Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Yeah, well, OK, it’s March. What, you miss February? Let’s review: around here we had ice, snow, ice, ice, high winds, snow, ice, slush, mud, more mud and frozen mud, and then we finished up with a “rare late-winter” tornado that took out a farm a mile away from us. And I’m not even counting when the power went out because some enterprising miscreants broke into the substation and stole a bunch of copper wiring. This whole place is starting to look a bit post-apocalyptic at the edges; the latest thing is to break into businesses while they’re closed on the weekend and steal all the plumbing and heating fixtures.

By the way, can someone please explain why we have Ohio Air National Guard Black Hawk helicopters flying low over the house several times every day now? When we first moved in we had the four o’clock Huey every afternoon, a homey old Vietnam-era bird (with that thud-thud-thud sound you could hear ten miles away) which just sort of floated slowly by in the distance. Now these things come in a treetop level and make the whole house shake. Last week we had one sort of hovering at low altitude over our north field for no apparent reason. If they know what they’re doing, fine, but I’m getting a very disquieting student-driver vibe from this behavior.

So AOL bought the Huffington Post. This is hilarious. A zombie falls in love with a fluff farm. The schmuck who runs AOL just got through admitting that 60% of their profits come from people who pay $25/mo. for AOL dialup accounts they don’t need because they have broadband access and AOL is free on the web. Heckuva business model, dude. What’s next, Medicare fraud?

As far as I know I still have a free AOL “press” account they gave me back in 1994 when I was writing a book about the internet. It still worked a couple of years ago, and I have no doubt that, had I been paying for it, they’d still be charging me.

I’m sure that Ms. Huffington is as happy at being crowned Queen of AOL as a shape-shifting reptilian overlord can be. And I’m sure that we can look forward to many more features hewn of the same fearless journalistic stock as her now-legendary “What Time Does the Superbowl Start?.” (That article has since been re-written to seem less whorish, but it originally began:”Are you wondering, “what time does the Superbowl start?” It’s a common search query, as is “what time is the super bowl 2011,” “superbowl time” and “superbowl kickoff time 2011,” according to Google Trends the evening before the Super Bowl. It’s easily answered too. Super Bowl 2011 will take place on Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time and 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time.” As one commenter noted, “Most pathetic SEO spam ever.”)

Unfortunately for Arianna 2.5, less than a week after the grand announcement of the sale, Google released a crowd-sourcing plug-in for its Chrome browser that lets the common folk blackball “scraper” sites like HuffPo, and a bit later re-jiggered their search algorithms to devalue “content farms” and thinly-disguised search-engine whores (and plagiarism factories) like … HuffPo. It would appear that Google, which has profited enormously from promoting garbage search results for years, has recognized that the worm has turned and that they had better clean up their act. That is not good news for HuffPo, Demand Media, and their idiotic how-to-boil-water ilk.

Um, what else? We had a Kindle for about a week but sent it back. The screen is gray. Did you know the screen is gray? If you have anything wrong with your eyes, it’s damn near impossible to read the thing. And there are no page numbers. And you have to jump through hoops to find the table of contents of books. Kathy (it was hers) hated it and, after playing with it for 30 seconds, I concurred. Creepy little gizmo. But your mileage may vary. I played with a iPad in an Apple Store for a few minutes a few weeks ago, and it’s much easier to read on one of those, but they’re heavy and expensive.

Onward to movie reviews! I recently saw Green Zone on cable and actually liked it a lot. The more you know about the run-up to the Iraq war, the more sense it makes, though the character played by Amy Ryan is a very mild take on its apparent inspiration, Judith Miller. Matt Damon is very good, and I think I may have finally overcome my tendency to confuse him with Brad Pitt.

By the way, even a mild inability to tell people apart can be a real problem in a small town. I keenly remember, about ten years ago, failing to recognize a guy I’d spent more than two hours with earlier that same day. I know he thought I was either a real jerk or insane or both. It was mortifying. And I have actual in-laws around here I wouldn’t recognize outside of a family gathering. Life would be a hell of a lot simpler if people would just wear the name tags I give them.

Kathy says that sometimes when we’re shopping in a grocery store she’ll see me looking at her from down the aisle and I clearly don’t recognize her. I assume that’s true, because I don’t remember seeing her, which I wouldn’t if I didn’t recognize her, would I? I guess I should make a mental note when we go in of the color of her coat or whatever. This is nothing new. One of my earliest memories is of mistaking some stranger in a store for my father, and as a child I actually used to confuse Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra. When I took six hours of cognitive tests right after I was diagnosed with ms a few years ago I did miserably on the facial recall test. Quelle surprise.

This makes movies with even vaguely similar characters problematic. A few weeks ago we finally saw Black Swan, which, when I first heard references to it, I had honestly expected to be vaguely about epistemology with a car chase or two thrown in (the way that He’s Just Not That into You, a self-help book, was spun into a romantic comedy). It turns out to be about ballet. (As Paul Carr recently said on TechCrunch, “If I were Nassim N. Taleb I’d tell my publishers to immediately re-release The Black Swan with a picture of a ballerina on the front.”)

So, anyway, Norma Bates, Ballerina. Interesting concept. On the drive home, however, I learned that the good ballerina turns into the bad ballerina (or vice-versa) several times (and into the has-been ballerina at least once). But I had missed all of these subtle and pivotal psycho-points (and therefore the meat, lean as it was, of the movie) because I couldn’t tell any of these ballerinas apart. So I thought Natalie Portman was just really, really unhappy, not gonzo nuts, and I sat through the entire movie being bored to tears, watching other patrons text their friends, and being repeatedly reminded of how much I hate Tchaikovsky. Sigh.

Meanwhile, back on TV, one of the cable channels recently showed The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, which I had expected to hate (snotty Tribeca filmmaker making fun of hillbillies, etc.), but which was actually remarkably sympathetic to its subjects. Oddly enough, meth didn’t seem to be in the picture for these people, who trade in prescription drugs, although it’s a major industry where we are. I must say I had never heard of people huffing gasoline before. Wow.

Oh, well, so it goes. And, lest we go, please consider subscribing.

And many thanks to the folks who have signed up for our Cute Kitty Cat Food Fund (CKCFF), which deducts a set amount from your PayPal account each month so that the little monsters can eat. Each CKCFF membership comes with a subscription if you want one — just send me a note when you sign up.

Artist's conception of what cute kitties might look like if they were better-behaved.

Cute Kitty Cat Food Fund

One kitty : $5.00USD – monthly Two kitties : $10.00USD – monthly Three kitties : $15.00USD – monthly

And now, on with the show…

Lose/Lose

Dear Word Detective: I have been trying for some years to determine the origin, and original meaning, of the term, “Mexican standoff.” At one time, one could not find this anywhere (or anywhere that I found); but now, there are some “authorities” that provide a definition, but no origin. As far as I can see, those definitions define what is usually called a “standoff”; there is no is no information as to what would render a standoff “Mexican.” My belief is that the term “Mexican standoff” refers to a particular kind of standoff, christened for some incident (in the Mexican-American War, perhaps?). I have a vague recollection of being told by someone (not an authority) that a “Mexican” standoff is one in which either advance or retreat would be fatal for either side, whereas in a normal standoff, one or both sides may have the possibility of non-fatal retreat. I have no solid references for this, however. If you can solve this one, I will be tremendously thankful and impressed. — Mikael.

Hey, me too, because the question itself is giving me an anxiety attack. I have a lifelong aversion to personal confrontations, so I rarely end up in any sort of standoff. In fact, I routinely agree to all sorts of things just to avoid conflict, which is how I’ve managed to wind up simultaneously belonging to the Church of Scientology, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Young Socialists League, the NRA and PETA. I’ve definitely got to stop answering the door.

Your question about “Mexican standoff,” a phrase which first appeared in print around 1891, is actually two questions: first, how does a Mexican standoff differ from a “regular” standoff? Secondly, what makes that kind of standoff “Mexican”?

As to the first question, opinions evidently vary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “standoff” (they prefer “stand-off,” which seems a bit stand-offish) as “Any uneasy stalemate or deadlock; an impasse,” but also as “A draw or tie, as in a game…,” a definition that Oxford notes comes from an 1895 dictionary. A “Mexican standoff” seems to be a subset of the more general “standoff.” The OED defines “Mexican standoff” as “A deadlock, stalemate, impasse; a roughly equal (and frequently unsatisfactory) outcome to a conflict in which there is no clear winner or loser,” and The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English defines the term as “A situation in which nobody clearly has the advantage or emerges a clear winner.”

The key difference between a “Mexican standoff” and a garden variety “standoff” seems to be the equal strength of the two parties and thus the lack of a clear result. A regular standoff may be a temporary roadblock or impasse, in negotiations, for example, that eventually ends in either a surrender or an agreement, albeit grudgingly. A “Mexican standoff,” however, is a complete stalemate, and both sides lose by being forced to walk away without a victory.

Several sources I have found suggest that the “Mexican” modifier in the phrase refers to a supposed proclivity of 19th century Mexican “bandits” for running away from a fair fight. But the first example of “Mexican standoff” found so far in print used the phrase to describe a baseball game ending in a tie, and subsequent uses employ the term as a simple synonym of “stalemate” with nary an actual Mexican in sight. The “Mexican” in “Mexican standoff” is thus  almost certainly just another entry in the long and shameful roster of US slang terms employing “Mexican” as a slur meaning “fraudulent, inferior, or marked by poverty, poor sanitation, lack of sophistication or ignorance.” Such formations as “Mexican bankroll” (one large denomination bill wrapped around a roll of smaller bills), “Mexican athlete” (a phony braggart) and “Mexican breakfast” (a cigarette and a glass of water) all reflect the same derogatory national rivalry. A “Mexican standoff,” in this light, is called “Mexican” because it is pointless, inconclusive and unproductive, not because it has any actual connection to Mexico.

On wheels.

Dear Word Detective:  I recently was trying to find the origin of the term “dolly,” as in a cart with wheels. I found your website by accident. I cannot put together a “doll” and the “dolly” as in your old, old posting. I have a gentleman’s bet with the owner of a bakery on the origin and I would really appreciate it if you could take another stab at the origin and/or maybe explain differently how a “doll” and a cart with wheels could be connected in the 16th century. — Karita.

OK, I’ll give it another shot. Perhaps with a wooden bullet, like the one Jason used on Franklin, the psycho vampire on True Blood. As Russell Edgington (the vampire king of Mississippi and my absolute fave) said in a slightly different context, who knew? By the way, the column of mine you stumbled across was from 1998, which makes it fairly old, but not really “old, old.” That makes it sound like you found it on the wall of a cave in southern France.

Before we begin, however, a word of caution is in order. It is often very difficult, and frequently simply impossible, to definitively trace the “why” behind figurative uses of words. There isn’t always a straight line of logic to be discovered, because the English language as we see it today is the product of a committee with millions of members over the course of many centuries. With no one in charge, to boot. The best guesses we can make are thus often maddeningly vague, and “dolly” is one such case.

As I said, ahem, way back when, the whole story starts with the word “doll,” which arose in the mid-16th century as a shortened “pet” or familiar form of “Dorothy.” The substitution of “l” for the “r” in Dorothy was not, at the time, as weird as it seems today. The same pattern gave us “Hal” from “Harold,” “Sally” from “Sarah,” and several other common names.

“Doll” and “Dolly,” in addition to being “pet” names for women, soon came to be applied as generic terms to pet animals, toy “dolls,” and lower-class women, including servants and prostitutes. “Dolly” was also used as a name for various small mechanical devices, often because the contraption was thought to resemble a child’s doll in some way. Thus a wooden device used in the 18th century to agitate clothes in a washtub was called a “dolly” because the user gripped it by two “arms” and twisted it, making the gizmo’s two “legs” churn the water in the tub.

“Dolly” wasn’t used to mean a small wheeled platform until around 1910 (not the 16th century), and by then the term “dolly” had largely lost the original “looks kinda like a person” sense. It is possible, of course, that someone saw a resemblance between a primitive wheeled “dolly” and human arms and legs, but doubtful. It’s more likely that “dolly” was used because of such carts’ small size when compared to larger trucks, wagons and similar conveyances.

It’s also possible that “dolly” in the wheeled sense harks back to “dolly” as a generic term for a lower-class woman or girl, especially a servant. Thus a “dolly” would be so-called because it “helps” or “serves” in the task of moving heavy objects.

If that “servant” connection is true, it would make “dolly” in this sense a cousin of the “lazy susan,” the revolving tray sometimes placed on dining tables to hold condiments or side dishes. This device had been called a “dumb-waiter” in Britain since the 18th century, but when it was introduced to the US in the late 19th century it became known as a “lazy susan,” almost certainly because “Susan” was considered a common name for female servants.

Ravioli Rage on Aisle Five.

Dear Word Detective: The other day I mentioned to my wife that I had “lucked out” in finding a particular item I was looking for in a store. I then wondered about the origin of “lucked out” and “luck out.” Why is “out” tacked onto “lucked” and “luck”? — Warren I. Pollock, Glen Falls, Pennsylvania.

That’s a good question, and the answer is a bit more complicated than I first thought. Incidentally, my attempts to find any particular item in a store, especially in a grocery store, seem to face two separate but equally annoying hurdles. One is that the stores around here are routinely “out” of fairly basic things, making the trip at least partially a waste of time. The second is that determining whether the store has, for example, the particular peanut butter I want involves combing shelves that contain at least thirty-five other varieties of the stuff. A recent article in Fortune magazine, interestingly, attributed the success of the Trader Joe’s grocery chain in part to the small size of their stores and their limited selection of items in any one category. Tell me about it.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “luck out” as “to achieve success or advantage by good luck in a difficult, testing, or dangerous situation,” and dates the first appearance of the term in print to the early 1950s. That’s certainly the sense in which we use the phrase today, as synonymous with “to get lucky” (“I started making inquiries..and damned if I didn’t luck out and get steered into a good job,” J. Wambaugh, The Blue Knight, 1972). But there’s some indication that the phrase may once have meant exactly the opposite.

An entry in the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (published in 1985 and written by my parents, William and Mary Morris) notes that “luck out” was used during World War II to mean “to run out of luck,” specifically to be killed or wounded in action. My parents asked the book’s usage panel of authors and editors to vote on whether they agreed that the “new” usage of “luck out” to mean “get lucky” had superseded that “old” meaning. Surprisingly (this was 1985, remember), 26% of the panel preferred the old “out of luck” usage. Novelist Anthony Burgess, for instance, opined that “‘Lucked out’ is too close to ‘out of luck’ to mean its opposite.” Mr. Burgess was, of course, slightly off the mark on that, and “luck out” meaning “out of luck” has, as far as I can tell, completely disappeared today.

If “luck out” was indeed used to mean “run out of luck” during World War II, it couldn’t have been a very popular usage, because written examples are very hard to find. The use of “out” in “luck out” actually seems to suggest the “get lucky” meaning was more common from the outset. “Luck” as a verb was commonly used by itself and with such adjuncts as “into” to mean “get lucky” during the same period, a usage still common today (“The rent was fantastically low; she had lucked into it a couple of years ago through an artist friend,” 1970). If one “lucks out,” it’s because the likelihood of success is small to begin with and failure is probable, so in “lucking out,” you’re escaping “out” of a perilous or failure-prone situation.

alt.fan.nonsense.utter

Dear Word Detective:  I’ve seen the word “woot” (sometimes spelled, more originally I have gathered, “w00t”), as an expression of joy for some prize or treasure, or something valuable that was otherwise unexpected. I first heard (or read) the term in the chat ramblings from an online game around, say 2004; when I asked about it, I was told it originated somewhere in the world of MMORPG’s, “massively multiplayer online roleplaying games” (or “many men online roleplaying girls,” a backronym that often proves true), but I’d like a real sleuth to see what he can find. — Josh.

Oh boy. Y’know, every so often it strikes me just how weird the internet has always been. I guess humanity, having pretty much exhausted the novelty of exotic lands and cultures, collectively decided to create a whole new bizarre dimension of reality where the Id could run wild and all bets were off. That whole “gender impersonation” thing, for example, strikes me as very strange. Then again, I’ve never played any online games, or, in fact, any computer game more sophisticated than Pong. Life is too short and so am I. Heck, I can hardly reach the keyboard most days.

“Woot” (as I will spell it to maintain an aura of sanity) is an exclamation roughly equivalent to “Hooray!” or “Whoopee!” Often (but not necessarily originally, as we shall see) constructed with two zeros in place of the “o”s (“w00t!”), it’s been a staple of online discussion groups, gaming communities, and bulletin boards since at least the 1990s. “W00t” spelled with zeros is one of the more well-known items of “leet” or “leetspeak,” a loose system of alternative orthography popular in hacker and gaming circles at that time in which certain letters of words are replaced with non-alphabetic characters usually vaguely resembling the letter (“7″ for “L,” for instance) or constructs of multiple symbols thought to resemble the letter (e.g., “/\/\” for “M”). The name “leet” (or “l33t,” if you’re drinking the Kool-Aid) is short for “elite,” a privileged status in early online gaming communities. “Leet” was officially over among the cool years ago, and today is used largely to mock hacker-wannabes (who are derided as “H4x0rs”).

The earliest citation found so far for “woot” in print comes from 1993, and a number of explanations offered for the word trace it to shortenings of or acronyms for various phrases supposedly popular among online gamers, such as “we own the other team” or “wondrous loot” (for “treasure” won during such games). But these theories, along with the one tying “woot” to the “root” account used by administrators of Unix computer systems, all lack any solid evidence. In several cases, in fact, the phrases supposedly “behind” the word only appeared long after “woot” itself was popular.

Fortunately, lexicographer Grant Barrett has done some heavy lifting for us on the subject of “woot,” and he makes a compelling case for his theory on his website (at http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/comments/the_real_history_and_origin_of_woot_and_w00t/).

Barrett traces “woot” to the catch phrase “Whoot, there it is!”, which became a nationwide craze in the US in 1993. In fact, there were two popular hip-hop songs capitalizing on the phrase released that year, “Whoot There It Is” by the group 95 South, and “Whoomp! (There It Is)” by Tag Team.  The Tag Team song was the more successful, spending 45 weeks in the Billboard Top 100, and the group says that the “Whoomp” was in part drawn from the famous “woof woof” chant of the audience at the Arsenio Hall TV show around the same time. So if Barrett is right, and I think he is, “woot” was never short for, or an acronym for, anything. It’s just the sound of a someone having a good time.

BTW, whatever became of Joel Furr?

Dear Word Detective: I’ve heard that “tips” in a restaurant comes from the acronym “To Insure Prompt Service.” This sounds like a pre-internet urban legend. First of all it just sounds wrong, and second of all if it were true it should be “teps”: “To Ensure Prompt Service.” Could you “tip” me off to the correct origin? — Mark Jacobs.

Hmm. You seem to be using “pre-internet” in the sense of “pre-Enlightenment,” perhaps implying that the advent of sites such as snopes.com has finally put paid to silly stories about Pop Rocks and the death of Mikey, but I have my doubts. It’s true that the net has made it much easier to check the veracity of emailed stories. One of the first wonders of the pre-web internet that I encountered, back in the early 1990s, was the usenet discussion group alt.folklore.urban, still going strong today, where popular fables were debunked by the dozens every day. But I still receive at least a few queries about classic linguistic urban legends every week. The problem seems to be that we have a natural tendency to believe such stories, but no compensating urge to actually investigate their truth. Oh well. At least I know I’ll never run out of questions.

I answered a query about the “tip” story a decade ago, but since it’s still making the rounds I’ll take another whack at it. The form of the story that my reader back then had encountered was “tip” supposedly being an acronym for “to insure promptness,” and he also raised the question of the proper word being, in such cases, “ensure” rather than “insure.” It’s true that “insure” has traditionally been used mostly in financial contexts (particularly to mean “to arrange a guarantee of compensation in case of loss or failure”), while “ensure” has been used in broader contexts to mean simply “to make sure something happens or is done” (“Dave’s credit card bill ensured that he went to work every day”). But both words (along with “assure”) are commonly used today in that general “make sure it happens” sense. So the fact that the term isn’t “tep” doesn’t prove much.

Fortunately, the story about”tip” being an acronym for “to insure promptness” (and its various variants) has much bigger problems. In the first place, acronyms, pronounceable words created from the initial letters of a phrase (such as NATO, AIDS, etc.) were very rare in English before World War II. (Similar but unpronounceable abbreviations, such as LCD or SSN, are usually called simply “initialisms.”) Since “tip” in the “gratuity” sense dates back to the early 18th century, it is extremely unlikely to have begun life as an acronym.

Furthermore, the origin of “tip” in this sense is not a huge mystery. It appears to be connected to the use of “tip” among urban thieves in the 17th century to mean “to pass something surreptitiously, especially money, to another person,” which in turn probably came from the even older (13th century) use of “tip” to mean “to touch lightly, especially as a warning.” There are several “tips” in English, including the noun meaning “the end, top or point of a thing” and the verb meaning “to fall over or cause to slope,” but this “tip” is most likely a descendant of the German “tippen,” meaning “to poke or tap lightly.” This sense of tapping someone lightly to communicate surreptitiously also underlies our use of “tip” to mean “inside or secret information.”

Lastly, unless there’s only one restaurant in town and you eat there every day, a good tip doesn’t “insure” (or “ensure”) promptness, since, at least on my planet, it’s given at the end of the meal. But I guess the more logical “trp” (To Reward Promptness) was just too hard to pronounce.

Out, damn story!

Dear Word Detective: I have been having an argument recently with my fiancé about the origin of the word “stain.” He says that is comes from “ye olde Englishe tymes,” when someone would say, “That wine is going to stay in your shirt!” Of course, meaning that “stay-in” became “stain.” This sounds convincing, but I was there when he made it up on the spot. However, he is so charmingly convincing that everyone believes him! I am utterly convinced that that is not the origin of the word, seeing as he came up with all of it himself, but I can’t find the origins anywhere. He promises to stop telling people this when I prove him wrong, so could you please help me stop him? It would help make the world a less misinformed place. — Roxanne.

A less misinformed place, eh? Good luck with that. Speaking of information (or the lack thereof), I’ll see your fiancé’s spurious invention and raise you something truly disturbing. I recently discovered that many people around here, especially those under 30 or so, have no idea which way North is. Yes, North, the direction. Seriously. But they seem content in this state, and I suppose that if they ever decide to wander off they’ll be able to ask their cell phones how to get home. Doesn’t augur well for the post-apocalyptic society, though.

At the risk of encouraging your fiancé’s inventions, I should note that his idea about the origin of “stain” is not, actually, completely crazy. English forms words in many ways, and sometimes it does so by taking two or more existing words and smooshing them (the technical term) together. Folks who have been paying attention may remember that we recently wrestled with the assertion by Dan Brown (of “Da Vinci Code” fame) that our modern word “atone” was born of such a smooshing of the phrase “at one,” meaning a state of unity with the universe, stamp collecting, or whatever floats your personal boat. That’s essentially true, although our modern “atone” carries the sense of expiating a wrong done, rather than just feeling groovy about the universe.

“Stain,” however, was not created through such smooshing (love that word), although its story is not without some serious weirdness. Our modern word “stain” first appeared in English in the late 14th century, and appears to have developed from an aphetic, or cropped, form of the Old French “desteindre.” Oddly, however, that French word meant not to “stain” in our modern sense of “to dye” (as in staining wood) or “to blemish with color” (as in a stain on clothing), but nearly the opposite, “to remove the color from, to fade.” Consequently, “stain” in English was originally used to mean “to deprive of color.”

Just how “stain” came to mean “to alter appearance of something by adding color, either intentionally or by accident” is unclear. The “des” of that Old French root “desteindre” may have been interpreted as meaning not “un” (as it did) but “differently,” as if “stain” should mean “to change the color of something.” It’s also possible that the development of “stain” was influenced by the Old Norse verb “steina,” meaning “to paint.” It’s all a bit of a muddle, and nowhere near as satisfying as your swain’s story, but it does have the virtue of being true.

And chicken fingers. Lots of chicken fingers.

Dear Word Detective: As part of my weight-gaining regimen, I often drink a Snapple. Today the cap Real Fact #752 was “A group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.” I cannot find much information on this word, though I now know that cows may have regional accents. Can you hang a tale on this word? — Charlie N.

Feh. Snapple is for pikers. Our local newspaper prints the school lunch menu, and I noticed recently that the little monsters seem to get something called “Bosco Sticks” as a main course at least three times a week. Bosco Sticks are not, as I had expected, giant chocolate bars. They turn out to be Brobdingnagian breadsticks filled with tomato sauce and cheese (“Just thaw, bake or deep fry, and top with butter and parmesan cheese for a delicious breadstick!”). Yeah, don’t forget the butter. Now we know why Johnny can’t breathe. But for quick weight gain, Bosco Sticks sound like just the ticket. You’ll have to give up climbing stairs, of course.

Unfortunately, and I say this as someone who willingly falls for every cute or quirky animal story that comes galloping down the pike, that thing about cows having regional accents is not, as far as anyone knows, true. Back in 2006, an English dairy farmers’ group called the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers were preparing to market a new line of regional cheeses. A public relations firm working for the group contacted John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, and asked him if it was “possible” that cows, like some birds (and cheeses, I guess), might have regional accents. Professor Wells said that it was, of course, in theory, “possible.” Presto, within days he was being quoted around the world as saying that cows did, in fact, exhibit regional twangs and drawls in their moos. Which they maybe do, maybe don’t, but nobody knows. Wanna buy some cheese?

“Flink” as a collective noun for a group of twelve (or more) cows is, as you’ve probably gathered, a bit of a mystery. The only “flink” listed by reputable dictionaries is “flink” as a 19th century US rural dialect verb meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “to behave in a cowardly manner,” and the word itself is probably simply a variant of “flinch.” The “cow” in “cowardly” is as close as “flink” gets to livestock in real dictionaries.

“Flink” is, however, found all over the internet, variously defined as “a group of twelve cows,” “at least twelve cows,” and so on. Obviously it’s not impossible for a word or usage to originate on the internet. But this isn’t “lolcat” or “spam,” and “flink” is widely presented as an established term on lists of collective animal nouns (“pod” of whales, “murder” of crows, etc.). Something is fishy.

Poking around on the trail of “flink,” I came upon what may be the explanation for its apparently sudden appearance sometime around 2002. In an article in one of the behind-the-scenes parts of Wikipedia, a user suggests that “flink” might be a fanciful invention based on the “cow” of that “cowardly” in the OED definition, and that, furthermore, “flink” might actually be a “mountweazel” that has, so to speak, escaped into the wild.

A “mountweazel,” as I explained a few months ago, is a spurious entry deliberately included in a dictionary or encyclopedia in order to trap plagiarists. (The name comes from a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, supposedly a famous photographer of rural mailboxes, included in the 1975 edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia.) It seems entirely possible that “flink” was invented as such a mountweazel for a text, perhaps an electronic dictionary, which was then widely plagiarized on the internet, giving the imaginary “flink” a life of its own. Of course, if “flink” is still popping up on the internet in a few years, it’ll be time to begin considering it a “real” word fit for “real” dictionaries.

Not. Even. Close.

Dear Word Detective: I have read your column for years now, and always smile when I hear a story from a tour guide giving me the supposed origin of a word or phrase. Not because I know the true origin, but because I’ve read your words of wisdom “Never trust a tour guide” too many times! This past weekend was no exception. In San Diego, the tour guide told us that the word “Chicano” (meaning a Mexican-American) came from the word “chicanery.” According to his story, Texas was fighting to become a separate sovereign nation in the mid 1800s and felt that to do so, everyone from Mexico had to be kicked out of the state. Of course, those deported didn’t think that was quite right and some of the young Mexican men came back to cause trouble — in other words, to participate in “chicanery” and mischief — hence the word “Chicano” to specifically mean a young Mexican-American man. This seems seriously far-fetched to me. My dictionary says “Chicano” is from the word “Mexicano” and originated over 100 years after that conflict. Please tell me that you are, once again, correct about tour guides! — Ellen.

Well, I’m reluctant to permanently alienate all the tour guides on the planet; you never know when one might rescue you, Saint Bernard style, with a tiny keg of Pepto-Bismol at a especially toxic tourist-trap buffet. But that particular tour guide is either a frustrated fiction writer or simply insane. Maybe both.

“Chicano,” meaning a person of Mexican birth or descent residing in the US, does indeed come from the Mexican Spanish word “Mexicano” (Spanish “mejicano”), and first appeared in print as a noun in 1947. As an adjective, “Chicano,” meaning “of or pertaining to Mexican-Americans,” came along quite a bit later, first appearing in 1967. The transformation of “Mexicano” into “Chicano” was apparently largely due to the pronunciation of “Mexicano” in Mexican Spanish, where the first syllable is unaccented and nearly unvoiced. “Chicano” also probably reflects the influence of the Spanish “chico,” meaning “boy,” frequently used as a nickname or term of familiar address.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “chicanery” as “Legal trickery, pettifogging, abuse of legal forms; the use of subterfuge and trickery in debate or action; quibbling, sophistry, trickery,” but “clever trickery” probably covers most uses of the term (“You don’t need to look abroad to find evidence of fraud and chicanery in corporate operations,” Motley Fool, 8/10). Unfortunately, “chicanery” itself is a tricky little word, and its origins are a bit murky. It first appeared in print in English in the early 17th century, borrowed from the French “chicanerie,” meaning “trickery,” which was derived from the Middle French “chicaner,” meaning “to trick, pettifog or deceive.” The origins of that “chicaner” are uncertain, but the best bet seems to be that it represents a borrowing of the Middle Low German word “schikken,” meaning “to arrange or bring about.” A person who routinely practices “chicanery,” incidentally, has been known since the late 17th century as a “chicaner,” a word that obviously deserves to be far more well known than it is.

Monkeys on parade.

Dear Word Detective: I’m writing to ask about two words missing from your website. I put them in the search box, but got no return on “gallivant” and “monkeyshines.” Because I found the much rarer “hurrah’s nest” there, I shudder to think that the previous two are missing, as they seem to fall from my grandma’s lip in the same sentence. I really, really don’t want “hurrah’s nest” to be lonely. — Miss Bliss.

Oh great. Now you’ve got me anthropomorphizing phrases. I already had a touch of synesthesia. (I have hated the number 56 since I was a kid. It makes me queasy. Seriously.) So now I have to worry about words and phrases as creatures with feelings, eh? Won’t that make my investigations of their origins and histories akin to invasion of privacy? I can hardly wait to be sued by “posh,” which by definition probably has very good lawyers.

“Hurrah’s nest,” a 19th century American coinage meaning “confused mess,” is indeed rarely heard or seen today. But its origin is simply the joyous exclamation “Hurrah!”, dating back to the 17th century but used in the US in the 1800s as a noun to mean “an uproar, great commotion.” If one imagines a “hurrah” as a creature, it’s logical that it would have a very untidy home; thus “hurrah’s nest” meaning a tangled, cluttered mess.

To “gallivant” is to parade around in a very ostentatious and possibly scandalous fashion, often with members of the opposite sex (“I did not consider it right or proper that a lady … should be gallivanting about the country with those three fellows,” 1875). “Gallivant,” which first appeared in print in the early 18th century, is probably a humorous mutation of the earlier (and now antiquated) verb “to gallant,” meaning “to play the gallant or dandy; to flirt” (“Captain Jemmison went on shore to … spend his time in great dissipation … eating, dressing, dancing, gallanting,” 1809).

“Monkeyshine,” a US coinage dating back to the early 19th century meaning a prank, trick or just boisterous behavior, is one of several English words and phrases that draw parallels, usually not very negative, between human and playful simian behavior. “Monkey business,” “monkey around,” “more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” “monkey see, monkey do,” etc., all make being a monkey sound like a lot more fun than it probably is. “Monkeyshines” may land you on probation at college or even cost you your job, but you’re unlikely to land in the slammer by monkeying around (unless “monkeyshines” is used, as it sometimes is, in a sarcastic sense to mean serious ethical or legal violations).

The “shine” in “monkeyshine” is a colloquial term, also dating back to the early 19th century, with a number of meanings. “Shine” in this sense can mean “a party” (as in “tea-shine”), “a ruckus or commotion,” “a fancy for” (as in “take a shine to”), or simply “a trick or caper” (“‘I’ll boun you pulled ‘em out, some o’ your shines,’ said Aunt Chloe,” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852). The origins of this “shine” are uncertain. It may be simply a specialized use of “shine” in the sense of “radiance.” But it may also be related to the dialectical terms “shindy” and “shinty,” both used to mean “commotion,” and both related to “shinny,” a game similar to field hockey dating back to the 17th century.

This just in: It depends.

Dear Word Detective: I was out at dinner with a friend of mine who is a principal at a local high school. I mentioned the ironic situation in a book that I read. This was a book on writing, and within a mere fifty pages it used the term “to flaunt the rules” about half a dozen times. I joked snootily that the author misused it, the editor and proofreaders missed it, etc. My principal friend responded, “What’s wrong with that?” and I, being the sanctimonious word jerk that I am, took it upon myself to educate him as to the difference between “flout” and “flaunt.” I then went to pee. When I returned he had his iPhone in hand and said, “Hey, the ‘flaunt the rules’ thing sounded right to me, so I checked it out.” He then proceeded to blow my verbal mind. On the screen were dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com, both of which listed one of the definitions of “flaunt” as “to disregard, treat with disdain.” My questions are: 1) Has the whole world gone crazy and if so, when did this start happening? and 2) Does it officially make one an 80-year old man trapped in a 30-year old man’s body when one hears oneself say, “Well, there goes the language”? Please keep me from defecting to Latin. — Dave.

Well, times change, you know. Just a few years ago, for example, I’d have been in serious trouble for letting you use the word “pee” in your question. Today nobody cares … hold on, there’s someone at the door.

OK, I’m back. Who gave my eighth-grade English teacher a Taser? Anyway, as I was saying, language is set in stone and there are certain immutable rules which must always be observed. Just kidding. Language changes constantly, often in some very annoying ways. Good luck stopping it.

To begin at the beginning, “flaunt” first appeared in the 16th century, from unknown origins, and means “to display ostentatiously” (as in “Flaunting one’s wealth”). “Flout” appeared roughly at the same time, possibly drawn from the Middle English “flouten” (literally “to play the flute,” which was used idiomatically to mean “to mock or jeer”). Today “flout” means “to treat with contemptuous disregard,” as in “Senators often flout the ethics rules.”

Use of “flaunt” to mean “disregard” began cropping up in print in the early 20th century, and it’s been driving usage mavens bonkers ever since. There is no doubt that this usage sprang from a confusion of “flaunt” with “flout,” so on that level it’s definitely an error. But it’s an understandable error, since both words depict obnoxiously arrogant public behavior, they strongly resemble each other in both form and sound, and there is even a chance that “flout” and “flaunt” may have been the same word at one time.

Now we come to a classic dilemma in English usage and lexicography. All major English usage books continue to label the substitution of “flaunt” for “flout” as a slam-dunk error. But the usage is so widespread that dictionaries would be remiss if they didn’t list the common “disregard” usage of “flaunt” as a secondary definition. The job of a dictionary is to describe how language is used, not to rap the knuckles of (or to Tase) its users.

The imperfect solution is to continue to observe the distinction yourself but not to freak out (or lapse into lecturing) when confronted with the “wrong” usage of “flaunt” to mean “disregard.” The flip side of that coin is that you should be especially careful when speaking to, or writing for, an audience that is likely to know the difference between the words. That the book on writing you mention used the disputed “flaunt” repeatedly is indeed surprising, but may be an indication that the days of “flout” are fading faster than I had thought.

Well, that explains the guards at the Longaberger factory.

Dear Word Detective: Recently a dear friend of mine was going through a romantic breakup, and was suffering most pitifully. It occurred to me that she was a basket case. Then it occurred to me to wonder where the heck the term “basket case” comes from anyway. I used to think it was based on the practice of encouraging patients in mental hospitals to participate in craft activities such as basket weaving. Actually, I have no idea whether mental patients are actually expected to do weave baskets. I used to have a friend who remarked to me that his son always thought that prisoners in the penitentiary making license plates was just an urban legend or movie device until he got sent to one. Apparently prisoners really do make license plates! So do mental patients really weave baskets? And if so, can I take a basket-weaving class without being in danger of running afoul of Nurse Ratched? But I digress. If the term doesn’t refer to that, to what does it refer? Is it someone who’s so fallen apart he must be carried about in a basket? I must say, I think my explanation’s more interesting. Or is there an even better explanation out there? Pray enlighten me, pretty please. — Chris.

My, what a long question. Not that I’m complaining; it was fun to read. I don’t have any direct experience of mental hospitals myself (yet), but I suspect that basket weaving therapy, if it ever existed, has been replaced by something a bit more lucrative for Big Pharma. As for license plates and penitentiaries, I believe the subject was definitively covered by John Hiatt in his classic song Tennessee Plates, available on YouTube (watch a version with Sonny Landreth on slide guitar for maximum awesomeness).

In addition to the theory about “basket case” being rooted in basket-making as therapy for severely debilitated mental patients, another popular explanation traces the term to victims violently dismembered in auto accidents (requiring rescue workers to gather them up in baskets). A third theory popular on the internet traces the phrase to the baskets used as receptacles at the foot of guillotines during the French revolution. The truth, unfortunately, is just as grisly as the latter two stories.

“Basket case” first appeared in the slang of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) fighting in Europe during World War I. It was widely rumored among the soldiers that some casualties had lost all four limbs and had to be transported in “baskets” lest they roll off a standard stretcher. Given the horrific nature of combat in this conflict (the AEF alone suffered 320,000 casualties), the stories of “basket cases” were entirely plausible, but the US War Department vigorously denied that there was a single such case known to them. A 1919 US government press release cited by lexicographer Paul Dickson in his book War Slang (1994) states emphatically that “The Surgeon General of the Army … denies emphatically that there is any foundation for the stories that have been circulated in all parts of the country of the existence of basket cases in our hospitals.” But the rumors persisted, of course, and the idea of the “basket case” was further spread in 1939 by Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun,” which focused on just such a case. A similar rumor of “basket cases” made the rounds during World War II and was denied with equal vigor by the US government.

Whether or not such “basket cases” actually existed in either war (and strongly I suspect that they did), by the 1960s “basket case” was being used almost exclusively in its modern figurative sense to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “One who is emotionally or mentally unable to cope; something that is no longer functional, especially a country that is unable to pay its debts or to feed its people” (“The real basket cases of European agriculture are the Italians and the Bavarians,” 1973).