Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

One question: am I really supposed to mow the lawn in February? It certainly seems to be growing. And when I took the dogs out yesterday, I was absent-mindedly brushing away a fly circling me for a full minute before I realized that a fly was circling me. That ain’t right. I’ve also just realized that my computer is operating, for some unknown reason, with a UK dictionary and wants me to spell “realized” as “realised.” I must fix this, as I have lost a big chunk of my formerly crackerjack spelling ability in recent years and thus may not notice subtle changes in the colour of my prose.

Speaking of losing my mind, right after I was diagnosed with ms a few years ago, I came across a book called something like “Cognitive Impairment in Multiple Sclerosis.” Cheery, right? Bad enough you can’t walk and can’t see half the time, but it turns out you can’t even sit quietly and think convincingly. The book had been written by a guy with ms and proved to be absolutely unreadable, which sounds like a joke, but I think it was because he was simply a horrible writer, not because he had cognitive problems. I also tried to read “Blindsided” by Mr. Meredith Vieira (Richard Cohen), who has ms and seems like a really nice guy, but I had to give up because his writing style reads like the voice-over on a network news report, bland, shallow and impersonally descriptive, which makes sense since he is/was a network news producer.

I had, back then, gone through six hours (!) of cognitive tests at OSU, the verdict of which was that I had developed some quite peculiar gaps in my mental hedgerows. I am unable, for instance, to add long columns of two-digit numbers in my mind, something I used to do routinely in my job at the Catplex. My short-term memory is dodgy, and I tend to misplace the dogs. I also tend to get turned around downtown, which is pretty scary since our town consists of a gas station, post office, one traffic light and not much else. I can never remember which way the high school is. Thank heavens I don’t go to high school.

Sunday in the Park with Treacle.

All of which brings us, inevitably, to Downton Abbey (not to be confused with Downtown Abby, who hangs out in the high school parking lot on weekends). I swear to god that if there were anything else on TV I would never watch this show. But Storage Wars and Shipping Wars and Hoarders have all started to blend together quite disturbingly in my dreams, so we tivo Downton and watch it in small chunks during the week. I think we’re about two weeks behind at this point. I don’t want to flog this thing too badly, because the only alternative is Dog the Bounty Hunter, but someone in the Guardian the other day called it “the Epcot Center version” of England, and that seems about right. In a bit of classic Disneyesque all-your-tie-ins-are-belong-to-us behavior, PBS apparently tried to open a tawdry online gift shop (“Lady Mary knotted pearl necklace and earring set”) on the coattails of the show without permission of the producers and got itself smartly slapped down.

The New York Times runs about one article per week about the show, the most cringe-worthy being one on the rage for Downton-themed viewing parties among the Manhattan elite. (Small world, indeed. I went back to look at that article and noticed that the accompanying photo features John-John ex-squeeze Christina Haag, with whom I worked many years ago.) Now that the huffy Brits have put the kibosh on cheesy Downton swag, I’m sure there are already clandestine tiara-parties on the Upper East Side where far pricier baubles are traded like Tupperware in Des Moines. It’s nice to know the 1% haven’t lost their childlike taste for dress-up, isn’t it?

So, anyway, a biggie in the ms cognitive whammy department is emotional lability, which means that your emotional reactions to small things tend to be hugely out of proportion. Some people, for instance, foam at the mouth and throw things when it rains. I, on the other hand, weep at stupid things on TV. It’s totally involuntary, and the weird thing is that I often don’t feel especially sad, happy, melancholy or even mildly moved when it happens. But if there’s a kid giving his mom a handmade card in an insurance commercial, I start blubbering. It’s mortifying. And infuriating.

And it’s especially infuriating when I watch Downton Abbey, because the show is shamelessly wrenching your amygdala at every possible opportunity with soaring strings and portentous little speeches embedded in a plot so cornball and dialogue so stilted that the part of my brain that still has some standards is begging me to change the channel to My Name is Earl. But no, there I sit, sniveling over some improbable subplot involving implausible characters whose names I can’t remember from week to week. It makes me want to foam at the mouth and throw things.

Onward. In addition to the TWD Facebook page, we now have a TWD Google Plus page, which can be reached by clicking on that big red thing in the right column. Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what G+ is for. It seems to be a cross between Usenet and Twitter.

As always, we depend on the kindness of readers for our kibble, so please consider subscribing. Think of it as a tiara for your mind.

Close, but no bugle.

Dear Word Detective: What is the derivation of “in the pink”? My father, born an Englishman, claims that the color of the jackets of those who hunt fox on horseback with their hounds (never “dogs,” if you please) is called “pink,” not “red,” in the hunting jargon, and supposes that to be “in the pink” is to be in fine hunting form. One is inclined not to doubt one’s own father of course. But it does seem sensible to “trust, but verify” in such matters. — Leslie R. Weatherhead.

Yes it does. Parents and other trusted figures do sometimes unwittingly pass along erroneous information. A high percentage of the questions I answer, in fact, come from people who have been told, at an early age, a colorful story about the origin of a word or phrase by their parents, grandparents or other presumably sober people, only to begin to doubt it many years later.

As you can probably tell from the tilt of that paragraph, the story your father offered to explain “in the pink” is not, in fact, completely true. It is true that the bright scarlet of the jackets traditionally worn by fox-hunters is called “hunting pink,” as are the coats themselves (“She loved to see him thus, superb in his pink, on his great black horse,” 1936). But there is no evidence that the phrase “in the pink” arose in the sport (around which I am sorely tempted to put quotation marks) of fox-hunting. “In the pink,” meaning “in fine shape, at the peak of condition and health,” actually follows quite logically from the evolution of the word “pink” itself.

Although we think of “pink” today as a color most often described as a pale red, sometimes with a slight purple tinge, the use of “pink” as the name of that color is relatively recent, first appearing in the mid-17th century and only becoming widespread in the 1800s. “Pink” prior to that was simply the popular name for flowers of the genus Dianthus, small blossoms with notched petals, often with dark stripes on a bright pink background. “Pinks” were enormously popular flowers from the 16th century onward. The name “pink” is a bit of a mystery, but probably comes from the “pinked” (notched) petals, “to pink” being an old verb of uncertain origin meaning “to cut, notch or pierce” (found today only in the “pinking shears” used in sewing).

The “Pink” flower was so popular in 16th century Europe that “pink” soon took on the broader meaning of “something excellent; the peak of perfection,” much as we might call a high-end coffee maker “the Rolls Royce of cappuccino machines.” Shakespeare was, as far as we know, the first to use it in print in this sense, in his 1597 play “Romeo & Juliet” (“Why, I am the very pinke of curtesie”). By the early 18th century “pink” was being used to mean “the most perfect condition or degree of something; the highest or most desirable state” (Oxford English Dictionary), and by the early 20th century “in the pink” meant “in perfect condition” and specifically “in perfect health” (“‘I am in excellent health, I thank you. And you?’ ‘In the pink. Just been over to America,’” P.G. Wodehouse, Inimitable Jeeves, 1923). So “in the pink” evolved quite seamlessly from a small, colorful flower, and no foxes were harmed in the process.

Seems like Only-Yesterday-Day.

Dear Word Detective: Most people know that the word “anniversary” deals with years, due to its root word, “annum.” But I constantly hear people talk about a six-week “anniversary” or a seven-month “anniversary.” These phrases are incorrect, but I cannot come up with a word that works in that instance. Certainly using fractions of a year (“our 3/10s anniversary”) is ridiculous, so what is the correct word, or words? — Gary R.

Good question. I was going to wait until the first anniversary of its arrival in my inbox before answering it, but we’ll just call this the ten-month anniversary, OK? Seems more appropriate. I have, by the way, email archives dating back to 1994 on my computer, which comes in handy when I need a good question and don’t have a recent one handy. I used to feel guilty about answering queries ten years late, but I figure it’s like the person just found that wallet they lost back in 2001, assuming they’ve kept the same email address for ten years. Hey, I still get a lot of mail from AOL accounts.

Onward. You’re correct about the roots of “anniversary” and the apparent logical problem posed by using it for any denomination of time but whole years. You are far from alone in finding such usage odd and awkward, as I discovered when I Googled variations on “Is there a word for a six-month anniversary.” There seems to be a large and vocal community of outrage seething about the usage of “anniversary” to mean less than one year. (Incidentally, I think we should popularize the term “Community of Outrage,” which we can then refer to by the acronym “COO,” which will drive the seethers nuts.)

“Anniversary” first appeared in English in the 13th century, and was based on the Latin word “anniversarius,” meaning “returning yearly” (from “annus,” year, plus “versus,” a turning). The first uses of “anniversary” were in the church, and “anniversary days” were usually dates with particular religious significance, e.g., the days of martyrdom of saints, etc. The use of “anniversary” for the yearly marking of any past occasion dates to a bit later, and such dates were previously known as “year-days” or “mind-days,” times when a notable occasion or person is “brought to mind.”

The use of “anniversary” to mean a date marking less than one year’s passage of time started to attract the attention of lexicographers in the late 1960s, but such use was, at that time, largely oral and rarely found in print. With the advent of the internet, of course, more previously purely oral usages began to appear in print. Bingo, here we are speaking of “two-week anniversaries” and yadda yadda yadda. (Yes, that’s an oral usage meta-joke.)

There have been, among those disturbed by the “hijacking” of “anniversary” to celebrate the fact that Danny and Debbie have been dating for a month, new words suggested to fill the gap. Since the need is felt most keenly when the interval observed is a multiple of months, we have “monthiversary,” “mensiversary” for Latin lovers (“mensis” being Latin for “month”), and “lunaversary” (“luna,” Latin for “moon,” the waxing and waning of which is the basis for our months). To the folks who came up with those inventions, I can only say, “Nice try, good luck with that.” But seriously, “lunaversary”? It sounds like where you’d go to study the invention of weird new words.

The bottom line on “anniversary” is something I seem to say way more often than once a year: language changes, and words change their meanings according to how real people use them “in the wild.” Does anyone truly not understand what “six-month anniversary” means? Of course not. So we don’t need a new word. The word we have has simply broadened its meaning from “The day in any year which agrees in date with a particular day in a former year” (Oxford English Dictionary) to “A day which marks the passage of a specific period of time from the date of a notable occurrence.” Just as “decimate” no longer means “to kill one out of every ten people” and “nice” no longer means “stupid” or “wanton,” the word “anniversary” has simply made itself a bit more useful.

It goes well with my lark’s-tongue shoes.

Dear Word Detective: Can you tell me why the word “bespoke” has become so popular recently? Did a movie actor or rock celeb re-coin the term? — Stuart Rosenberg.

Not that I know of, but what do I know? I seem to have a serious celebrity/showbiz/tabloid news deficiency. I didn’t know who Casey Anthony was until last month, and if Beyonce has a last name, it’s news to me. In fact, until the Anthony business, I had only a hazy idea of who Nancy Grace is, and I certainly didn’t realize that she’s mad as a March hare. I’m rather surprised that she isn’t running for president on a platform calling for the return of the rack and public stoning. Then again, the electoral night is young.

While pop culture, broadly defined, can certainly boost the popularity of a word or phrase to annoying heights (you can blame the musical “Les Miserables” for the “at the end of the day” plague, for instance), I think the rising rage for “bespoke” has more to do with the world of hedge funds than with either Hollywood or hip-hop. Leave it to the guys taking home a billion per year without breaking a sweat to gravitate to the classiest synonym out there for “wretched excess.”

“Bespoke” (for those of us who aren’t Masters of the Universe in the Tom Wolfe sense) simply means “made to order,” and has usually been applied to clothing (especially men’s suits or shoes) or other luxury goods. In tailoring,”bespoke” was originally a level of quality above “custom-made,” because a “bespoke” suit had to be hand-cut and hand-sewn from a pattern made for that particular customer, not simply machine-made and tailored from a modified standard pattern. According to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words (www.worldwidewords.org), however, in 2008 the British Advertising Standards Authority ruled that machine-made suits tailored to an individual customer could be called “bespoke.” Cue the angry grumbling from Grosse Pointe and Greenwich.

By 2008, on the other hand, “bespoke” had already been adopted to describe all sorts of consumer goods, from kitchen cabinets to surfboards, that had merely been custom-made or custom-modified for someone who was willing and able to pay much more than a sane person would.

Although “bespoke” is in common use in Britain, it strikes the American ear as slightly strange and exotic, a fact that has, no doubt, increased its appeal among the wealthy and would-be wealthy in the US. The Anglophiliac tendencies of that same demographic almost certainly also played a role in the spread of the term. And, of course, the mass media barkers are always on the lookout for new buzzwords, so “bespoke” is suddenly everywhere.

But while “bespoke” may sound exotic, that’s only because it’s a bit antiquated. “Bespoke” is an adjective formed from the verb “to bespeak,” which first appeared in Old English as “besprecan,” meaning “to speak out, to call out,” especially in a forceful, public manner (the prefix “be,” in this instance, acting as an intensifier). “Bespeak” went on to develop a number of senses in Modern English, but the only one still in use is “to indicate or give evidence of” (“But her House Bespake a sleepy hand of negligence,” Wordsworth, 1814).

One of the senses “bespeak” developed, back in the 17th century, was “to request or engage a person to do something” (“Then fairely I bespoke the Officer To go in person with me to my house,” Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, 1616). This sense of “bespeak” is obsolete as a verb, but its past participle “bespoke” lives on as an adjective redolent (at least until lately) of exclusivity and wealth. Incidentally, in case anyone out there is truly disturbed by the dilution of the definition of “bespoke,” I have a solution. Send me two million bucks and I’ll invent, just for you, a brand-new word meaning “just for you.”

Tee many martoonies?

Dear Word Detective: Do you know where the term “whostruckjohn,” meaning, to me, a little white lie (as in “I caught a 12 foot fish.” “Aw, you’re just giving me a whostruckjohn”) came from? I have also heard it used in the sense of “a mess,” as in “It looks like whostruckjohn in here.” It seems to be local to the Washington DC/Baltimore area. There was a local Baltimore rock band called Who Struck John, and there is a jazz composition by some famous jazz artist (sorry I can’t recall who, right now) called Who Struck John; the jazz artist is from D.C. I learned the term from my mother, who is from nearby Frederick, Maryland — Linda Conner.

Whoa. That’s a heckuva question. There are some questions that are fairly easy to research (or to which I already know the answer), and the only challenge is explaining the answer in a logical fashion (which often isn’t as easy as it should be). And then there are questions like this one, where there seem to be clues everywhere I turn, but no definitive answer, and trying to pin down a coherent history or even a logically consistent definition of the term is like trying to nail smoke to a wall. All of which is a long-winded way of saying “Don’t get your hopes up.”

What I’ve found in stumbling around on the trail of “whostruckjohn” and its relatives is a wispy tangle of sightings, but we might as well begin with what we do know with some certainty. “Who shot John” (or “who struck John” or “who hit John”) was a slang term in the Old West for moonshine or other illicit homemade liquor of exceedingly high strength and poor quality. The sense of the phrase is that one drink of “who shot John” would render the person instantly unconscious and leave his companions standing over the recumbent figure, jokingly wondering “Who shot John?” The phrase and its variants appear in several glossaries of cowboy slang, and apparently made it into the script of the 1976 Western “The Shootist,” in which John Wayne (in his final film role) says, “I hope you’re smart enough to know that who-hit-John don’t go with guns.” Apparently “who shot John” and its relatives were also used to mean an advanced state of inebriation. Robert Hendrickson, in his “Whistlin’ Dixie: A Dictionary of Southern Expressions” (1993), defines “drunker than who shot John” as meaning “uncontrollably drunk.”

OK so far, but now things get weird. At some point, “who shot John,” et al., came to be used in a wide variety of senses unconnected to drink, such as to mean “nonsense” (e.g., your “little white lie” about the fish), extreme commotion and confusion, or just “a total mess.”

Just how those senses evolved is unclear, but they may hark back to the mid-19th century, when a children’s game called (or involving the phrase) “who shot John” was popular in Britain. The phrase was apparently adopted by the British military as slang for “finger pointing,” attempts to assign blame in the wake of failure. This use of “who shot John” eventually became popular in Washington, DC (where finger-pointing is the name of the game), and, according to the late William Safire, President Richard Nixon was known to be fond of the phrase (saying, in 1977, “And so, that’s the human side of story, which . . . I know that you and the press, you can’t be interested in that. You can only be interested in ‘Who shot John.’ Well go ahead.”).

It could be argued that a scene of great confusion (“a total mess”), perhaps involving profound drunkenness, would lead naturally to “finger pointing” and the invention of “nonsense” or “white lies” by those accused of responsibility, which would connect the major senses of the phrase. Or the “drunk” sense could be unrelated to the other uses.

There are many other tantalizing clues floating around out there about “who shot John,” along with indications of the strangely persistent attraction of the phrase. As you note, there have been several bands named with versions of the phrase, and Duke Ellington used it as the title of a composition in 1947. Maybe the phrase “who shot John” is just hanging around until somebody manages to definitively explain it.

Walking my cow. Why?

Dear Word Detective: Is there not a phrase “coming out in droves” or do I have “droves” wrong? And if “droves” is indeed correct, what does it mean? — Ron Burkey, Jr.

Ah, the sound of a man doubting his own sanity. I know it well. Every so often I’ll find myself typing or saying something that makes perfect sense to me, but which fails, for some reason, to mean anything useful on Planet Earth. A few years ago I convinced myself that I had grown up using the word “stinch,” meaning “to be stingy.” No such word (except as an obsolete 15th century form of “stanch”), according to every dictionary I own. Apparently I had been combining “stint” (which does mean “restrict”) with “stingy” or “skimp.” But at least I wasn’t alone; the impetus for my investigation was a question from a reader also convinced that “stinch” was an accepted word.

In the case of “droves,” however, you’re on solid ground. “Droves” is not only a real word, it’s a very popular one. Google News at the moment lists more than 2,000 news stories using the word (e.g., “New Yorkers leaving the state in droves,” AP, 8/02/11). And you don’t even have to be human to qualify as a “drove,” provided there are enough of you (“Toadlets cross Chilliwack roads in droves” and “Stink bugs showing up in droves” being two recent headlines).

“Drove,” of course, is familiar to us as the past tense of the verb “to drive” (“Having nothing better to do, Bob drove to Cleveland and almost immediately regretted it”). “Drive” as a verb, derived from Germanic roots, originally carried the sense of forcing people or animals to move forward by pushing or threatening from behind (a sense that was somewhat weakened in the 16th century by the adoption of “drive” to mean “operate a vehicle pulled by horses, oxen, etc.”).

“Drove” is a noun derived from the verb “to drive,” and when it first appeared in Old English, it meant simply “the act of driving or herding” a herd of livestock, flock of sheep, etc. By the 12th century, however, “drove” had come to be applied to the group of animals that was being “driven.” Eventually, “drove” expanded yet further, and was used to mean a large group of animals, people or other entities, moving together as a group for whatever reason, not necessarily because the group was being “driven” by force (“Singapore fans turned up in droves to watch the Lions reach the third round,” 7/28/11). Although “drove” in the singular now means “a large group of animals, people or things,” the word is almost always used in the plural form “droves.”

While “driver,” the agent noun formed on the verb “to drive,” has developed a wide range of literal and figurative meanings, from golf clubs to economic mechanisms (“Consumer spending, a key driver of the economy, did not grow at all in the second quarter,” AFP, 8/06/11), the agent noun of the verb “to drove,” which appeared in the 17th century meaning “to herd,” hasn’t changed much at all. A “drover” is a person who “drives,” in the original “force from behind” sense, a herd of animals, usually cattle, to market (“Scores of highly born and bred men live by droving cattle,” 1881). The cowboys that figure so prominently in US history, TV and movies were, in many cases, “drovers” who spent their days convincing “droves” of reluctant cattle to march to market.

Too good a time was had by all.

Dear Word Detective: I’m reading “Five Weeks in a Balloon” by Jules Verne. A character is described as “the jester and merry-andrew of the boatswain’s mess.” I understand what a “merry-andrew” is, but can’t find out where it came from. Please help. — Jan.

I’ve never read “Five Weeks in a Balloon,” though I probably should have during my Jules Verne phase (roughly when I was between 12 and 14). I must admit that the title has always made me a bit uneasy. I’m not claustrophobic at all, but I am acrophobic, and the thought of being aloft in a balloon for five minutes, let alone five weeks, gives me the wimwams. In any case, Verne’s novel describes a trip across Africa (where he had never been) by hot-air balloon (about which, according to the killjoys at Wikipedia, he got all sorts of technical details wrong). But looking for factual accuracy in a Verne novel is, to put it mildly, missing the whole point. After all, Verne’s talent managed to make Captain Nemo, who never existed, immortal.

As you have deduced (and is implied by the quotation you included), a “merry-andrew” is a jester, a cut-up or card who amuses people with a steady stream of jokes and comic banter. In extended use, “merry-andrew” is sometimes used to mean simply “fool or idiot” or, as an adjective, “foolish” or “clownish.” The first appearance in print of “merry-andrew” used in a generic sense was in the late 17th century (“Th’ Italian Merry-Andrews took their place, And quite Debauch’d the Stage with lewd Grimace,” Dryden, 1684).

There has been uncertainty (and debate) over the origin of “merry-andrew” for several centuries. The most popular theory identifies the original “merry-andrew” as Dr. Andrew Boorde (circa 1490–1549), personal physician to Henry VIII. Dr. Boorde apparently was known for his humorous bedside manner and love of a good joke (although he did not, as some accounts have it, actually publish a popular joke collection). Dr. Boorde’s prominence and well-known sense of humor would make him, at first glance, a good candidate for being the original “merry-andrew.” Unfortunately, there is no actual evidence for this theory; it was simply declared as a fact in 1735 by the historian and antiquarian Thomas Hearne (1678–1735), and subsequent attempts to bolster the Boorde/”merry-andrew” equation have been fruitless.

That leaves us with the explanation suggested by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which traces “merry-andrew,” based on early citations, to the Bartholomew Fair, a large summer fair in London that was held every year from 1133 to 1855. (That’s an annual fair held for 700 years, which is pretty amazing. According to the City of London website, “The Fair featured sideshows, prize-fighters, musicians, wire-walkers, acrobats, puppets, freaks and wild animals. Also common at the fair was the selling of wives.” Apparently the city authorities pulled the plug on the Fair in 1855 because it had “degenerated” too far into debauchery. One can only imagine what line they finally crossed.)

The OED suggests, quite reasonably, that the original “merry-andrew” was a particular performer at the Bartholomew Fair in the mid- to late 17th century, most likely one, as the OED puts it, “whose persona was that of a fool” and whose stage name was actually “Merry Andrew.” The OED supplies supporting citations from the period, including one dating to 1688 from the famous Diary of Samuel Pepys (“I … took her and Mercer and Deb to Bartholomew-fair, and there did see a ridiculous, obscene little stage-play called ‘Mary Andrey,” a foolish thing but seen by everybody.”) Other quotations make it clear that the performer was, in fact, male (“Arch Merry Andrew will rend out his voice: Though his looks are but simple, & his actions the same, …By playing the fool he does get store of Coyn” (circa 1680) and “Let’s … step to Fair of Bartlemew… Here Merry-Andrew with his Babble, Diverts the crouds of gaping Rabble” (1691)). So “merry-andrew,” today meaning a person who behaves like a clown or fool, almost certainly came from the stage name of a very successful “fool.”

Hey, how come there’s no four-letter word for “four-letter word”?

Dear Word Detective: I recently found “sabe” on the Scrabble word list. I wondered what it meant, but could only find it in the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Players Dictionary as a verb meaning “to savvy.” I know “savvy” is related to the Spanish “sabe,” but have been unable to find any English use of the word. Is it an English word? If not, any idea how it ended up on the word list?

Rats. I was getting all fired up for my anti-Scrabble rant, which I trot out every two or three years, when I had a disturbing realization. I personally dislike playing Scrabble. But the game’s makers really ought to be awarded some sort of prize for enriching the vocabulary of millions of people since Alfred Mosher Butts, an unemployed architect, invented it in 1938. Then again, Butts gets the credit, but he didn’t really invent the Scrabble game we know today. His original version was called “Lexico,” and didn’t even have a game board, just the little tiles. It wasn’t until a guy named James Brunot bought the rights to Lexico in 1947, fiddled with it a bit, added the board, and renamed it Scrabble that the game took off. The Chairman of Macy’s played Scrabble on vacation, ordered all his stores to stock it, and turned it into a national sensation. Today, according to Hasbro, the game’s current maker, there’s a Scrabble set in one out of every three US households. We actually own a very nice deluxe set ourselves, received as a gift a decade ago. It makes a lovely bookend.

In any case, yes, “sabe” is a real English word (pronounced “SAH-bay”) although it is a direct borrowing of the Spanish word “sabe.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “to sabe” as a simple synonym of “to savvy,” which in turn means “to know, to understand, to comprehend.” The OED notes that “savvy,” and presumably “sabe” as well, are often used in the interrogative form “Sabe?” or “Savvy?” following an explanation given to someone whose understanding of said explanation is considered, for whatever reason, to be in doubt (“You’ve got to quit; savey?”, 1897; “Ha! Sabe that?” 1850). Both “sabe” and “savvy” are also nouns, meaning “practical intelligence” or “street smarts,” and adjectives meaning “quick-witted” or “in the know” (“A savvy tenant putting a deposit on his house gains a 12-month option to buy at the price ruling when he made the deposit,” 1980). Interestingly, the OED also defines the interjection “Quien sabe?”, originally a Spanish phrase meaning “Who knows?” or “Who can say?” (“Was this the same man for whom Murdock’s Landing was named? Quien sabe?”, 2005).

When those of us who grew up with 1950s television in the US hear “sabe,” many of us immediately think of the word “kemosabe,” which is what Tonto, faithful Indian companion to the Lone Ranger, called the masked dude in the wildly popular TV series. But there doesn’t seem to be any connection between “sabe” and “kemosabe.” According to an exhaustive investigation by The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams (www.straightdope.com) many years ago, Jim Jewell, who directed the Lone Ranger radio serial back in the late 1930s, took the word from the name of a camp (Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee) run by his father-in-law in Michigan. Jewell maintained that “Kee-Mo Sah-Bee” meant “trusted scout” in the local Indian language, and he was at least in the ballpark on that. Cecil Adams managed to track down language exerts who confirmed that the word “giimoozaabi” did mean something like “scout” in the Ojibwe language, the Ottawa tribe in the area of the camp did speak Ojibwe, and “giimoozaabi” probably sounded a good deal like “Kee-Mo Sah-Bee” or “Kemosabe.” That’s some serious detective work.

Unfortunately, even the awesome and resourceful Cecil Adams was unable to determine just how the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion ended up with the name “Tonto,” which, in Spanish, is an insult meaning “drunk” or “crazy.”

I prefer not to.

Dear Word Detective: My mother says that there was a comic book character that originated the contraction of “would rather” into “druthers.” Other folks call it a Southernism. Where’d it really come from? — Debbie.

Comic book? Southernism? How strange. I always assumed that it came from Druthers, our family butler when I was growing up. Druthers was a good man, but he never seemed to be there when you needed him, not a winning trait in a butler. I distinctly remember Father saying, nearly every day, “If I had my Druthers, I would drive to the shore and buy some carp. Where is my Druthers?” My brother Timmy, quite the card, finally replied, “Don’t you mean ‘Where ARE my Druthers,’ Father?”, whereupon Father sharply cuffed Timmy, then drove him down to the station and booked him for aggravated effrontery and chronic twerpitude. It was about this time that I realized I had wandered into the wrong house several years earlier, so I went home.

Please forgive me. It’s 89 degrees in this room and I feel, uh, rather odd. Anyway, “druthers” is an interesting word. It is indeed a Southernism, meaning that it arose in and still is found primarily in the southern US. And it is a dialectical variation of “would rather.” “Druther” is used both as a verb (“Any way you druther have it, that is the way I druther have it,” Mark Twain, 1896) and a noun to mean “preference,” sometimes in the form “ruthers” or “ruther” (“‘Your ruthers is my ruthers’ (what you would rather is what I would rather). Certainly the most amiable and appeasing phrase in any language, the language used being not English but deep Southern,” 1941).

“Rather” itself is a rather interesting word. It first appeared in Old English, from Germanic roots, and was actually the comparative form of the now long-obsolete adverb “rathe,” which meant “quickly, rapidly, without delay.” So this “rath-er” form meant “earlier, sooner or previously,” and eventually took on the more general adverbial senses used today, indicating preference (“I’d rather be in Philadelphia”), degree (“A rather large dog”), or contrast (“Next time, make sure you email just Bob, rather than the whole office”).

The first occurrence of “druther” found so far in print is from 1833 (“I’d druther live in the woods any time, by myself, than on the best plantation in the county,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine), discovered by etymologist Barry Popik. It was, of course, almost certainly in oral use long before it showed up in print, and logic dictates that the original form was probably “drather,” which is still occasionally heard in the South. One odd thing about “druthers” is that it began as an adverbial phrase (“I’d rather”), but became a noun. Another really strange thing is that, according to field research done by the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), using “druthers” as a noun is especially common among people with a college education (though usage of the verb “druther” doesn’t similarly skew along educational levels).

As for the comic strip origin of “druthers” your mother suggested, I have good news and bad. The bad news is that since “druthers” has been around since 1833, and its evolution is fairly well documented, a comic strip source is unlikely. The good news, however, is that your mother is not crazy. Cartoonist Al Capp (1909-79), in his wildly popular strip L’il Abner, apparently used “druthers” so often that many people believed that he had invented the word. Set in the fictional town of Dogpatch, Capp’s strip did contribute a number of phrases to the popular lexicon, including “Dogpatch” itself for a small, backward town, “Sadie Hawkins Day,” a fictional holiday when gender roles are reversed and women “chase” men, and “Shmoos,” friendly creatures that give milk, lay eggs, and look forward to being cooked and eaten.

Neatly pressed lucre.

Dear Word Detective: I heard someone say that the term “money laundering” originated with Mafia ownership of laundromats in the United States. I think the speaker was clearly hitting the suds that day. Do you know when and how the term “money laundering” came to be? — Chris.

Oh boy, a Mafia question. Always fun. Back in the 1990s, I wrote a weekly column for the New York Daily News called “City Slang,” in which I answered readers’ questions about the rich and varied vernacular of the city. Since the Mob is a popular obsession in NYC, a lot of the queries I received were about organized crime slang I’d never heard, so I’d ask crime reporters at the paper and some retired NYPD detectives I knew if they’d ever heard the term. I also discovered that a couple of guys I knew knew guys who were “connected” in the Mob sense, and they’d ask around for me. More often than not, the search turned up bupkis, and I had to assume that the word in question was some screenwriter’s invention. It wasn’t a total wash, however. I did learn who to call if I needed somebody’s legs broken.

The verb “to launder,” meaning “to wash or clean,” is an interesting word. It first appeared in the mid-17th century, but the antiquated noun form “launder,” meaning “someone who cleans clothes,” dates back to the 14th century. The ultimate root of both words is the Latin “lavare,” to wash, which also gave us “lavatory.” But the word “launder” is actually a contraction of the earlier (and now obsolete) word “lavender,” which meant “a washerwoman” in the 13th century. Various theories have been proposed over the years attempting to connect this washing “lavender” to the shrub known as “lavender,” such as the aromatic flowers of the lavender being used to scent freshly-washed clothes. But it now appears that they are two completely separate words, and that the “lavender” shrub takes its name from the same roots that gave us “livid,” i.e., “bluish,” as are lavender blossoms.

The term “money laundering,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions,” seems to have first appeared in the early 1960s, though it only became widely known during the Watergate investigations of the 1970s, in which suitcases full of cash played a role in forcing the resignation of President Richard Nixon. While organized crime has long used legitimate businesses to “launder” dirty money, “money laundering” simply employs an established figurative use of “launder” meaning “sanitize, render acceptable” (“House votes to launder report before publication,” UPI headline, 1/30/76). So laundromats are not the root of “money laundering,” and I guess you’re right about the suds.

Although “money laundering” is nowhere near as intriguing as it should be (I’ve always pictured industrial Maytags full of cash), the practice has spawned at least one amusing term. In the wake of US law enforcement attempts to prevent money laundering by requiring any bank deposit of more than $10,000 to be reported to the government, criminals looking to hide cash began breaking up large sums into a series of small deposits, just under that limit, in different banks. By 1985, this tactic was known as “smurfing,” after the then-popular TV cartoon series The Smurfs, which featured numerous and highly-animated small blue people running around. It’s an inspired bit of slang for an otherwise dry and probably tedious activity (“To be more efficient, smurfs target areas where several banks are close to each other and, like most people, they avoid busy banks. ‘There is very little smurfing in New York City,’ says Charles Saphos, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Florida, ‘because the lines are too long.’” Business Week, 1985). There are now laws against “smurfing,” which is more soberly called “structuring” by bankers. But I really like the sound of “Anti-Smurfing Law.”

Dig it.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve lived most of my life in the southern US, and for most of that time I’ve heard about “bar ditches” beside the road. It has been explained to me that the name refers to the fact that the dirt that makes the “crown” in the center of the road was “bar-aahd” from the ditches. I have been unimpressed by this explanation for forty-five or fifty years now. Any suggestions? — Stewart Bolerjack.

Hey, we live on a road like that, with no shoulder and deep ditches on both sides. You do not wanna end up in one of those ditches. Our road is supposedly two lanes, but it’s been more like 1.5 lanes since the county “improved” it a few years ago. (Our neighbor said, “Jeez, that’s how they build roads in Texas,” which apparently wasn’t a compliment.) People wonder why folks out in the sticks tend to be more religious than city dwellers, and I think it’s partly these roads. There’s nothing like seeing one of the local honor students futzing with his cell phone while he’s coming at you doing 55 in his daddy’s F-350 to suddenly put questions of eternity at the top of your personal agenda.

That “bar-aahd” (“borrowed”) explanation of “bar ditch” that you find unimpressive is, I see from the internet, very widespread. I’ve also heard that a “bar ditch” is so-called because, if you drive your car into one, you might as well start walking to the nearest bar and have a few beers while you wait for the tow truck. A more serious explanation for the term, found in Texas and reported by the Dictionary of American Regional English, says that the name “bar ditch” comes from the fact that it “bars” cattle and sheep from wandering onto the road. If there’s any truth to that being the intention behind the ditches, somebody needs to tell the cows that wander the roads around here.

The funny thing about the “bar-aahd” theory you’ve heard is that it may very well be true. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the term “borrow-pit” from 1893, which it defines as “In civil engineering, an excavation formed by the removal of material to be used in filling or embanking,” and notes that it “apparently” comes from the verb “to borrow.” It seems entirely possible that “borrow pit” became “barrow pit” or “barrow ditch” (which is almost as common in the US as “bar ditch”) and then “bar ditch.” The fact that the earth removed from such ditches is indeed frequently used to form the foundation of these roads is a powerful argument for this theory.

There is, however, a complicating factor, which is the existence of the very old English word “barrow,” meaning “mound or hill,” which first appeared in Old English and is still found in place names. It is possible that the “bar” in “bar ditch,” as well as the “barrow” in “barrow ditch,” come from this “barrow,” rather than from “borrow.” At this point “barrow” and “borrow” are so entwined in usage of the term that it’s impossible to pin down the exact origin of “bar ditch.”

Incidentally, if that “barrow” sounds familiar, it’s probably because of “wheelbarrow,” but there’s no connection between the terms. The “barrow” of “wheelbarrow” is a different word, dating back to the early 14th century and originally meaning a kind of platform with handles (like a wooden stretcher) used to carry heavy things. A “barrow” required at least two people to carry it until some genius decided to add a wheel to the front and created the “wheelbarrow.” The old, un-wheeled barrow is now known as a “handbarrow.”

Made in the shade.

Dear Word Detective: Please explain the origin of the phrase “The world is your oyster” with regards to having the ability to accomplish anything you put your mind to. And is this a correct paraphrase? — Julie.

You’re close, but in place of “ability,” I’d say “opportunity,” and rather than “accomplish anything you put your mind to,” I’d go with “profit from your position.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) explains the idiom “the world is one’s oyster” as meaning that “one is in a position to profit from the opportunities that life, or a particular situation, may offer.” It is possible to attain that position of advantage through one’s own efforts, ingenuity or foresight (“Bob got a degree in Computer Science back in 1990, so when he went looking for a job, the world was his oyster”), but it’s also possible to be born wealthy and grow up in a life of privilege where any whim can be fulfilled.

I am personally not a big fan of oysters as food (especially after a bout of neurotoxic shellfish poisoning caused by bad clams a couple of years ago). But even if I were an oyster addict, it would still seem strange to employ a small, slimy critter as a symbol of “having it made.” The OED defines an oyster as “Any of various bivalve mollusks of the family Ostreidae, typically having a rough, irregularly oval shell, including several types which are eaten (often raw) as a delicacy and may be farmed for food or pearls.” Our word “oyster” first appeared in English in the 14th century (“Many a muscle and many an oystre … Hath been oure foode,” Chaucer, circa 1395). We adopted “oyster” from “oistre,” the Old French word for the creature, but the ultimate source was the Latin “ostrea,” from Indo-European roots meaning “bone,” in apparent reference to the critter’s shell.

Although oysters have long been considered a delicacy, “the world is one’s oyster” invokes, as a metaphor, much more than just a tasty snack. Oysters are also, of course, the source of beautiful and very valuable pearls, although the chances of finding a pearl-bearing oyster on your dinner plate are vanishingly remote (especially today, since the oysters that produce pearls are not considered edible). But, as they say in the Lotto ads, you can’t win it if you’re not in it, and only by prying open the oyster can you hope to win a pearl or, at the very least, partake of the delicacy inside. So, in the most expansive sense, “the world is your oyster” means that, because of your position or advantages, the world is laid out before you like a plate of oysters needing only to be pried open to be enjoyed, perhaps with a pearl as a prize (“Invested with full powers to make the world his oyster, and leave nothing but the shell to his unpatented competitors,” 1809). The “prying open” part of the process is mentioned in the very first known use of the phrase. “The world is one’s oyster” first appeared in print in the early 17th century, and seems to be one of the dozens of phrases and figures of speech coined by William Shakespeare, in this case in his play The Merry Wives of Windsor (“Why then the world’s mine Oyster, which I, with sword will open”).

“Oyster” itself crops up in numerous other phrases, from “oyster monger” to “oyster shucker,” which sounds like a yucky job. Special mention, however, should be made of the term “oyster kiss,” which dates back to the 1600s but was probably best explained by a young woman quoted in the Vancouver Sun in 1994: “The raw oyster kiss. ‘They’re those wet, cool, open-mouth slobbering kisses,’ she explained. ‘You feel like a mollusk has attached itself to your face.’” And they say romance is dead.