I’m holding out for one that tastes like pizza.

Dear Word Detective: As I ponder the year-over-year increase in seasonal beers, I am sipping a “lemon shandy” and wondering about the origin of the drink name. A quick search gets me to “shandygaff,” but then the trail gets cold and my shandy grows warm. Can you help? — John.

Perhaps. But I should warn you that I am severely beer-ignorant. I decided early on that I really didn’t like the stuff. I probably should have tried harder, but I didn’t realize until way too late that I was cutting myself off from great swaths of life in the US. Some major elements of American culture, such as football, the Eagles and Steve Carell movies, can apparently be properly appreciated only after imbibing mind-numbing quantities of beer. Oh well, maybe next time. The whole boutique micro-brewery scene still mystifies me, however. Isn’t that all sorta like obsessing over the best brand of beef jerky?

Now that I have the vegan fedora-wearing hipster artisanal brewers of Williamsburg mad at me, back to work. You’ll be glad to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that paragon of scholarly sobriety, includes both “shandygaff” and “shandy” (defined as a short form of “shandygaff”). The OED defines “shandygaff” as “A drink composed of a mixture of beer and ginger-beer,” but Merriam-Webster broadens that a bit, declaring the stuff “beer diluted with a non-alcoholic drink (as ginger beer).” The OED entry for “shandy” notes that the word can also be used to mean “a mixture of beer and fizzy lemonade.” The consensus of sources I found is that a shandy can be a “ginger shandy” or a “lemon shandy,” but that substituting any other non-alcoholic ingredient, particularly sweetened fruit syrup, is a demonic perversion of the natural order and cause for social ostracism and possibly actual exorcism. (This sort of combative secret code is yet another good reason I avoid bars.)

The earliest citation offered by the OED for “shandy” is from 1888 (“Sparkling hop, shandy, and other new-fangled drinks.”); the first citation for “shandygaff” is from 1853 (“He taught me … to make shandy-gaff and sherry-cobbler.”).

Unfortunately, while we know when “shandygaff” first appeared, no one seems to have even the faintest glimmer as to where it came from, and every dictionary I’ve checked labels it “origin unknown,” so we’re left to strike out on our own. The word “shandy” by itself is a fairly old (1691) English dialect adjective meaning “boisterous” or “empty headed; half-crazy” (OED), which could be a clue, but this “shandy” is also of unknown origin, so that’s no fun. We’re also still left with the original “gaff” bit to explain. There are several “gaffs” in English, the most common being “gaff” in the sense of “a hooked pole.” Another “gaff” means “a loud outcry” or “nonsense” (possibly from the Old English “gaf-spraec,” blasphemous or scandalous speech, possibly related to the French “gaffe,” verbal blunder). There’s also a “gaff” meaning “a fair” or “a place of lower-class entertainment,” as a music hall, etc.

If any of these have any connection to “shandygaff,” I’d put my money on the one meaning “loud nonsense” because, combined with the “boisterous and silly” sense of “shandy,” you’d have a plausible picture of someone who has spent the evening guzzling “shandygaffs.” But this is all pure speculation, and reverse-engineering words this way is often misleading.

Knock three times.

Dear Word Detective: Well, we all know what the question “Are you decent?” means, but how and when did it come to be that very specific question referring to one’s state of (un)dress? —  Your Humble Reader, Nick.

Mmm, humble. That’s the spirit. “Are you decent?” is an interesting idiom in part because it doesn’t seem like an idiom, which is a fixed phrase that has more meaning (or a different meaning) than the literal sum of its words (e.g., “piece of cake” meaning “something easily done”). “Are you decent?” seems to be the most basic of simple, factual questions, on a par with “Are you married?” or “Is that your dog driving my car?” But what it really means, as an idiom, is “Are the parts of your body considered not fit for public viewing according to societal norms in this particular historical period sufficiently obscured so as not to cause either of us embarrassment and/or lasting mortification?”

“Decent,” of course, is one of more popular English adjectives (certainly more popular than “crepuscular,” which means “dim, indistinct, resembling twilight” and is one of my favorite words). English adopted “decent” in the 16th century from the French word “decent,” which was based on the Latin “decentem” (“fitting, appropriate, proper”), which was a form of “decere,” meaning “to be proper or seemly.”

The initial meaning of “decent” in English concerned the tenets of social respectability at the time; what was “decent” was what was appropriate to one’s rank or station and socially fitting given the facts of a situation (“The funerall of the Bish[op] of Hereford …was a decent solemnity..,” circa 1684). We still use this “appropriate” or “seemly” sense when we speak of waiting a “decent” time before criticizing someone who has died or spending a “decent” amount of time on social obligations (“After a decent Time spent in the Father’s House, the Bridegroom went to prepare his Seat for her Reception,” 1710).
By the 17th century, “decent” had broadened a bit to also mean “in good taste,” “sufficient” (“decent salary”) and even “handsome or attractive,” especially as applied to dwellings (“He had Five or Six Apartments in his House …Two of them were very large and decent,” Daniel Defoe, 1725).

Bubbling along under the “socially appropriate” usage of “decent” all this time had, however, been a different use of “decent” in a “personal morality” sense, specifically to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “In accordance with or satisfying the general standard of propriety or good taste, in conduct, speech, or action; especially conformable to or satisfying the recognized standard of modesty or delicacy; free from obscenity.” Yes, folks, we’re entering the zone of foul-mouthed nekkid people here. This is the sense of “decent” invoked by centuries of fervid campaigns against obscenity, pornography and other sorts of “indecency,” from which a pass can be earned only by clinical detachment, such as that of an anthropologist encountering people safely far away (“The Wa-Caga cannot be accused of indecency, for they make no effort to be decent, but walk about as Nature made them,”  H. H. Johnston, Kilimanjaro Expedition, 1886). Today cable TV and the internet are, of course, full of people wandering around “as Nature made them” (albeit often with unnatural enhancement), so “decency” in this sense has lost a bit of its oomph in many quarters, though it still gets votes in the boonies.

All of which brings us back to “Are you decent?” as a pause-at-the-door formality. Interestingly, the phrase seems to have originated as a jocular usage among theater performers, as explained in a 1949 book by Ruth Harvey called “Curtain Time”: “Sometimes, if she knew one of the actors or actresses, she would knock at a door and call ‘Are you decent?’  (That old theatrical phrase startled people who didn’t belong to the theatre, but it simply meant ‘Are you dressed?’).” Given that actors would be well aware that government agencies as well as self-appointed Decency Cops were constantly monitoring stage productions for “indecency” during most of the 20th century, it’s likely that the “decent” in the phrase was a joking reference to the standards of propriety applied to performers on stage, and not just a random synonym for “dressed.”