Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Note:  Due to the unfortunate lapse between our November and January issues (not to mention a disastrous cash-flow problem here at TWD World Headquarters), the Holiday Two-Subs-for-Just-Barely-More-than-One Special Deal described here has been extended until February 1, 2009 (or until we get around to taking down the Christmas tree, March at the latest).  So if you’re looking for just the thing to combat those post-holiday blues, we’ve got your ticket, with a spare for a friend.  As always, your support keeps this website up and running.  We now return you to our somewhat irregular programming:

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Holy moly, all right, already.  Never a dull moment.

You’re probably wondering what happened to the December issue. Me too. I’ve been away:

Twas just days before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for one spouse, who was crouched on all fours at the porcelain throne, wishing he’d chosen dinner at home….

So a couple of weeks ago Hometown Buffet, an all-you-can-eat place here in Central Ohio, sent me a coupon good for one free meal on account of my birthday.

(Although I do not “age” as you humans do, I celebrate my arrival on your planet as my “birthday” out of solidarity with your plight.  It also makes things way easier at the DMV.)

We chose the Friday before Christmas as the happy date, because Friday is Fish Night at HTB (as they call themselves), and Mrs. WD is fond of broiled salmon. The food at HTB is not, as you can imagine, exactly the reincarnation of Lutece, but if you exercise caution, much of it ain’t bad and the salmon is always fresh. Besides, this was all gonna be half-price.

I actually hate fish, and on such occasions usually go with the broiled chicken, mashed potatoes and pizza that represent my personal food pyramid. The vegetarian marinara sauce there is also actually quite good, and they don’t overcook the pasta. It really isn’t a dump, in other words.

So we march in and chow down, and on my second trip to the trough I notice that they have a big tray of fried clams, the only kind of seafood I actually like.  So I eat a small pile.  A big small pile.  With tartar sauce that, admittedly, reminds me a bit of spackle.  Then, after a few pieces of carrot cake (quite good), we toddle home.  End of Act One.

That night I dreamed of Manderley.  No, actually, I dreamed of Borneo, which is very odd.  I almost never dream of Borneo.  Never, in fact.  But there I was, in a small village in Borneo, being pursued by giant stinging insects. It was an extremely vivid, cinematic sort of dream, which is also unusual for me.

I spent the next day in a weird sort of funk, and didn’t feel like eating much of anything. That night I had more B-movie nightmares, also very vivid. The only other time I remember having such baroque nightmares was when I took Percocet after a gall bladder operation years ago. In one dream, for instance, I was at a book fair in Atlanta, and they had given me a very fancy but completely blank name tag, which really upset me. I went on to dream that I was trapped in a dead city full of ghosts, but that name tag thing actually bothered me more. Hi, my name is nobody. Wanna talk about my invisible book?

The next day, Sunday, I really felt strange and sick, so strange that I went back to bed in the early afternoon. When I woke up at around 6 pm I felt dizzy and nauseated, so I headed for the bathroom. About halfway there I sort of collapsed on the floor. Even to me, up until then convinced that I merely had a bad case of indigestion, this was clearly a Bad Sign.

Next thing I know I’m downstairs in the living room, arguing with the EMTs that they should take me to Mt. Carmel East in Columbus rather than to the local Fairfield Medical Center (FMC). I won. Take my word for it, you don’t ever wanna go to FMC. I’d rather take my chances with the local veterinarian.

The ambulance ride was exciting, although I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t use the siren at all.  The EMT in back  with me whiled away the time by trying to get an IV into my hand, a seemingly simple task he abandoned after the third or fourth stab.

Once in the ER I was swarmed by what seemed like nineteen nurses, probably because they suspected I was having a heart attack.  When, within about five minutes, it became apparent that my heart was just fine, most of them drifted away.  It seemed like a good time to begin projectile vomiting, so I did.

I spent the next two hours doing essentially nothing, as far as I recall, but then again my short-term memory was fading in and out rather alarmingly.  The torpid doctor who eventually appeared wasn’t even interested in using his stethoscope on me.  He seemed to think food poisoning was a likely explanation and the clams a likely culprit.  Since Doctor Shrug didn’t have any really constructive suggestions, we went home.

Then things got very weird.  For the next three days I couldn’t really eat much of anything, spent most of my time in bed or in the bathroom, and had truly awful dreams, not all of them when I was, strictly speaking, asleep. I am told that much of what I said during this period made even less sense than it normally does.  I also couldn’t breathe very well; something was affecting the muscles in my chest. My legs, feet and face were partially numb, but it was difficult to tell whether that was due to whatever had happened to me or to my multiple sclerosis.

Eventually, as I regained my alimentary and mental footing, I Googled my symptoms and came across several case studies that matched my experience precisely.  I seem to have had neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, wherein my little bivalve pals had accumulated a bunch of nasty algae from a “red tide”  and converted it into a neurotoxin that can’t be destroyed by cooking. There seems to be a rash of this contamination going on in US coastal waters at the moment.  It wasn’t really HTB’s fault, but I don’t plan to go back there anytime soon.

So there you go — the clams ate my homework, and this is actually the December issue that never was.  As usual, there are a few anachronisms buried in this batch because these columns were first published in newspapers (and sent to subscribers) last summer.

Subscribers, incidentally, have been receiving my columns by email throughout this ordeal, because I have a weird thing about deadlines and long ago learned to type whilst fully recumbent and hallucinating.  I still haven’t received the bill from the hospital, which is likely to be hefty, since I am on Medicare (per Social Security Disability Insurance) and Ohio law prohibits people in my situation from buying supplemental insurance until we hit 65.  (Apparently, the hope is that we’ll die of whatever ails us before we become a burden on poor little Aetna.)  So if anyone out there has a few spare doubloons, I humbly beseech you to subscribe.

Lastly, my cranky rant about Facebook last month garnered some very sensible comments in defense of the Great Gray Time Sink, and I am duly chastened. Using it to keep in touch with your family and friends is entirely reasonable. But Facebook’s recent revision of its privacy policies is very disturbing, and I strongly suggest that you read up on what Facebook isn’t telling you.

And now, I see Ms. Freedle has finally managed to get our stage lights to work, so on with the show…

Putting the “duck” in “deductibile.”

Dear Word Detective: This one has been bothering me for years, but I keep forgetting to write and ask you. Why do actors say “break a leg” to each other right before they go on stage? What’s wrong with “good luck”? Is it true that this “break a leg” tradition dates back to when John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln? — Cindy S.

How odd. Yours is the second question about “break a leg” I’ve received this week. What makes that odd is that, seven or eight years ago, I used to get this question at least once a month, but there’s been not a peep from the “break a leg” brigade since then. I guess these things travel in waves. Maybe certain questions are like comets orbiting the sun. Anyway, I just hope I don’t wake up tomorrow to find my email program clogged with another tsunami of impassioned pleas to reveal “the third word that ends in ‘gry’.” (Let me save us both the trouble. There isn’t one. It’s all a very old, and very lame, joke.)

Onward. “Break a leg” is, of course, a saying traditionally employed by actors to wish each other success before going on stage. To call “break a leg” a funny way to wish someone good luck is an understatement. We don’t shout “Hit a tree!” as our friends drive away, or “Have fun with the iceberg!” when they embark on a cruise. For an actor, especially one in a stage role, breaking a leg would be a major disaster.

The story about John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln is certainly the most popular legend purporting to explain “break a leg.” It’s true that Booth was a famous actor in 1865, and it’s also true that after shooting President Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, Booth leaped from the President’s box to the stage below, breaking his leg. But there are two enormous problems with tracing “break a leg” to this event. First is the fact that “break a leg” is not found in print before 1957, and the phrase almost certainly wasn’t used before the early 20th century. Secondly, the events at Ford’s Theater that night would strike most sane people as the polar opposite of good luck for all concerned.

There are other theories of varying plausibility about the phrase, but the most likely explanation tackles the “wish someone ill as a way to wish them well” puzzle of “break a leg” head on. Popular folklore down through the ages is full of warnings against wishing someone good luck. Doing so, say the sages, will tempt evil spirits or demons to do your friend harm. So the trick is to outwit the demons (who are apparently not very bright) by wishing your friend bad fortune.

As for the specific form of “break a leg,” we seem to have imported it from Europe. In the German theater, actors use the equivalent phrase “Hals- und Bienbruch,” to wish their colleagues “a broken neck and a broken leg.” The German phrase seems to have begun life among aviators, possibly during World War I, and gradually spread to the German theater and from there to the British and American stages.

On the house.

Dear Word Detective: I am an ex-pat from St. Louis, MO. I still try to check in on local happenings by reading the Post-Dispatch online. Today, on their Blog, someone said, “Are there still restaurants in town where the managers are boniface?” Boniface? I had never heard that term before. Sure enough, “boniface” means the keeper of an inn, hotel, nightclub, or eating establishment. Where in the world did this term come from? — Margherita Wohletz.

Hey, me too. We left New York City for rural Ohio more than ten years ago, but I still read the New York papers online (mostly the Daily News, since the New York Times is pretty clueless as to how most people in New York actually live). And sometimes when I’m doing the dishes late at night I like to tune in to WCBS News Radio in New York. (I suspect they can get the WCBS signal on Mars.) It makes me homesick to listen, at least until they get to the traffic report. New York is the only city I can imagine having traffic jams at 1:30 am, but they do, usually on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I do not miss the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

“Boniface,” which today is used as a generic name for an innkeeper or proprietor of a restaurant, tavern, etc., is an eponym, a term drawn from a proper name. English is full of eponyms. The humble “sandwich,” for instance, is so called because it is said to have been invented in 1762 by John Montagu (1718-1792), the fourth Earl of Sandwich. (Sandwich almost certainly did not, in fact, “invent” eating meat between slices of bread, but his status as a member of the aristocracy popularized the concoction.) Similarly, when we call someone a “maverick,” we’re invoking the name of Samuel Maverick, a 19th century Texas rancher famous for not branding his wandering cattle, which made his name an eponym for a nonconformist who doesn’t “stick with the herd.”

Maverick and Sandwich were both real people, but eponyms are also frequently formed from the names of characters in fiction, and often become more famous than their literary sources. Most people, for instance, know that a “Svengali” is an evil, manipulative figure who exerts a powerful hold over another person, but not many know that the term comes from a character in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel “Trilby.”

“Boniface” is a literary eponym whose source is even more obscure today than “Trilby.” It comes from “The Beaux’ Stratagem,” a comedic play written by the Irish dramatist George Farquhar and first produced in London in 1707. The play centers on two young men who set out to enrich themselves by misleading young heiresses, but one of the two actually falls in love with his target and hijinks, as they say, ensue. I haven’t read the play, but evidently an innkeeper (and his daughter) play a prominent role, and the innkeeper’s name is, you guessed it, “Boniface.” Apparently the jovial innkeeper Boniface (pronounced “BAHN-ih-fass”) made such an impression on audiences that the term became an eponym for the operator of an inn, tavern or similar establishment.

In asking whether there were still restaurants in St. Louis where “the managers are boniface,” I think what the writer was seeking was places where the manager is always around, greeting guests and acting as a real host, as opposed to the hands-off, “autopilot” atmosphere of chain restaurants. It’s definitely worth the trouble to seek out such places. Those chain restaurants always seem like nothing but enormous vending machines.

What’s in your trunk?

Dear Word Detective: I recently looked up the word “gonzo” (as in “gonzo journalism”) and was surprised to see the the origin of the word was listed as “unknown.” I would think that it likely originated in the beatnik or jazz communities. Since I couldn’t find it in your archives, could you shed some light on this question, man? — Michael Hooning, Seattle, WA.

Go ahead, make me feel old. It’s bad enough that this year marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock (the real one) in 1969, which I attended, if that’s the right word. Incidentally, I noticed the other day that Target has apparently bought the rights to the Woodstock legend (or whatever), and is now offering everything from toothpaste to beach sandals festooned with that dippy bird-on-a-guitar logo.

Beware the bats

I mention Woodstock because the word “gonzo” first appeared in print just two years later, in 1971, in an article written by journalist Hunter S. Thompson for Rolling Stone magazine describing two trips to Las Vegas taken by Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta. Thompson’s article was later expanded and published in 1972 as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” No brief summary can possibly do justice to “Fear and Loathing,” but Wikipedia’s stab at a synopsis is as good as any: “The [story] revolves around journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they arrive in 70′s Las Vegas to report on the Mint 400 motorcycle race. However, they soon abandon their work and begin experimenting with a variety of recreational drugs, such as LSD, cocaine, mescaline, and cannabis. This leads to a series of bizarre hallucinogenic trips, during which they destroy hotel rooms, wreck cars, and have visions of anthropomorphic desert animals, all the while ruminating on the decline of American culture.” The book was an immediate best seller and remains a seminal work in what became known as “gonzo journalism,” defined dryly by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a type of committed, subjective journalism characterized by factual distortion and exaggerated rhetorical style.” “Gonzo” is also used as an adjective meaning “bizarre” or “crazy.”

In addition to using “Dr. Gonzo” as the pseudonym of his companion in the book, Thompson used the phrase “gonzo journalism” in the book to describe his reporting methods (“But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism”).

For those of us who lived through the period, “gonzo” will always be associated with Hunter Thompson. But Thompson himself never claimed to have coined “gonzo.” He credited Boston Globe editor Bill Cardoso with using “gonzo” to describe an article Thompson wrote in 1970 (entitled, in classic Thompson style, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”), and reported that, according to Cardoso, “gonzo” was “some Boston word for weird, bizarre.”

“Gonzo” also happens to be an Italian word meaning “fool or simpleton,” and that Italian “gonzo” may well be the direct root of Cardoso’s “gonzo.” But there are other possible sources. There was a hit song in 1960 entitled “Gonzo,” as well as a character by that name in a 1960 movie, and, perhaps most bizarre given Thompson’s use of the word, a Muppet (first appearing in 1970) on the TV show “Sesame Street” named Gonzo the Great. Tracking the exact pedigree of Thompson’s “gonzo” is thus probably impossible. But I can testify that in the late 1960s and early 70s, “gonzo” was definitely in the air.

IHop, you hop…

Dear Word Detective: I love your column and having just discovered you have written a book, I am literally on my way out the door to buy it. I hope you can explain to me the origin of the phrase, “selling like hotcakes.” My only guess is that hotcakes somewhere at sometime were very popular, enough to create this particular expression. — Sarama Teague.

Well, it’s been a while since I received your question, but how did running out the door to buy my book work out? I’ve actually written four books (five, if you count a complete revision of the first one). Unfortunately, you’re not likely to find any of them in those big chain bookstores, although they’re all still in print. But online booksellers will be happy to sell you The Word Detective (a collection of these columns), From Altoids to Zima (the origins of popular product names), or Making Whoopee (words associated with love and romance). I also wrote two editions of something called The Book Lover’s Guide to the Internet back in the mid-1990s, which Random House is still selling even though it is fifteen years out of date and thus about as useful as Stagecoaches for Dummies.

Nature's Perfect Food

Hotcakes (aka “pancakes” or “griddlecakes”) are still popular in my family, enough so that there was a minor revolt last year when a certain restaurant chain (we call it “Barrel of Crack”) switched from serving genuine 100% maple syrup on their pancakes to a watery corn-syrup blend. Incidentally, if you’ve ever been to a Cracker Barrel, you’ve seen the rocking chairs lined up for sale out front. I noticed last month that they now have an Extra Large model available with beefed-up legs and rockers. They must be selling a lot of pancakes.

The term “hotcake” is an American invention, dating back to the late 17th century (“pancake,” meaning the same food, is older, first appearing in England around 1400). To “sell like hotcakes” has meant “to be in great demand” since about 1839, and there doesn’t seem to have been any particular “hotcake fad” leading to the origin of the phrase. But hotcakes have always been popular at fairs and church socials, etc., often selling as fast as they can be cooked, so they make a good metaphor for a very popular product that sells quickly and in great numbers.

Of course, pancakes are, when properly made, quite flat, and “flat as a pancake” has meant “perfectly flat” since the 16th century. A building that collapses straight down floor by floor is said to “pancake,” and when an aircraft drops jarringly onto the runway it is called a “pancake landing.” In Britain, Canada and Australia pancakes are traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar, and the day itself is called “Pancake Day” or “Pancake Tuesday” in many places. This day, also known as “Fat Tuesday” or “Mardi Gras,” has traditionally been the occasion for using up all the fat, butter, and other rich ingredients in one’s house in preparation for the fasting and self-denial of Lent.

It only hurts when you quack, Doc.

Dear Word Detective: I just read “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dr. Baglioni says of the ingenious Dr. Rappaccini, “But, let us confess the truth of him, he is a wonderful man! — a wonderful man indeed! A vile empiric, however, in his practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the medical profession!” I found two definitions for “empiric”: (1) One who is guided by practical experience rather than precepts or theory, and (2) An unqualified or dishonest practitioner; a charlatan. How did the word “empiric” come to mean both “the layman” and “the shyster”? And does it have to do with what what my friend says, that all professions are a conspiracy against the lay? — Tania.

Sounds like an impacted deductible.

Well, I wouldn’t say that “all” professions are a conspiracy against laypeople. Many professions have oodles of actual substance and arcane knowledge not easily available to the average person, e.g., law, medicine, astrophysics, nuclear engineering, newspaper column writing, etc. There are, of course a few “professions” (“management consultant” springs to mind) whose practitioners are pretty obviously the modern equivalent of snake oil salesmen. But the problem with categorizing certain professions as fraudulent is, of course, that it is impossible to prove a negative. If I charge you big bucks, for instance, to wave a bowl of tapioca pudding over your head while I stomp on your toes, you can’t prove that I haven’t prevented you from being devoured by wolverines. And if I insist you give my bank five billion dollars to cover my bad bets, you can’t prove that you wouldn’t have lost more money if you’d refused. See how that works?

Meanwhile, the term “empiric” is closely related to “empiricism,” a philosophy of knowledge (aka “epistemology”) cooked up by the ancient Greeks. Empiricism maintains that all knowledge comes from actual experience perceived by our senses, rather than being innate in the human mind. In ancient Greece, this approach produced a group of physicians, known as the “Empirici,” who based their practice on personal experience rather than on medical theory and philosophy as it existed at that time.

The name of this group came into English as “empiric” in the 16th century, meaning a physician or scientist who relied on personal observation rather than established theory. Pretty quickly, however, “empiric” came to also be applied to those who relied on observation because they simply didn’t know the theories, i.e., untrained medical practitioners. These people often embraced outlandish theories of their own, and thus “empiric” soon became synonymous in certain quarters with “quack.” And by the 17th century, “empiric” was being used to mean “fraud, charlatan” in just about any field, not just medicine (“Such are the political empirics, mischievous in proportion to their effrontery, and ignorant in proportion to their presumption,” Coleridge, 1817).

While “empiricism” remains a respectable philosophy, I’m afraid that whatever virtue “empiric” once had has faded in modern usage, and today the word is for all practical purposes synonymous with “charlatan.” Simply being untrained (“lay”) in a profession doesn’t make one an “empiric,” of course. It’s pretending to be an expert that marks the true “empiric.”

And “old” stands for “Over Last Decade,” right?

Dear Word Detective: Today our local newspaper Helsingin Sanomat had a brief note on the word “news.” It said that Fred Sedgwick, in his book “Where Words Come From,” explains that it comes from from a saying: “Tidings from North, East, South and West.” Now, my suspicion was roused immediately as acronyms, as you say, were almost nonexistent before WWII. Could you please put Mister Sedgwick to his right place? — Topi, Finland.

I’d like to, but he’s in the UK and I’m in the US, and that’s too far for me to throw a cream pie. According to his publisher’s website, “Fred Sedgwick is a poet, former headteacher and the author of many books in the areas of literature, expressive arts, education and creativity.” “Expressive arts”? There’s a passport to lifetime unemployment. On the other hand, among his “many books” (eight with this publisher alone) is something called “How to Teach with a Hangover,” which is a wonderful title and makes me like him.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t alter the fact that you are right and Mr. Sedgwick is wrong about “news.” The rest of his book may be flawless and fascinating, of course, but one howler like that tends to ding the credibility of his entire enterprise. There’s really no excuse these days for this sort of mistake, with Oxford English Dictionary (OED) available either on a CD-ROM or on the internet by subscription (or free, if your local library system offers it).

Just for fun, let’s see what the OED would have told Mr. Sedgwick about the origin of “news,” had he asked: “News (noun) — Special use of plural of NEW n., after Middle French nouvelles …”. You’ll notice the absence of any reference to “north, south,” etc., in that etymology.

In fairness to Mr. Sedgwick, he didn’t invent that story about “news” being an acronym (and acronyms were indeed very rare before World War II, while “news” has been with us in its current form since the early 16th century). That “north, east, etc.” story has been floating around for years, and it actually makes a certain amount of superficial sense. Unlike some of the awkward and overly-elaborate fables you hear about the origin of some words, this one “fits” nicely. “News” does indeed come from all directions.

Another reason that the story seems plausible is that “news” sounds like the plural of a noun, “new,” but “new” is not a noun in English. It’s an adjective, and our adjectives don’t have plurals. We don’t speak of “three news cars.” You can have a hundred and they are, together, still simply “new cars.”

The answer to this muddle, and I’m glad there is one, lies not in English but in French. Back in the 14th century, someone noticed that the French used the word “nouvelles” (“new”) to mean “new things” in Bible translations from the Latin “nova” (also meaning “new things”). If the French could use a plural of “new” to mean “new things,” went the reasoning, so can we, and the English noun “news” was born.

There was apparently some resistance among the general public to the use of “news” as a singular noun, however, and many people tried to make the form make a bit more sense by treating it as a plural (“There are never any news,” W. M. Thackeray, 1846). But the singular “news” is now almost universally accepted, and only in the form of English spoken in India are you likely to find “the news are good.”

Look out below.

Dear Word Detective: Although I live near Mount St. Helens and am familiar with Bigfoot, I’ve never heard him mentioned as he was in recent CNN coverage of the crisis in Iran: “Many in the establishment view him as someone who does not cower to big-footing by the West.” Is this an idiom I’m unfamiliar with or just a poor translation? — Edward Jones.

Familiar with Bigfoot, eh? Could you tell him Nessie needs his email address? She asked me to ask. Just kidding, of course, but I had not realized that the Mount St. Helens area in Washington State is known for its Bigfoot sightings. Sounds like fun.

Friend me on Facebook!

“Bigfoot” is, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “(A name for) a large, hairy, manlike creature supposedly inhabiting the north-western United States and western Canada,” although in Canada the same critter is more commonly known by its Salishan Indian name, “sasquatch.” The use of “Bigfoot” as a name for the creature dates back to the 1950s, but “Bigfoot” as a popular nickname for a human being with very large feet dates back to at least the early 19th century.

More relevant to your question, however, is the fact that, since about 1980, “bigfoot” has been used as slang among journalists to mean “a prominent or well-known columnist or political reporter,” i.e., a “celebrity” journalist. According to an explanation offered by William Safire (himself just such a “bigfoot”) back in 1985, the term was coined as a joke during the 1980 US presidential campaign, when Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Hedrick Smith of the New York Times appeared on the press plane with his injured foot encased in a large cast.

“Bigfoot” in this sense has apparently also become a transitive verb among journalists, and I ran across it just the other day while reading writer Dan Baum’s explanation of how he came to leave the staff of the New Yorker magazine. Assigned to cover Hurricane Katrina, Baum learned that the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, would also be going to New Orleans, and confronted him, saying “You’re going to bigfoot me?” Baum defines “to bigfoot” here as “to snatch a story away from a lower-ranking reporter,” and, not surprisingly, his belligerent use of the term to Remnick turned out to be a very bad idea.

It’s possible that the use of the verb “to bigfoot” you spotted, meaning roughly “to throw one’s weight around” or “to bully,” is a further development of this journalistic slang. But it’s also possible that this geopolitical use is an entirely separate invention alluding to Bigfoot as a large, overwhelming presence that is difficult to resist.

Mince and cheddar + coffee = Nirvana.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve always wondered what is so darned “easy” about pie. Can you enlighten us all on this? — Mark Anderson.

I could have sworn I already did, but it seems that I was wrong. All I did was parenthetically refer to “easy as pie” in a column I wrote last year on “pie-eyed,” which is usually used to mean “extremely drunk” and comes from the wide-eyed (like big, round pies) blank stare often seen in persons who have partaken of tee many martoonies.

Writing teachers always exhort their young students to “write what you know,” i.e., make use of their own experiences in life to generate ideas. This has always struck me as dubious advice, since it seems to produce little but novels about how unfair the world is to young writers. On the other hand, “speak what you know” has worked quite well for the English language. Given a popular food like pie, we’ve managed to cook up a whole range of metaphors and similes involving the humble pie. There is, of course, the very phrase “humble pie,” which, before it was the name of a 70s rock group, was most often found in the phrase “to eat humble pie,” meaning to own up to having made a serious error. “Humble” in this phrase is a bit of a pun. The original form was “to eat umble pie,” “umbles” being the innards of game such as deer, and “umble pie” being a lowly dish usually served to servants and the like.

But “pie” has more often served as a symbol of something highly desirable, even if illusory, as in the phrase “pie in the sky” meaning “the promise of a good life in the future used to excuse hardship in the present.” The phrase was coined in 1911 by Joe Hill, troubadour and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World in his song “The Preacher and the Slave” (“Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die”). Politicians, of course, are always promising voters a “bigger piece of the pie,” meaning a greater share of wealth, but such promises usually fail to materialize on budget “pie charts,” a term dating to the 1920s. One might wonder, given that such pledges by leaders have been broken for millennia, why it took until 1977 for “pie” to become a verb meaning “to strike someone, usually a public figure, in the face with a custard pie.”

The key to “easy as pie,” which first appeared in the early 20th century meaning “extremely easy or simple,” is that it refers to eating pie, rather than making a pie (which can be quite complicated). Pie has been used as a symbol of something very pleasurable or agreeable (“nice as pie,” “sweet as pie”) since the mid-19th century, as well as meaning anything eagerly sought or regarded as a prize (“I wanted to reach Fort Larned before daylight, in order to avoid if possible the Indians, to whom it would have been ‘pie’ to have caught me there on foot,” W.F. Cody, Story of the Wild West, 1888). So “easy as pie” simply employs “pie” as a general-purpose metaphorical superlative, much as “piece of cake” is used to mean “effortless,” as easy and pleasurable as eating a piece of cake. It is, of course, also “easy” to eat actual pie, as anyone who has left me alone in a room with a pumpkin pie can attest.

Make mine coffee and pizza.

Dear Word Detective: “Sam’s parking fine payments keep the city in beer and skittles.” In my hearing, this expression has always referred to a payment, usually onerous or unfair, for a second party’s benefit. Can you tell me from whence it comes and why? — Janet.

That’s an interesting question. But before we begin, I should warn you that there are people out there, who someday you may have the misfortune of encountering, who will castigate you for using the phrase “from whence.” They will point out that “whence” all by itself means “from where,” and insist that “from whence” must therefore mean “from from where,” which, if they were correct, would be awkward and redundant. But they are not correct, and “whence” and “from whence” are equally proper.

Whee.

Onward. The example you provided of “beer and skittles” certainly does reek of unjust enrichment, as the lawyers say, but I think you may be carrying a bit too much of that context into judging the connotation of “beer and skittles.” It is entirely possible to enjoy “beer and skittles” without bilking anyone. It used to be possible, for instance, for a factory worker to look forward, after a life of toil, to a retirement of carefree enjoyment of “beer and skittles.”

As an idiom common in English since at least the early 19th century, “beer and skittles” means “unalloyed enjoyment and relaxation,” what we might also call “living on easy street.” Unfortunately, such a state of bliss is uncommon, and it shows in the history of the phrase. The first recorded use of “beer and skittles” in print is in Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” in 1837, where it is used straightforwardly to describe a comfortable state (“It’s a reg’lar holiday to them — all porter and skittles”) (“Porter” is short for “porter’s ale,” a strong dark beer.)

But the remaining citations for “beer and skittles” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the vast majority of examples to be found today, employ the phrase as a symbol of precisely what life is not “about” (“‘Teach him life can’t be all beer and skittles,’ said Robert Gardner maliciously,” Agatha Christie, 1931). The phrase “life isn’t all beer and skittles,” often deployed as a stern admonition to wayward youth, is considered a tattered cliche today but remains nonetheless enormously popular, probably because life stubbornly refuses to get any easier.

One interesting aspect of “beer and skittles” is that the phrase is often used, especially in the US, by people who haven’t the faintest idea what a “skittle” is. There is, of course, a brand of candy called Skittles, but the “skittles” in “beer and skittles” is a game often played in pubs in Britain, a kind of tabletop bowling in which the pins are called “skittles.” The word “skittle” itself dates back to the 17th century and is of uncertain origin, but appears to have Scandinavian roots.

Tilt.

Dear Word Detective: The definition of “lopsided” is fairly well known as “being out of balance,” but I can find almost nothing about the origin. Could the origin have anything to do with “lopping” branches off one side of a tree or bush which would result in an imbalance? This is not a question of earth shaking importance, just curiosity. — Silvanus Newton.

Oh goody, a day off from saving the world from misplaced modifiers and split infinitives. I’m only partly joking. You’d be amazed how many people write to me with complaints about other people’s grammar, sincerely convinced that their pet social ill (drug abuse, tattoos, baggy trousers, et al.) can be traced to what they perceive as, for instance, the widespread misuse of the word “hopefully.” I wish they were right, but they’re not, so for the most part I avoid grammar questions. Life is too short to spend it arguing with cranks.

“Lopsided” is an interesting word. In current usage it means, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, “heavier, larger, or higher on one side than on the other” or “sagging or leaning to one side” (“An odd, lop-sided, one-eyed kind of wooden building,” Charles Dickens, 1842). In a figurative sense, it means “characterized by the domination of one competitor over another” (“The … article … is very lop-sided and unfair,” 1868).

When “lopsided” first appeared in print in the early 18th century (in the spelling “lapsided”), it was specifically a nautical term, used to describe a ship that was, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it, “disproportionately heavy on one side; unevenly balanced,” which is not something you want to see in a ship (“You will certainly have the Misfortune of a lapsided Ship,” 1711).

Obviously, the key to decoding “lopsided” lies in pinning down the meaning of the “lop” part. Unfortunately, this turns out to be trickier than one would think, because, as the OED helpfully illustrates, there are no less than eight separate “lop” nouns and four “lop” verbs in English. Fortunately, most of them can be ignored (“lop” as a very old word for a spider, for instance), leaving us with two main senses of “lop” as a verb.
The older “lop,” dating back at least to the 15th century, originally meant “to cut off or trim the branches of a tree,” with the extended sense of “cut off or reduce by cutting” just about anything else appearing by the 16th century. The origin of this “lop” is unknown.

While “lopping off” part of something would indeed tend to make it “lopsided,” the “lop” in “lopsided” is the other “lop,” which appeared late in the 16th century meaning “to hang loosely or limply; to droop.” This is also the “lop” found in “lop-eared rabbit” and similar terms. So the logic of “lopsided” is that not that one side has been chopped off, but that one side droops or leans in relation to the other.

The origin of this “lop” is uncertain as well, but it may be onomatopoeic in origin, intended to convey the feeling of something slipping down and drooping loosely. It may also be related to the older noun “lap,” originally meaning “part of a garment that hangs down or might be folded over.” This “lap” eventually gave us verbs such as “overlap” as well as the “lap” formed when a human being is seated.

Move along.

Dear Word Detective: When I was a boy, my father used many colorful phrases. He was from Texas, so that may explain it. My wife, from Idaho, had not heard of many of these. However, a friend from Massachusetts and I had both heard of “get off the dime.” Now we are wondering about its origins. It seems like it was not something my father just created. — Harry Plumlee.

And when I was a boy, you sent me this question. Actually, it was only three years ago, but it seems like sometime in the last century, which would have been only a little over nine years ago, come to think of it. Am I the only one around here still weirded out by this turn-of-the-century thing? In any case, every so often I go back through my reader mail in case I’ve missed a good question, which I clearly did, so here we are. Sorry for the delay, to put it mildly.

Not really relevant.

I’m happy to report that your father did not, in fact, invent the phrase “get off the dime,” so we don’t have to worry about how it ended up being heard in Massachusetts. “Get off the dime” has been around since at least the 1920s, and today it’s generally used to mean, as defined by the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, “to take action after a period of indecision or procrastination; to act” (“Congress [should] get off the dime and adopt the … budget proposal before it,” President Ronald Reagan, 1982).

According to Wikipedia (a phrase I always use with the trepidation of a man skydiving with a parachute he bought on eBay), the “dime,” in size the smallest coin in US currency, was first issued in 1796. The name “dime” comes from the Latin “decem,” meaning “ten,” a “dime” being worth one-tenth of a dollar, or ten cents (“cent” being rooted in “centum,” Latin for “one hundred”).

Since a dime is a small unit of money and fairly easily to come by, this small coin has played a much larger role in US slang than, for instance, the hundred-dollar bill. To “drop a dime on someone,” for instance, means to inform on them, usually by tipping off the police, and originated back in the 1960s when a call from a public telephone cost ten cents. “Dime” has also found a home in the slang of drug users, where a “dime” or “dime bag” has long meant ten dollars worth of a drug. The small size of a dime has also been used as a metaphor for “a small spot,” as in “stop on a dime” or “turn on a dime” when speaking of motor vehicles (or politicians).

“Get off the dime” dates back to the days of dance halls and “taxi dancers,” women employed by the halls to dance with strangers, usually for ten cents per dance (a grim occupation immortalized in the 1930 Rodgers and Hart song “Ten Cents a Dance”). A contemporary account, published in 1925, explains the phrase: “Sometimes a … [dancing] couple would … scarcely move from one spot. Then the floor manager would cry ‘Git off dat dime!’” Similarly, “dancing on the dime” meant to dance very closely with very little movement, behavior that might well attract the attention of the Vice Squad and get the hall closed. Thus “get off the dime” referred both to the the customer as the “dime” he had paid and to the small spot (“dime”) on the floor where the couple seemed frozen.