (to take a drink of alcohol, likening the mouth or throat to a whistle) to “dog whistle politics” (comparing a narrowly-focused coded political message to a high-pitched whistle used to call dogs) to “go whistle” (meaning “get lost”).

“Clean as a whistle” first appeared in print in the early 18th century, meaning “completely, absolutely, leaving no trace” (“A first rate shot; …head taken off as clean as a whistle,” 1849).  The sense of “pure, unsullied, spotless” that your friend used came a bit later, as did such variations as “sharp as a whistle” and “slick as a whistle.”

It’s probable, however, that the original phrase was actually “clear as a whistle,” referring to the ability of a whistle to be heard in a noisy environment, and that the initial meaning was “definitely” or “unambiguously” (“I heard you clear as a whistle, Boss”).  The mutation to “clean as a whistle” (using “clean” in the sense of “sharp and definite” found in “clean cut”) with the meaning “completely, absolutely” was a short jump from that “definite” meaning.  “Clean” was then reinterpreted in popular usage to mean “spotless,” and “clean as a whistle” came to be used to mean “perfectly clean.”

An interesting parallel to “clean as a whistle” may be found in the phrase “clean as a hound’s tooth,” which has been used to mean “spotless” since about 1900.  Hounds are not known for their oral hygiene, of course, so it’s likely that this “clean” originally meant “sharp,” just as in “clean as a whistle.”

They shoot azaleas, don’t they?

Dear Word Detective:  I am a little confused as to the meaning of the expression “take the rag off the bush.”  It seems like it means “a prayer is answered” or “one that never got answered” or, in some contexts, it means the same as “if that don’t beat all.”  The last one seems to fit best.  What is the most correct? — Darb.

That’s an interesting question, and by “interesting” I mean “infuriating.”  Seriously, this one gave me a headache.  But after spending an entire evening grappling with this phrase, I think I finally have it pinned to the mat.  So fasten your seat belts, kids, because it’s going to get a bit complicated as we attempt to unscrew the inscrutable “take the rag off the bush.”

The literal answer to your question is the easy part.  To “take the rag off the bush” means  “to excel, to be the best or most triumphantly successful.”  Used in an ironic sense, it means “to be breathtakingly outrageous” or, in the current vernacular, “to take the cake” (“You do take the rag off the bush, boy,” R. Coover, 1977).  It can also mean “to put an end to an argument or contest through overwhelming victory.”  This is actually the sense in which the phrase is used in one of its earliest appearances in print, in 1810 (“This ‘takes the rag off the bush’ so completely, that we suppose we shall hear no more … about the Chesapeake business.”)  “To take the rag off the bush” is definitely of US origin, and was probably first used in the 18th century.

That US origin is important, because if you go looking for the origin of “take the rag off the bush” on the internet, you’ll find rather long and involved explanations that trace the phrase to Ireland or Scotland and a folk tradition of tying rags to bushes near religious shrines.  It is said, for instance, that at a shrine to Saint Patrick in Ireland emigrants bound for America in the 18th and 19th centuries tied bits of cloth to a nearby bush to solicit Saint Patrick’s favor in their journey and future endeavors.  If the cloth disappeared from the bush soon after the person set sail, it meant that good fortune had been granted (or, according to other accounts, that disaster had struck).

This story about rags and bushes is, in itself, true.  There is a long tradition in Celtic (and other) cultures of “rag bushes,” often located at religious shrines or wells known for their healing powers, and supplicants do indeed tie bits of cloth to these bushes or trees to solicit aid or health. At medicinal wells and springs, for instance, it is said that as the “rag” weathers away, the affliction itself will fade.

But these “rag bushes” are almost certainly not the source of “take the rag off the bush.”  For a far more likely source, we turn to the American frontier and its nearly omnipresent guns.  It was common in the 18th and 19th centuries to hold impromptu shooting matches where the target was simply a rag hung on a bush in the distance.  A good shot would hit the rag, making it visibly jump.  A great shot would literally “take the rag off the bush,” putting an end to at least that round of the contest with an overwhelming success.

Making this sort of shooting match the likely source of “take the rag off the bush” is the fact that it fits perfectly with “triumphant success” sense of the earliest examples we have of the phrase in print.  One of these examples, from 1843, specifically refers to a shooting match, and none of them mention religious shrines.  There is, on the other hand, no scenario I can imagine involving “rag bushes” that would produce the “stunning triumph” or “take the cake” meanings of “take the rag off the bush.”   Finally, although the phrase has been widely used in the US for at least two centuries, it is virtually unknown outside the US.

The red stuff.

Dear Word Detective:  Where did the word “ketchup” originate? — Kana.

Good question, and I’m glad you asked it, because you’ve just reminded me that we’re out of ketchup around here.  (We seem to use the spelling “catsup” on lists at our house, but we’ll get to the various spellings in a moment.)  I also just realized that I answered this same question back in 1994, in one of my very first columns.  At three columns per week for the ensuing 15 years, that’s 2,340 columns ago, proving that I am nothing if not remarkably persistent.  Ad astra per caffeine, as we say.

OK, back to work before I become roadkill on Memory Lane.  I read a filler item in a newspaper a few years ago which cheerfully announced that salsa-in-a-jar had replaced catsup as America’s favorite condiment, but I didn’t believe it then and I still don’t.  I can’t imagine substituting salsa for catsup on the foods real Americans love, like cottage cheese.  OK, that was just Richard Nixon’s thing as far as we know, but dumping salsa on onion rings is, to me, like putting pineapple on pizza.  Sure, people do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

The funny thing about catsup is that there doesn’t seem to be any strict definition of the stuff.  The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, defines “ketchup” (apparently the preferred spelling in Britain) as “A liquor extracted from mushrooms, tomatoes, walnuts, etc., used as a sauce.”  Mushrooms and walnuts?  Might as well throw in some tree frogs and minced wildebeest.  Here in the US of A, we make our catsup from tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, spices, and whatever’s on sale at the local chemical plant.  But according to Wikipedia, early American forms of catsup were made from oysters, mushrooms and other odd things, and more akin to Worchestershire sauce than our familiar thick “tomato” catsup.  There’s apparently something in the human spirit that can’t resist messing with catsup, because in 2000, the H.J. Heinz company, the world’s largest producer of catsup, introduced a line of brightly colored (including green, purple and pink) catsups.  They also proved that “flop” isn’t just the sound catsup makes when it hits the plate.

None of that weirdness can, however, hold a candle to the original catsup, which came to us from China via Malaysia, and was known as “ke-tsiap” or “kechap,” meaning roughly “fish sauce.”  Indeed, this “kechap” was from pickled fish and brine, and used as a dipping sauce.  Forms of this stuff first made it to Britain in the late 17th century, and as the ingredients varied over the next two centuries, the name blossomed from simply “ketsup” to “catchup” (still considered acceptable) to “catsup.”  All of these, of course, are nothing but phonetic approximations of the Chinese term, and none is more “proper” than the others (although Heinz spells it “ketchup”).  Interestingly, even folks who like to spell it “catsup” generally pronounce the word as “ketchup,” and if you encounter a person who insists on saying “cat-sup,” you’re in the presence of someone who would probably be happier if it were still made from pickled fish.

Finders keepers.

Dear Word Detective:  I recently finished a crossword puzzle containing the answer “glom.”  I was able to determine this from having seen it in previous puzzles.  It is, apparently, a slang word for “seize.”  I would have guessed “grab” or “nab,” if they fit the puzzle.  Is “glom”  referring to “seize” in the context of a car engine seizing up after running out of oil?  I have never encountered this word outside of a crossword puzzle. — Anthony Goldstein.

That’s a good question, and I’m sorry it took me a while to get around to answering it.  I get so many questions that I often put aside the good ones for later use.  Unfortunately, I also sometimes forget to look at my “to do” file.  For a year or two.  And then I’m afraid to.  I have the horrible feeling that there are questions in there about things Monica Lewinski said to Ken Starr back in 1998.  Oh well, sic transit gloria mundi.  It’s a good thing the Romans didn’t have email, or I’d be apologizing to them, too.

Your question jumped out at me way back when because I was surprised that you had never run into the word “glom” before.  I remember hearing and using it back in the late 1960s, and while I wouldn’t say that it’s a core element of my vocabulary, I still probably use it at least every few months.  It also seems fairly popular in the media, and a search of Google News  produces current examples from sources as disparate as The Huffington Post (“And you remember when conservatives thought stopping people from ‘glomming’ off government programs was a good thing.”) and Science Daily (“The nanoparticles ‘glom onto the flies,’ Rand noted while watching a video of flies in the test tubes.”).

In any case, “to glom” does mean, as you gathered, “to grab, snatch, seize or steal,” and it’s usually used in the phrase “to glom on to.”  It’s used, of course, to mean literally “to steal” (“I learnt that stealing clothes from a clothes-line is expressed in Hoboland by the hilarious phrase, ‘Glomming the grape-vine’,” 1925).  But “glom” is also often used in a more figurative sense to mean “to appropriate preemptively” (“I got to the wedding early, but the groom’s drinking buddies had already glommed on to all the good seats”) or “to attach oneself to another person with unwarranted familiarity” (“I tried to talk to Debbie at the party, but some dork had glommed on to her and was talking her ear off”).

There are two surprising facts about “glom.”  One is that it is a fairly old word, first recorded in English in 1907, albeit with a slightly different spelling (“We … discovered that our hands were gloved. ‘Where’d ye glahm ‘em?’ I asked. ‘Out of an engine-cab,’ he answered,” The Road, Jack London).  The other is that “glom” has a distinguished pedigree.  It’s simply a form of the Scots word  “glaum,” meaning “to snatch,” which in turn comes from the Gaelic “glam,” meaning “to grab or clutch.”  It’s still considered slang in English, so it’s probably best not to use it in memos to your boss (“Third Quarter widget sales are slightly down due to Acme glomming on to our Panamanian market share”), but for everyday use, “glom” is a very handy little word.

Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Dear Word Detective:  I caught myself saying “If you catch my drift” in a conversation I was having a while back, and then began to ponder if even I was “catching my drift.”  I was wondering if you could divine the origin of this phrase, which has been used as a cue to look for innuendo or intended meaning since I can remember. — Tom.

That’s a good question.  I try to keep track of my own drift in conversations, but it’s not always easy.  The other day, for instance, I had a conversation with our neighbor about an unruly honeysuckle bush that sits on the property line between us.  I ambled away from our friendly chat believing that I had been perfectly accommodating and agreeable.  But upon reporting the conversation to my consort, she explained to me that I had apparently implied to said neighbor that he should volunteer to be our unpaid full-time gardener, and perhaps live in a hut behind our garage, surviving on a diet of squirrels and birdseed.  All that seems a bit of a stretch to me, but on the off chance that she’s right, I’m spending the rest of the summer indoors.

“Drift” in the sense you mention is a somewhat colloquial use of the word to mean “the meaning, implication or gist of speech or writing,” and, as you perceptively note, the phrase “if you catch my drift” is a cue for the reader or listener to not simply take what is said or written at face value, but to “read between the lines.”  Although “drift” used in this sense sounds like modern slang, this usage actually dates back at least to the early 16th century (“Harde it is … to [perceive] the processe and dryfte of this treatyse,” 1526).

Behind “drift” is the venerable English verb “to drive,” which sprang from ancient Germanic roots and has dozens of meanings today, from the early literal sense of “forcing a living being to move” (e.g., “driving” cattle), to more figurative senses, such as “driving a hard bargain.”  One such figurative use, which emerged in the 16th century and is still common, is “to proceed with a definite intention; to mean or intend,” often used in the context or argument or advocacy (“Their intent drives to the end of stirring up the people,” John Milton, 1649).

This sense of “to drive” is the key to “drift” meaning “intended meaning.”  “Drift” as a noun is based on “to drive,” and in its basic sense means simply “the action of driving or being driven,” as a boat might exhibit a certain degree of “drift” from its charted course, or “that which is driven,” as in a “snow drift.”  Such “drifts” are natural and unintentional, but “drift” can also mean “the aim or goal that one is driving at in speech or writing” (“The main drift and scope of these pamphlets … was to defame and disgrace the English Prelates,” Thomas Fuller, 1655).

This is the kind of “drift” that one “catches” or “gets.”  It’s necessary to “catch” this sort of “drift” because by definition the actual meaning or aim of the speaker’s words is not plainly apparent, but usually hidden in a thicket of oblique implications.  To pin down the period when “catch your drift” became popular is difficult, but “catch” in the sense of “perceive the meaning of something said” dates back at least to the mid-19th century, and “catch” meaning simply “to see or hear something in particular” was common in the 16th century.

But no porcupine ever called me Guv’nor.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m wondering about the word “urchin.”  What exactly is the relationship between kids on the streets and spiny sea-bottom creatures that allows them to share the same name? — Alyson.

That’s a good question.  After all, the sort of grimy-but-endearing “urchins” that populate Dickens novels and Sherlock Holmes stories were not known for their close acquaintance with water, especially in bathtubs, and the spiny things that live in the ocean are about as far from cute and endearing as you can get.  As a matter of fact, sea urchins are one of the reasons I abandoned a youthful flirtation with skin diving.  I realized one day, a few feet below the surface of Long Island Sound, that I was afraid of urchins, crabs, sharks, jellyfish, stingrays, eels, most other kinds of fish and, in fact, darn near everything down there.  I didn’t even trust the shellfish, who, I suspected, harbored deep and justifiable resentment about Unlimited Fried Clams Night at the local Howard Johnson’s.

Although we use “urchin” today to mean either a poor ragged street child or that sea critter that looks like a golf ball with spikes, neither sense is even close to the original meaning of the word.  They’re also both quite different from some of the uses to which “urchin” has been put over the past seven centuries.

“Urchin” first appeared in English in the late 13th century with the spelling “irchin” (followed shortly thereafter by “hurcheon” and other variants).  The word had been filtered through several other European languages, but the root of all the forms was the Latin “ericius,” which meant “hedgehog.”  Hedgehogs are common in Europe, Africa and Asia, but are not native to North America, so a brief primer is probably advisable.  They are small, spiny mammals covered with quills, which they use to defend themselves when threatened by rolling themselves into a tight ball so the quills point outward.  They cannot, however, throw their quills as porcupines can.

[Note: That sentence, as many readers have pointed out, is inaccurate. Porcupines cannot throw their quills (see Snopes on the topic).  I am now wondering what other lies about the natural world I absorbed from Looney Tunes.]

The first use of “urchin” in English was to mean, logically, “hedgehog,” but soon the word was also applied to people with “prickly” personalities.  “Urchin” was also used to mean “hunchback,” “elf or goblin” (because elves were said to take the form of a hedgehog on occasion), a woman considered old and unattractive, a woman considered too attractive and thus probably “loose,” or a small child of a mischievous or bratty bent.  Most of these uses were based on either a perceived physical resemblance to a hedgehog (as in the case of a hunchback or old woman) or some metaphorical connection to a hedgehog’s behavior.  Those spiny sea urchins have been so called since the early 17th century.  The use of “urchin” to mean “small child” or “infant” appeared in the 16th century, but it wasn’t until the 18th century that our modern sense of “poor street child” became the dominant usage.

File not found.

Dear Word Detective:  Close to a half century ago, I had a summer job with my local municipality, Toronto, Canada.  City garbage collectors sometimes found valuables in trash cans (anything from returnable bottles to fixable appliances) and stowed them away until the day’s end when they were furtively taken home. The common word for these “perks” of the job sounded like “polikens,” though the second vowel may have been “a” and the third “i” (I never saw it written).  My best guess is that it may derive from the demeaning terms for a person from Poland, (Archie Bunker’s famous “polack”) and imply that Polish people are “garbage pickers,” but that is just a guess.  As I reach retirement age (and my “nest egg” shrinks in value), I may return to this sort of treasure hunt (a.k.a. “dumpster diving”) in the hope of supplementing my pension.  It is, after all, more adventuresome and possibly more lucrative than saying, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.” — Howard A. Doughty.

That’s a good question, but I have one of my own.  Did you, in your tenure as an Urban Sanitation Engineer, engage in the stereotypical garbage collector tradition of affixing a teddy bear to the front of your truck?  What’s up with that?  I worked in a paper recycling warehouse for a couple of years back in the 1970s, and we hung all sorts of inappropriate “found objects”  (stuffed animals, shoes, etc.) from our baling machine and forklifts, but I never really understood why we did it.  Some primal attempt to distance ourselves from the job, I guess.

We also found a variety of things in the trucks of waste paper that we dealt with, but we didn’t have a special name for the rare treasure we came across, although I’m not surprised that you did.  Especially if the item is not supposed to be in your possession, it’s handy to have another name for it besides “that perfectly good TV we found.”

I had never encountered the term “polikens” before, so I went looking in my usual sources.  And I looked, and looked.  Then I looked in my unusual sources.  Then I began Googling under every possible spelling.  I eventually began to seriously consider the possibility that “polikens” was some weird form of “palichnology,” also known as “paleoichnology,” the study of fossil footprints.  Did you have any paleontology grad students in your crew?  Probably not.

So I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to your question.  Your theory tying the word to the derogatory term “Polack” applied to people of Polish ancestry is certainly possible, and may, depressingly, be the answer.  I hope not, because it would be much more fun if it “polikens” had an interesting (and inoffensive) origin all its own.

So for the time being, the best I can do is to “open source” this question and appeal to my readers.  If anyone out there has ever heard the term “polikens” in the sense of “something valuable found” or “perk or side benefit of a job,” please drop me a line via the question form at www.word-detective.com.  This approach has worked before, and if I learn anything about “polikens,” I’ll definitely pass it along.

Last chance.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the origin of the phrase “grabbing at straws”?  And does it still have the same meaning as when it was first used?  I searched the archives and I am quite sure this has not been answered. — Michael Tambornino.

And you are quite correct.  You also get an automatic ten point bonus for checking our archives before asking your question.  There are about 1500 back columns available free there, so there’s a decent chance that whatever one might be seeking has already been sought.  But I really don’t mind if folks ask a question I’ve already answered.  Sometimes I even answer it again.

The original, and still the most literal, meaning of “straw” is the stems and stalks of grains, such as wheat, rye, oats, etc., left over after the grain has been threshed and the bits useful as food have been removed.  When we first moved from Manhattan to rural Ohio, I was under the impression that “straw” and “hay” were the same thing.  Wrong-o-rama.  Hay is essentially dried grass used as food for livestock.  Straw is used for many things (animal bedding, straw hats, etc.), but not as a primary food for livestock.

The source of our English word “straw” is a Germanic root with the general sense of “that which is strewn,” or scattered, a reference to the still common use of straw as a bedding or floor covering in barns, etc.  We inherited “straw” directly from the Old English “streaw,” and we’ve been piling new meanings and uses onto this little word ever since, from “straw” as a symbol of something worthless or insubstantial, to the “straw” that comes with a cold drink, in the 19th century an actual piece of straw, now a plastic tube.

Straw has also loomed large in English idioms and proverbs.  “Man of straw” or “straw man” (what we would call a “scarecrow”) has, since the 16th century, meant a dishonest person of no substance, an imaginary foe, or, most often today, an invented and bogus argument.  It was just one more straw (“the last straw”) that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and “a straw in the wind” has long been a metaphor for something that indicates a change in public attitudes, which gave us “straw poll” and “straw vote” as terms for quick, unofficial surveys of opinion.

“Grabbing at straws” (or “grasping,” today the more common form) comes from the very old proverb noted by Samuel Richardson in his novel Clarissa (1748): “A drowning man will catch at a straw, the proverb well says.”  The “straw” in this case refers to the sort of thin reeds that grow by the side of a river, which a drowning man being swept away by a fast current might desperately grasp in a futile attempt to save himself.  Thus “grasp at straws” has, since at least the 18th century, meant “to make a desperate and almost certainly futile effort to save oneself” (“Bob’s attempt to build a case that the contract was not valid because it contained a split infinitive was just grasping at straws”).  “Grasping at straws” is still very much in use in this sense, as by one source quoted by the Associated Press in a recent news story on the economy: “People have to pay the bills, so what we see is people kind of grasping at straws and taking anything that’s available.”

Pitchfork this.

Dear Word Detective:  I know you’re the Word Detective and not the Usage Enforcer, but I just read an article in the Washington Post about the current health care debate that reminded me of something that’s been bothering me for the past few months.  The author of the piece proposes a new verb: “‘Medagogue’ [meaning] to demagogue the health care issue.”  Obviously, “medagogue” is a non-starter, but it’s the use of “demagogue” as a verb that’s been driving me nuts lately.  Is this kosher?  I can’t think of a simple replacement, but it really grates on my nerves. — Luke Hoover.

Oh boy, here we go.  You’re correct — I usually avoid issues of “proper usage” in English, although I’m more than happy to advise folks about what is generally accepted as Standard English at the moment.  But the so-called “language wars” over issues such as the use of “hopefully” to act as a meta-modifier of an entire sentence (“Hopefully, Jim will just shut up”) can chug along for another 200 years without me.  I don’t plan to spend my time arguing with people who consider “split infinitives” a harbinger of the Apocalypse.  The older I get, the more allergic I am to that kind of crazy.

But your question is not in any way crazy.  The use of “demagogue” as a verb strikes many people as less than euphonious.  “Demagogue” used as a noun, of course, raises no hackles (except those of the target).  The root of “demagogue” is actually quite honorable, being the Greek “demagogos,” meaning simply “leader of the people,” and in ancient times that’s all the word meant.  In English in the mid-17th century, however, “demagogue” came into use as a noun meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it, “a political agitator who appeals to the passions and prejudices of the mob in order to obtain power or further his own interests.”  H.L. Mencken more succinctly defined a demagogue as “one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”

The use of nouns as verbs is a pet peeve of usage purists, most of whom are unaware that at least one out of every five common English verbs began life as a noun, and that the transition to use of a given noun as a verb often happened several centuries ago.  “Demagogue” is just such a case, appearing as an intransitive verb meaning “to play the demagogue” in the mid-17th century (“When that same ranting fellow Alcibiades fell a demagoging for the Sicilian War,” 1656).  The use of “demagogue” as a transitive verb (as in your example “to demagogue the health care issue”) meaning “to deal with (a matter) after the fashion of a demagogue” (OED) is a more recent (1890) and more controversial development.   The Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary rejects use of “demagogue” as a transitive verb by a ninety-four percent margin, for instance.  And the very fine new Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009) has no real problem with the intransitive form but rates the transitive “demagogue” as a “Stage One Language Change,” meaning that it is generally not yet suitable in Standard English usage.

Your mileage may vary, of course.  I suppose “demagogue” as a transitive verb could be useful conversational shorthand, although I wouldn’t use it in serious writing.  But, given its popularity in current mass media usage, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it widely accepted sooner than many usage mavens would like.  As you note, it’s not easy to think of a simple alternative.

A Field Guide to Homicidal Waterfowl.

Dear Word Detective:  The phrase, “take a gander.”  This can’t possibly (I hope) have anything to do with the male of the goosey species, can it?  In any case, could you take a look in your reference books and see where “take a gander” came from?  My appreciation would flow gratefully. — William Blum.

Hmm.  Do I detect a smidgen of anti-goose sentiment in your question?  I would have hoped that we, as a species, would have transcended our resentment of geese long ago.  True, geese can be vicious, ungrateful and absurdly aggressive, and the bite of a goose can be surprisingly painful, especially considering that it comes from a creature that lacks actual teeth.  Come to think of it, geese spend most of their time eating — what?  Pond scum?  So where do they get off attacking innocent people in the park whose only mistake was in thinking that they were feeding bread to a nice, albeit very large, duck?  Anton, bring me my shotgun and a cookbook.

Just kidding.  I’m not allowed to play with either shotguns or cookbooks.  In any case, I’m afraid your suspicions are justified, and “gander,” meaning anything from “a glance” to “a close look” (“Now I am taking many a gander around the bedroom to see if I can case the box of letters,” Damon Runyon, 1934), does indeed pay tribute to the noble goose.  “Gander” in this sense is also a verb, but not as commonly encountered today as the noun.

A “gander” is, of course, a male goose, while a female goose is known simply as “a goose,” and a mixed gaggle of geese is referred to as “geese,” preferably from a distance.  The word “goose” itself comes from the Old English word for the bird, “gos,” which in turn is derived from an Indo-European root word (something like “gans”) that was probably intended to imitate the sound a goose makes.  The plural form “geese” is, etymologically speaking, the same word as “goose.”  The “ee” is simply a phonetic mutation of a sort common at one time in English, which can also be seen in such singular/plural pairs as “tooth/teeth” and “foot/feet.”  Our English word “gosling,” meaning a young goose, comes from the Middle English “gos” (goose) plus the diminutive suffix “ling.”

“Gander” as a name for a male goose is a bit of a mystery.  It may be simply a mutated form of “goose,” but there is some evidence that it originally meant an entirely different kind of bird, possibly a stork.  It may be that the alliterative phrase “goose and gander,” originally meaning two kinds of birds often found near water, eventually resulted in wide misunderstanding of the phrase as meaning “male and female” (as in “buck and doe,” “bull and cow,” etc.), and “gander” came to mean “male goose.”

The use of “gander” to mean “look” comes from the long, flexible neck of the goose (immortalized in the “gooseneck” lamps once common in offices).  While female geese no doubt  look at things too, it is the gander of a gaggle that plays sentinel, craning his neck to examine any intruder or possible danger.  “Gander” in this “peer at” sense first appeared in print in 1887, as a verb.  Interestingly, up until that time, “gander” as a slang verb had meant “to wander aimlessly,” and as a slang noun had meant “a stupid person.”

Incidentally, I used the verb “craning” in my explanation of “gander,” a verb also meaning “to stretch one’s neck in order to see something.”  “Crane” in this sense comes from the “crane,” a large bird similar to a stork and probably much nicer than a goose.  And “gaggle” for a group of geese arose in the 15th century as an imitation of the sound of many geese (probably massing for an attack).