Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Twenty-eleven, eh? Unpossible. Uncromulent. I’d prefer not to. And, judging by how January has gone, we might as well fast-forward to 2012 and go right to the rain of burning frogs.

What an attractive possum might look like.

There’s a sad-looking cat out in the orchard. Do NOT bring it inside.

So naturally I put on my coat and wobble outside, peering in the direction of the apple trees. Even with my lousy eyes, I can see that it’s a very sad-looking cat. Probably because it was born a possum. Is there such a thing as a good-looking possum?

While we’re on the subject of cats and the bringing thereof into said house, I must mention that we are in dire need of subscribers in order to continue to feed the little dears (and ourselves), as well as to pay for this website. The “recession” (call it what you will) has been hard on many people, present company definitely included, and, apart from reducing our already meager income, has apparently made many folks understandably reluctant to spend even the pittance ($15) we ask for the yearly subscription the little kitties depend on for their chow. (Aren’t you glad you don’t have to diagram that sentence?) All of which is but a prelude to asking you to subscribe. For the kitties.

We can has sponsors?

But wait, I hear you say, that’s only $15 a year, not enough to feed a single tiny kitten! Isn’t there something more I can do?

Why yes, now there is. Simply click the PayPal button below after choosing the number of kitties you would like to feed, and you’ll be signed up for the Word Detective Cute Kitty Cat Food Fund, which will deduct that amount directly from your PayPal account every month. No stamps to lick, no renewals to remember, and you’ll sleep like a top every night knowing that somewhere an unbearably cute cat is sleeping on a full tummy.

Cute Kitty Cat Food Fund

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

All of which brings me to a couple of suggestions for anyone with less than stellar vision who spends a lot of time trying to read things on a computer. I’ve mentioned both of these things before, but they’re so cool I think it’s worth a rerun. One is an add-on for Firefox called No Squint, which allows you to increase the size of a web page and/or just increase the size of the fonts on a page (my preference). You can even set a default magnification for all pages and per-site settings so that every time you go back to Slashdot, for example, the page will be easily readable.

For reading long articles, however, Readability is, hands down, the most radical improvement to the web I’ve ever seen. Faced with a page of tiny type strewn with ads and “most emailed” boxes, you just click a button on your browser toolbar and the page is transformed into a single column of readable text (you can set the size and style) on a perfectly blank page, just as if you’d typed it yourself.

They make great pets!

Elsewhere in the news, we run a fairly tidy ship here at Word Detective World Headquarters, probably because we both grew up in pretty orderly households. My parents really didn’t accumulate anything except books and the piles of New Yorker magazines that seemed to spring up in nearly every room. Time and Newsweek went in the trash after a week, but nobody threw out the New Yorker. As for the books, they were almost all freebies that had arrived in the mail. At some point, for instance, my parents landed on the “free” list at Bantam Books, so every month a large box would arrive packed with mass-market paperbacks representing everything Bantam had issued that month. I loved those boxes. They almost always contained some science fiction, and frequently cool books about science and history. Other books arrived alone or in small bunches from other publishers, and, by the time I left home, the house was literally full of books.

Given my book-lined upbringing, it’s not surprising that it took me until a year or so ago to realize that my office contained way too many books. I had managed to fill five seven-foot bookcases plus one smaller one, and there was a growing mountain of books stacked in front of the bookcases in the corner of the room. It wasn’t really my fault; I had actually purchased only about one out of every twenty books in the room. Some were reference books from my parents’ library, some had been gifts, but the vast majority of them were review copies that had arrived, unbidden, at my P.O. box. Many of these were sent because of this website, but my having reviewed books for three major newspapers at various times probably didn’t help.

I mention all this because I recently bit the bullet and culled the booky herd in my office, boxing up about ten cartons of things to save (now stowed neatly on a pallet in the garage) and setting aside several dozen lesser efforts to donate or sell. This was not easily done, since the ms has made my left hand pretty useless. But the room is now much neater. I’m hoping it stays that way.

I must admit that I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to organize my office, and if any of you folks are looking for a shot of inspiration to tackle a similar stable-cleaning, I’d suggest you watch a few episodes of the apparently wildly popular A&E reality show Hoarders. Each episode deals with two cases of folks who have, at some point and for some reason, lost the thread of good housekeeping and filled their humble abodes (most are lower-income, some truly poor) with the most appalling mountains of crap imaginable. It turns out that there are a lot of ways to hoard. There are those folks whose homes are basically sound and have simply become filled, inexplicably, with $200,000 worth of counterfeit designer purses or thousands of gift-shop tchotchkes meticulously arranged in display cases. Then there are those more creative types who manage to accumulate (and are eventually driven from their homes by) 5,000 “pet” rats or decide that developing a three-foot-deep layer of food garbage and animal feces throughout their house somehow qualifies as “recycling.”

Usually tipped off by a child or relative, into each house troops the Hoarders team of a “professional organizer,” cleanup specialists (with a fleet of dumpster trucks in tow) and a psychologist of some flavor apparently designated to dispense instant psychoanalysis while the rest of the team attempts to get the hoarder to part with several trunks full of moldy headless dolls. Results vary. The rat guy was actually more or less fine with the rats leaving once he knew they were going to good homes. Seriously. No, really, they were. The show people said so. I can’t hear you nanananana.

Some of these folks are pretty clearly mentally ill, and the show provides funds for “aftercare” counseling as part of the deal. Many have family problems that turn out to dwarf their hoarding problem. And a few are not, to put it mildly, what they appear. An episode early in season two featured a guy who went by the name “Patrick Donovan Flanagan O’Shannahan,” or “Sir Patrick” to his friends, apparently an endearing crank with a house full of “collectibles” he thought were worth big bucks. They weren’t, and Sir Patrick wasn’t the real thing either, as revealed a bit later by The Smoking Gun. I’m guessing the show will be running more exhaustive background checks on prospective participants from now on.

Matt Paxton, aka The Paxtinator

Given the rich potential for exploitation in the premise of the show, the crew from Hoarders comes across as remarkably compassionate and understanding of these folks (up to a point, anyway). The breakout fan favorite and de facto star of the show is a guy named Matt Paxton, an “extreme cleaning” specialist and the local incarnation of the voice of reason. Although Matt can be firm (“You can’t ‘donate’ that. It’s covered with black mold.”), his musings, often delivered while knee-deep in toxic “treasures” (“We’re all just four or five bad decisions away from pooping in a bucket”), provide a humane “there but for fortune” tone as well as the show’s best lines.

Apart from Matt, the show’s great discovery has been a certain marsupial known as The Possum from Hoarders, who made his/her debut in an early episode in the second season. Brief footage (literally a split second) of the critter leaping from the kitchen sink of a “hoarded” house into a mountain of garbage became so popular among show fans that A&E used it in promos and the possum soon had his/her own fan page on Facebook, where his followers live-blog each episode.

One might think that Hoarders would only motivate people with severe clutter problems to break out the Hefty bags, but, judging from the reactions of fans, the show spurs nearly everyone who sees it into cleaning up something. Of course, given the state of the economy, people who might otherwise be happily spending their evenings (and disposable income) trolling eBay for bargains will have to find another, cheaper outlet. Incidentally, one of the things you notice about 99% of the people profiled on this show is rarely mentioned on the show itself. In even the most severely “hoarded” houses, full of teetering piles of crap that would give the Collyer brothers the wim-wams, the resident always has a little spot cleared (often just one chair) where he or she eats, sleeps, and spends all day on the computer. As Matt would say, I’m just sayin’.

And now, on with the show….

Spot on.

Dear Word Detective: I see that about five years ago you answered a question about “crack,” but you left out the meaning that’s puzzling me. What about “crack” meaning “excellent,” as in “crack troops” or “a crack shot”? Would this have anything to do with “crackerjack,” also meaning “excellent,” after which the popcorn concoction was named? — Pat.

Hey, you’re right. It’ll be exactly five years ago next month that I wrote a column on “cracked up” (as in “That restaurant wasn’t as good as it’s cracked up to be”). Gee, time just zips by when you’re doing whatever it is I’ve been doing. As Groucho Marx said, “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” Incidentally, how come dogs and cats don’t have to eat vegetables or fruit? “Don’t give your dog broccoli, it’s poison to them!” “Cats can’t eat apples, they’ll die!” But pizza, ice cream, cheeseburgers, fettuccine alfredo? No problemo. How conveeeeenient, eh?

Most of us probably associate the word “crack” with a break or fissure, usually unwanted, in something: a crack in a mirror, cracks in the ceiling, the crack in the Earth’s surface from which Rodan emerged, etc. But the original sense of the verb “to crack,” when it appeared as the Old English “cracian,” derived from Germanic roots, was “to make a dry, sharp sound,” and the word itself was almost certainly formed “echoically,” in imitation of just such a sound. We still use this initial sense of “to crack” in such forms as “to crack the whip,” meaning “to make someone work harder or more diligently,” which originally referred to an overseer causing his whip to make a cracking sound as a threat of punishment.

“Crack” expanded fairly quickly, as a verb, to mean “to break something,” usually producing a “crack” sound in the process. The noun form of “crack” followed the same pattern, meaning both the sudden, sharp sound (particularly with reference to rifle or cannon fire) and the presumably resulting break in something. Both the noun and the verb also quickly acquired a wide variety of figurative uses, such as “crack of dawn” and “to take a crack at something” (which originally referred to a shot with a rifle).

One of the most prolific branches of the figurative uses of “crack” was that using “crack” as slang to mean “loud talk, boasting or bragging” or “a sharp or cutting remark,” a sense still found in “wisecrack.” The “boast” sense also gave us “cracking up,” meaning “to strongly recommend or promote,” now usually found in the lament that something is “not what it’s cracked up to be.”

The use of “crack” as an adjective meaning “first-rate, excellent” in such phrases as “crack shot” and “crack regiment” also derives from this “boast or brag” sense. A “crack regiment,” for instance, is a unit whose proficiency has been rightly “cracked up,” the subject of public admiration and justifiable boasting by its members.

“Crackerjack,” which today we know (at least in the US) as a confection made of candied popcorn and peanuts, was, back in the late 19th century, both a noun meaning “a remarkable person” and an adjective meaning “excellent, of the highest quality” (“Say, by the way, look out — he’s a crackerjack boxer,” 1910). The root of “crackerjack” is simply that “crack” meaning “excellent” again, coupled with the suffix “jack” (which really doesn’t mean anything but does provide a nice echo of “cracker”).

Just beat it.

Dear Word Detective: Growing up in Detroit, we of modest means drove clunkers, sometimes referred to as “ghetto cruisers.” I hear the younger generation call them “hoop-dee’s.” I’m guessing this came from the fact that the creme de la creme of ghetto cruisers was the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which got shortened to Coupe de. Then the “C” sound was dropped to make “hoop-dee.” My niece and her friends were not impressed with my logic and now I’m referred to as Uncle B.S. Just how full of it am I? — Alan Smithee.

Gosharootie! Alan Smithee, the famous film director? I’ve seen all your movies! Well, most of some of them, anyway. In a few cases I had to leave when people started throwing things at the screen. But hold on a moment. According to Wikipedia, “Alan Smithee” is the standard pseudonym used by directors who wish, for whatever reason, to disown their films and not have their real names appear in the credits. That explains the projectiles. So I guess I should just assume that this is a real question and that you’re hiding from your niece. Plus maybe you’re famous, right?

It may be because I wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone until I was 17, but I had never heard of “hoop-dees” before I read your question. Fortunately, other people have, and the term is actually listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED spells the word “hooptie,” although it also recognizes “hooptie,” “hoopty,” “whooptie,” and “whoopty.” I’ll stick with “hooptie.” As for a definition, the OED explains “hooptie” as being “A car; specifically an old or dilapidated one,” and their earliest print citation for the term is from 1968, in a glossary of then-current slang, which would indicate that the term had been in use for at least a few years before then. So “hooptie” is essentially synonymous, according to the OED, with such other slang terms for aged and/or infirm automobiles as “beater,” “jalopy,” “crate” and “clunker.”

It seems, however, that “hooptie” may also be applied to a car which, while it may be past its prime, is still an object of devotion and pride. The OED’s assertion that “hooptie” first appeared as slang in the African-American community would fit with popularization of the term in a number of rap and hip-hop songs, most notably the 1990 “My Hooptie” by Sir Mix-a-Lot (“My hooptie rollin’, tailpipe draggin’ / Heat don’t work an’ my girl keeps naggin’ / Six-nine Buick, deuce keeps rollin’ / One hubcap ’cause three got stolen / Bumper shook loose, chrome keeps scrapin’ / Mis-matched tires, and my white walls flakin’ …).

The origin of the term “hooptie” is, unfortunately, considered a complete mystery. The Dictionary of Regional American English cites an apparent ancestor, “hoopy,” as being heard, especially in Texas, in the mid-1960s, but that doesn’t help much. Interestingly, several references I have come across suggest, as you did, a possible origin in the Cadillac Coupe De Ville, and the more I ponder that possibility the more sense it makes. A “hooptie” is clearly by nature a large American-made car (like the 1969 Buick in “My Hooptie”), most likely a status vehicle when new, and still retaining some of its original cachet. That certainly sounds like a Coupe de Ville to me, and the phonetic resemblance between “Coupe de” and “hooptie” is intriguing, to say the least. So while I certainly can’t swear your theory is correct, and we may never know the origin of “hooptie” for certain, your niece should chill until she has a better theory.

You look, uh, mahvelous.

Dear Word Detective:  Why do we refer to someone that is ill or not healthy as looking “peaked?” “Peak” means “at the pinnacle.” Seems like “peaked” should mean “to be at one’s best.” How did this meaning come to be? — Garry.

Yo, grasshopper, there is no “should.” There is only “is.” Or “does.” Whatever. Anyway, the universe doesn’t have to explain why it does what it does. That’s why I’ve spent my life cultivating that most un-American of traits, a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Simply put, the pictures on the menu never look like the food you end up with, so why agonize? Why not just trust the waiter, whose name, I believe he said, is Doug?

But seriously, folks, determining why a counter-intuitive use of language arises is often more difficult than herding cats, and I say that as a board-certified cat herder. (Pro tip: get one of those battery-powered hand vacuums.) In the case of “peaked,” fortunately, there is actually a plausible rationale for why it’s used to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it, “sickly looking.”

The whole saga begins with the noun form of “peak,” which first appeared in the early 16th century. Curiously, “peak” actually arose simply as a variant of the English word “pike,” which dates back to Old English and was formed from roots carrying the general sense of “sharp point” or “pointed object; spear.” In English, “peak” acquired a variety of meanings centering on the idea of “something sharply pointed,” from the “peak” some folks have at the front of their hairline (as in “widow’s peak”) to the pointed top of a mountain. This “mountaintop” sense led to the development of “peak” in a figurative sense meaning “highest point of achievement or success” or “point of greatest amount of measurable flow, etc.” The verb form of “peak” appeared in the late 16th century and has been used to mean both “rise to a peak” (either literally or figuratively) and “to attain maximum intensity or value.”

The adjective “peaked” is based on the noun “peak,” but here things get a little weird, because there are actually two separate “peaked” adjectives in English. The earlier, which appeared concurrently with the noun, means, logically, “rising to or appearing to have a peak,” as one might speak of a “peaked roof” or a “peaked cap.” This “peaked” is usually, at least in the US, pronounced as one syllable (“peekt”).

The other “peaked” didn’t appear until the early 19th century and was originally a regional colloquial term in Britain. The full definition in the OED, to which I alluded earlier, gives a clue to the logic of this “peaked”: “Sharp-featured, thin, pinched, as from illness or undernourishment; sickly looking.” And there’s your answer. We refer to a sickly-looking person as “peaked” because illness frequently causes weight loss and a haggard, wasted appearance resulting in “sharp” (i.e., bony) facial features, making the nose, chin, etc., appear to end in sharp points (“It seemed as if my aunt might have gone on for ever, getting a little dryer and her face more peakit, as the years went by,” 1914). Lack of proper nutrition can, of course, also lead to a “peaked” appearance, so advanced age or serious illness are not prerequisites for being “peaked” (“The children looked peaked and unhealthy,” 1992). In general use, in fact, a person exhibiting nothing more than a sickly demeanor or a bilious aura is also often described as “peaked” (“Bill looked a bit peaked after his third helping of clams”).

So while this “peaked” doesn’t mean that you’re having your best day ever, there are “peaks” involved. Incidentally, this “peaked” is, in the US, frequently pronounced in two distinct syllables (“peek-ed”), which is handy when your pal says “I’m peaked” and you’re not sure whether he means that he’s on top of the world or at death’s door.

It’s aliivve!

Dear Word Detective:  I became aware of the expression “the whole nine yards” in about 1945. I had also had some training in biology and understood that the human intestinal tract is about 27 feet long. I have long thought that “to give/go the whole nine yards” meant to give (it) everything you have. — Charley.

Oh boy, it’s that question again. I realize that your letter is more of a comment on or correction to my previous columns on this topic, but the origin of “the whole nine yards,” an American slang phrase meaning “the whole thing” or “everything,” is the Count Dracula of popular etymology topics. It swoops in and consumes the energies of anyone who dares to face it, and, worse than Dracula, it can’t be killed, not even with the wooden stake of “Nobody knows for sure.” (Just kidding, of course. I wouldn’t really want anyone to give up the chase.)

Two things bear mentioning at the outset. Although “the whole nine yards” has never  been found in print earlier than the 1960s, it’s far from impossible that you heard it circa 1945. Oral use of slang always precedes its appearance in print, often by decades or more. Secondly, if one were to stretch out the human large and small intestines (don’t try this at home, kids), together they would indeed measure in the ballpark of 27 feet, i.e., nine yards.

There have been about as many origins suggested for “the whole nine yards” as there have been vampire movies, from the amount of cloth needed for a wedding dress, a burial shroud, a man’s three-piece suit or a Scotsman’s kilt, to the capacity of a cement mixer, to the “yards,” or spars, utilized by a tall ship under full sail. My favorite theory has always been the one tying the phrase to the length of fighter plane machine gun belts in World War II. To fire your entire supply of ammunition at an enemy plane would certainly fit the modern “give it everything you’ve got” sense of “to go the whole nine yards.”

But all of these theories have fatal problems. As I said, the phrase has never been found in print before the 1960s, and print citations are the sine qua non of etymology; personal memory, unfortunately, does not count. The first date a word or phrase appears in print is also an important clue to its real origin. It is very unlikely that a phrase referring to 18th century sailing ships, for instance, would not appear in print before the mid-20th century, or that a phrase supposedly common among World War II fighter pilots would be completely absent (rats!) from accounts of that very well-documented war. Many of these theories (e.g., the capacity of cement mixers, cloth needed for a suit) are also simply factually wrong. And even if, as in your intestine clue, a theory does involve something actually nine yards long, a logical connection, supported by a print citation that both involves intestines and uses the phrase in something close to its current sense of “the whole shebang,” would be needed to seal the deal.

So the bad news is that “the whole nine yards” must still be counted as “origin unknown.” The good news is that, thanks to the fearless and peerless vampire hunters of the American Dialect Society (ADS), we may be getting a bit closer to the answer. Until 2009, the earliest known print citations for “the whole nine yards” came from the late 1960s, specifically connected to the US military in the Vietnam War. Since then, ADS members have unearthed three earlier printed examples, two from 1962 (from a literary journal and a car magazine) and one from a 1964 article about the US space program, which may be especially significant given the later military use of the phrase. Interestingly, all three examples use “the whole nine yards” in reference to a long list of items, rather than “nine yards” of any one thing. The newspaper article on the space program, for instance, offers a glossary of the lingo of participants, including “Give ‘em the whole nine yards means an item-by-item report on any project.”

So the mystery of “the whole nine yards” remains unsolved, but as long as new clues keep popping up, the hunt is still afoot.

Say it, don’t spray it.

Dear Word Detective: I was wondering about the word “froth,” or “frothing.” I recently bought an espresso machine and the manual uses the word “frothing” quite a lot in the wording. I was just curious — where and how did we get this strange word? — Judy.

Reading the manual, are we? Whaddayou, some kind of communist? Real consumers don’t read manuals. They tear open the packaging, fill the thing with gasoline, pancake batter, tropical fish, dirty laundry or whatever seems appropriate, plug it in or turn the key, and let ‘er rip. Nine times out of ten it’ll work, and, if it doesn’t, you either buy another one or hire a lawyer (especially if it burned down your house or traumatized your cat). Economists go on and on about “consumer confidence,” but trust me, it’s really “consumer impatience” that drives the US economy. Poor impulse control “r” us.

My own espresso period was back in the late 1980s, when you could sit in a place called The Peacock on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village nursing a double espresso for hours while listening to tragic opera duets and casting a baleful eye on all the poor deluded fools marching grimly by outside. Today I drink Maxwell House and cast my baleful eye from the seat of a tractor. But I do remember “froth” playing a large role in the ritual of the espresso machine, most of which have a little nozzle that dispenses steam to “froth up” milk to make cappuccino.

“Froth” is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “the aggregation of small bubbles formed in liquids by agitation, fermentation, effervescence, etc.” Oddly enough, the OED lists “foam” as a synonym of “froth,” but in my experience foam is denser than froth. Shaving cream, for instance, is definitely a “foam” and not a “froth,” and even shampoo produces what is generally considered a “lather,” lighter than a “foam” but definitely not an airy, bubbly “froth.” The OED goes on to declare that “foam” is a more dignified word than “froth” (“Being the proper word for the product of the agitation of the waves, foam is more dignified than the synonymous froth, and usually implies more copious production”). I can’t believe I’m seriously thinking about all this.

In any case, the origin of “froth” is, sadly, notably devoid of fizz. “Froth” first appeared in print in the late 14th century (“Samarie made his king for to passe, as frooth on the face of water,” 1382), apparently drawn directly from the Old Norse “frotha,” meaning “froth.” By the late 16th century we had started using “froth” as a metaphor for “the insubstantial product of thoughts or emotion” (“Forgive those foolish words — They were the froth my raging folly mov’d When it boil’d up,” Dryden, 1676) or “something of little worth” (“What win I if I gaine the thing I seeke? … a froth of fleeting ioy,” Shakespeare, 1593). “Froth” was also used in this period in a very negative sense as a synonym of “scum” (“Out, you froth, you scumme,” 1603).

“Froth” as a verb, which also appeared in the 14th century, acquired an interesting twist. It has been used, of course, to mean a liquid “frothing up,” either by itself or, for instance, by a Starbucks barista’s hand. But “to froth” has also meant “to foam at the mouth,” due either to illness or extreme anger. This second sense gave us, as of about 1960, the enormously useful noun “frother,” which the OED defines as “An excitable person, especially one readily provoked to outrage in defense of a principle or ideology” (“The frothers will not be pleased to learn of another initiative from a group of rock musicians … to produce a benefit record for miners’ families,” Guardian (UK), 1984). There have always been “frothers,” of course, but that OED definition could definitely do double duty as a plausible summation of most of today’s cable TV and internet.

A broken clock chimes.

Dear Word Detective:  I am now on my fourth Dan Brown book, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that he likes to make up legit-sounding stories about lost origins of words and customs that have lost their intended meaning. That makes him a good story teller but not a very reliable source of information. In his latest book, The Lost Symbol, he talks about how the word “atonement” is actually “at-one-ment,” an ancient religious ideal of becoming one with God and the universe (I’m paraphrasing of course). Is there any truth to this tale of the origin of “atonement”? — Diana.

Fourth Dan Brown book? Awesome. I must admit that I’ve never read a Dan Brown book. I did try to watch a movie made from one of them on TV, but I am violently allergic to Tom Hanks and had to stop. Tom Hanks reminds me of my 7th grade science teacher so strongly that I start to smell formaldehyde when he appears on the screen. In any case, I found the part of the movie I did see implausible, because I have a cousin by marriage who is in the Knights Templar and he does nothing but watch football and play with his ferret.

I have, however, read a fair bit about Dan Brown books, specifically his somewhat idiosyncratic uses of the English language, about which grammarian Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll) has had much to say. Then there’s the wee fact that referring to Leonardo da Vinci (literally “Leonardo of Vinci,” Vinci being his birthplace in Italy) as “da Vinci” in the title “The Da Vinci Code” is like referring to Jesus of Nazareth as “of Nazareth.”

But now onward to page 58 of The Lost Symbol, where a dude named Peter is attempting to convince his sister Katherine (who seems to sigh a lot) that most of the 20th century advances in theoretical physics were actually well known to the Ancients. (Too bad the Ancients didn’t take time out to notice penicillin, a comparatively mundane discovery that might have allowed more of them to live past age thirty, but I digress.) Thus, according to Peter, “entanglement theory” (a.k.a. quantum entanglement) in particle physics was “at the core of primeval beliefs,” reflected in the Ancients’ striving for “at-one-ment,” the state being “at one” with the universe. Pete goes on to explain that this “at-one-ment” is the root of our modern English word “atonement.”

It pains me a bit to say this, because I have no doubt that Dan Brown’s vast catalog of historical nonsense has included many etymological fables, but in this case he is essentially correct about the roots of “atonement.” The verb “to atone,” on which “atonement” is based, meaning “to reconcile, appease, unite,” is a contraction of the phrase “at one,” in which the “one” retains the pronunciation it had in the 16th century (which is probably why the word’s roots are not more obvious). As to the extent the Ancients may plausibly have played a role in this formation, “atone” in English appears to have been modeled on the Latin verb “adunare,” meaning “to unite,” a combination of “ad” (to, at) and “unum” (one).

The idea of everyone getting along is hardly recent, of course, and before “atone” appeared in the 16th century the adverbial phrase “at one” was commonly used in English to mean “in harmony” or “at peace.” But behind the scenes of “atone” (and the verbal noun “atonement,” which also appeared during the 16th century) is the sense of a dispute being settled, usually by the offender expiating a crime through some act of contrition or reparation. In modern usage we “atone for” a wrong that we have done; we do not simply “atone with” other people, joining hands and humming at the sky. That “making up for a wrong done” connotation sets “atonement” quite a ways apart from the gauzy “We are the universe” sentiment Brown ascribes to the Ancients.

The pitter-patter of tiny minds.

Dear Word Detective: Whilst watching CNN the other day, I listened as the on screen television personality (“anchor man” just doesn’t seem right anymore) used the phrase “we’re not out of the woodwork yet.” I laughed, then I cried (for the children). Of course, this immaculately groomed personage meant to say “not out of the woods yet.” It did get me thinking: Where does the phrase “we’re not out of the woods yet” come from? Similarly, how old is “coming out of the woodwork”? I’m betting bugs had a role to play in that one. — Chris, Kansas City.

I suppose “on screen television personality” works, although I prefer the simpler “chucklehead” in most cases. I must, however, admit to a fondness for CNN’s Don Lemon, who shows dangerous signs of intelligence, including the apparently rare ability to actually think about what he’s saying. But he’s obviously an endangered species, since the networks clearly prefer the sort of droid who can pronounce, with a straight face, lines such as “How long it will take, only time will tell.” I still miss Lynne Russell from the “old” CNN Headline News, who could speak volumes with a single arch of her eyebrow. She’s apparently now a radio host in Toronto, which strikes me as a real waste. Her being on the radio, I mean, not being in Toronto. Toronto is nice. Please don’t yell at me, Toronto.

Given how much of Europe and North America was originally covered in deep forest, it’s not surprising that English has scads of figures of speech involving wood. The word “wood” itself is, of course, very old, derived from Germanic roots meaning both trees collectively and the stuff trees are made of. We also have a range of words for trees growing together, from a “stand” of a few trees, to a larger “grove” or “copse,” to the sort of limitless “forest” so rare today. A “wood” (in the US, we usually say “woods”) falls between a “copse” and a “forest” in size. “Wood” or “woods” also seems the default word in such uses as “babe in the woods,” meaning an extremely naïve and vulnerable person (from fairy tales about children abandoned in forests) to less common phrases such as “in a wood,” meaning “in difficulty” or “perplexed.”

For much of human history, traveling through (or worse, being lost in) a dense wood was very perilous, posing dangers ranging from death from exposure to death by becoming lunch for bears or wolves. Thus “not out of the woods yet,” a phrase which first appeared in the late 18th century, carries the sense of still being in danger although progress towards safety (or some goal) is being made, much as a group of lost travelers in a forest who have found the path home may be encouraged and optimistic, but should not be complacent. There’s always the chance that a smart wolf will be waiting along that path home.

While “woodwork” has been used since the 17th century to mean simply “an article made of wood,” it’s most commonly used today to mean the interior wooden fittings (baseboards, molding, trim, cabinets, etc.) of a house or apartment. Of course, what we call “woodwork” a variety of unwelcome guests (mice, insects, etc.) call “home,” so “to come out of the woodwork” is a popular phrase meaning “to emerge from obscurity” or “to come out of hiding,” much as mice or cockroaches creep out when the lights are turned off. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “crawl out of the woodwork” first appeared in print in the mid-1960s (“These nutboys start crawling out of the woodwork,” 1964), but it’s hard to imagine the metaphor of something unpleasant crawling from behind baseboards not being used long before then. In any case, although nothing welcome ever crawls out of the woodwork in real life, the phrase is also sometimes used in a sardonic sense to mean simply “making a sudden splash after a period of obscurity” (“They are the new Australian playwrights and they are coming out of the woodwork everywhere,” 1973).

Pedal to the metal, and damn the roos.

Dear Word Detective:  G’day. This is probably not strictly within your bailiwick, but I would love to find out the origins of the term “ripper,” Australian slang (yes, I am a colonial) for “excellent.” I am unsure if this term derives from a British expression. Interestingly the Japanese word “rippa” is translated as “splendid or fine,” and if you check how it is written it is in traditional Japanese characters (Hiragana) rather Katakana which is the written form most often used for adapted words. This indicates that it is not a word adapted from another language but is a traditional Japanese word. My suspicion has always been that this word entered Australian usage from POWs during WWII. So, is this some form of convergent evolution of the word variety or can the Word Detective uncover another answer? — David Taylor.

Gee, you guys in Oz are still a colony? One of ours? I lose track. But I hope so. You are, after all, the world’s leading producer of unlikely animals, without which our vital nature documentary industry would collapse. Since movies are one of the few things we still make, that would be very unfortunate.

I kid, of course. “Colonial” in the sense you used it is simply popular shorthand for an inhabitant of one of Britain’s former colonies. I’ve always found the usage sort of heartwarming, as if Mother England were keeping your childhood room just as you left it.

That’s an interesting theory about “ripper” as slang for “excellent” being rooted in Japanese, but what you’ve found is almost certainly simply the kind of coincidence that is not uncommon between two languages. “Ripper” as Australian slang first appeared in print in the early 1970s (although it may be older in oral use), but it is clearly derived from “ripper” used as a slang noun in Britain to mean “something excellent” beginning in the early 18th century (“You have a ripper of a city to see,” London Magazine, 1825). That “ripper” is, in turn, clearly related to “ripping” as an adjective (meaning “splendid”) used in Britain since the late 18th century (“Sir! it is I that call, to inform your Lordship, there has been a great deal of shooting towards the Red Lyon, within this little while… Ripping work, my Lord!”, Battle of Brooklyn, 1776).

“To rip,” of course, means to forcefully tear apart or disassemble, and is derived from very old Germanic roots. A “ripper” is something that or someone who rips things, from someone who “rips” down trees or houses to a computer program that copies data from another (often copy-protected) medium, such as one used in “ripping” songs from a CD to your iPod. One of the most famous uses of “ripper” as a noun is in the name “Jack the Ripper” given to a famously mysterious murderer in Victorian London who “ripped” his victims with a knife.

The connotation of destructive energy in “ripping” and “ripper” (not to mention the association with a serial killer) would seem to make both words unlikely candidates for slang use meaning “excellent,” but “ripper” and “ripping” as slang primarily reflect the “energetic action” aspect of “to rip.” The same sense is reflected in the US slang coinage “let her rip,” meaning to let something (usually a car or other machine) run at top speed (“I think we’ll head for Cobham, and get on the A3. Okay, let her rip. Do you like going fast, girls?” 1987). To “let it rip” is also used in the broader sense of “allow something to proceed without restraint,” and “to let rip” means “to speak bluntly, often angrily, without restraint” (“Almost as soon as I had let rip, however, I realized the injustice of my complaint,” 1971).

So “ripper” and “ripping” as slang both reflect the sense of something that is not merely very good, but has been allowed to “rip” and is excellent in a very energetic, superlative sense. While “ripping” in this sense is now regarded as a somewhat archaic usage in Britain, it’s good to see that its cousin “ripper” has found success as an adjective in Oz.

Does a gold-plated water heater count?

Dear Word Detective: I was watching a program all about the Templars and how they have hidden treasure everywhere, started the banking system in Switzerland and probably are really responsible for killing the dinosaurs. At one part the program was talking about a pit in Nova Scotia that many groups tried to excavate to find hidden treasure. A shot of an old newspaper headline said something like “Many groups invest in money pit.” This made me wonder if the phrase “money pit” — a phrase you seem to live with every day — came from this excavation. — KT Kamp.

Oh, Templars, schemplars, I say. Bosh, balderdash, hokum and hooey. As I noted in a recent column, my brother-in-law is a Knight Templar, and he couldn’t find ice in Antarctica with Google Maps and a flashlight. I suppose that if Big Macs ever go extinct, he’ll be a logical suspect, but the producers of that program were definitely barking up the wrong ancient secret order. The Girl Scouts are the ones who control everything, and no one suspects them because those infernal cookies are the Blue Pill. I’ll wait here while you go look that up on Wikipedia.

The pit that the program mentioned is on Oak Island, off Nova Scotia in Canada. I first read of the Oak Island “money pit” mystery when I was about twelve years old, and it made such an impression on me that I resolved to someday go there myself and investigate. (Hey, I’ve been busy.) The Wikipedia entry for “Oak Island” is probably the easiest way to get up to speed on the history of the mystery, although it lacks the whoo-hoo atmospherics that entranced me when I was twelve. Long story short, back in the 18th century a 16-year old boy found a tree on the island from which dangled an old hoisting apparatus above a depression in the ground. He and his friends started digging and discovered a very elaborate system of layers, tunnels and barriers that many people since have suspected was designed to protect some kind of buried treasure, most likely pirates’ booty hidden by either Captain Kidd or Blackbeard. Several attempts, some quite elaborate, have been made to excavate the “money pit” (as it came to be known) over the years, but no one has yet succeeded.

The phrase “money pit,” although it came to be associated with the Oak Island mystery, was apparently already in more general use meaning “a pit dug (or suspected to have been dug) to hide treasure or money” (“In many places … we found money-pits dug; and, in one place, they told us, that a man bought of a poor widow, the right of digging on her ground for hidden treasure,” 1820). The phrase as eventually applied to Oak Island was a nifty double entendre: the pit was believed to contain millions of dollars in treasure, but several fortunes were spent on fruitless attempts to find the loot.

That sense of “a fruitless project that consumes money as surely as throwing it into a pit” produced, in the 1980s, the modern use of “money pit” to mean a house, usually old (such as ours), which turns out to need constant and ruinously expensive repairs with no end in sight. (In our case, it has meant a new roof, new furnace, new water heaters (2), well pumps (2) and dozens of small repairs. It’s gotten to the point that toasters break before we even plug them in.) This use of the phrase was popularized by a Tom Hanks movie called “The Money Pit” (actually a remake of the classic and far superior 1948 “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House”) in 1986. The phrase “money pit” is also often used in a broader sense to mean any enterprise or project that devours piles of resources with no real results (“Such a database is a true money pit, and finding consumers willing to shovel in the money to fill it is a formidable task,” 1986).

So “money pit” was in use before it was applied to Oak Island, but the fame of that mystery and the fortunes wasted on trying to solve it gave us the modern uses of the phrase.

Assuming the lights stay on, of course.

Dear Word Detective: While listening to a course on CD during my commute, the instructor kept using sentences like, “Let’s pause a moment and recapitulate what we’ve discussed.” This confused me, as I was pretty sure “to capitulate” meant “to cede, to give up, or to give in.” So, of course, I looked up both words and found that both the lecturer and I were correct. Thanks largely to your work, I know prefixes such as “non-,” ” un-,” ” in-,” ” and “a-” do not always indicate negation. But this is the first I’ve noticed that “re-” doesn’t indicate a repetition. Having gotten over my shock that the English language could contain such inconsistencies, I thought you might be able to shed some light on whether “recapitulate” and “capitulate” share a common root, and whether “re-” words that don’t imply repetition are not uncommon. — Ray.

Ah yes, the commuter school of study. I used to read a gonzo amount of classic literature on the subway when we lived in New York. Of course, the first thing you learn about New York subways is that you’d be crazy to get on the train without a book because (a) even if you’re not actually reading it, it’s safer to look as if you are, and (b) sooner or later the train’s gonna get stuck in a tunnel for three hours and you’re going to be glad you have something to read. I even taught myself a bit of Spanish while riding the train, although about all I remember is “La vía del tren subterráneo es peligrosa.”

It’s true that prefixes in English, which seem like such simple, unambiguous tags, are often tricky little scamps, and “re-” is no exception. In Latin, it carried the senses of both “again” and “back,” and in English it has retained both meanings. So “re-” prepended to a verb (with or without a hyphen) can mean that an action is performed again (as in “re-cleaning” a room), but it can also mean that the effect of a previous action or process is changed or reversed (as in “renegotating” a contract or “refoliating” a dying forest). The good thing about “re-” is that it’s never as perversely deceptive as the “in” in “inflammable,” which many people took to signify “not,” which it doesn’t, which is why we use “nonflammable” today.

The “re” in “recapitulate” does carry the meaning of “again,” but since “recapitulate” means “to sum up material by citing its main points” and not “to surrender over and over again,” some explanation is obviously in order.

So here goes. The Latin “caput” meant “head,” and its diminutive form “capitulum” (literally “little head”) meant “section heading” or “chapter” of a book or document. (Our word “chapter,” in fact, comes from “capitulum” via Old French, and the use of “heading” to mean the title of a part of a document is semantically drawn from that “little head” sense.) In English in the 16th century, “capitulate” meant, first, to arrange a document in chapters or sections, then to draw up an agreement on specified terms. Over the next century this use narrowed to mean specifically “to draw up a treaty,” and by the late 17th century “capitulate” had acquired its modern meaning of “to surrender.”

Meanwhile, back in the 16th century, our friend “capitulate” in the original sense of “to arrange in chapters” had spawned the form “recapitulate,” meaning “to go over a document again, summarizing it by citing the main points and section headings; to restate briefly,” which is how we use “recapitulate” today. So our modern words “capitulate” and “recapitulate” are indeed very closely related, but their difference in meaning goes way beyond that little “re.”

It was a dark and stormy anecdote….

Dear Word Detective: You often use “thereby hangs a tale” in your columns. It’s almost as though you are hinting for someone to ask about this phrase. I’m asking. I lost a neat book by that title by Charles Earle Funk. I recall the explanation involved Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” Can you add more background? — Charlie N.

I know no one is likely to believe this, but I really haven’t been seeding my prose with bait to elicit reader questions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, and the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. The downside is that I’d have to pick “bait” words and phrases that would both fit logically into the “lure” column and be practical to tackle in the “follow-up” column, lest I be hoist on my own petard and caught between a rock and a hard place. With bells on. To boot. Forsooth.

Somewhere around here (probably in the pile of books in the corner that is being used as a nest by a cat I swear I’ve never seen before) I have a copy of the book you lost, Thereby Hangs a Tale by Charles Earle Funk. I’m pretty sure the book is out of print, although it’s available on Amazon (at inflated prices, of course). A few years ago, however, I found a very thick tome titled “2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings and Expressions” on a remainder table at Barnes & Noble. It turned out to be four of Funk’s works of popular etymology (A Hog on Ice, Thereby Hangs a Tale, Heavens to Betsy!, and Horsefeathers) in one volume, and you can order it new from Amazon for $13.99. Operators are presumably standing by.

It’s fitting that Funk titled his book of word and phrase origins “Thereby Hangs a Tale” because the man was a masterful story-teller, and while some of his explanations have been superseded by recent research (“Tale” was published in 1950), I wouldn’t hesitate to give the book as a gift.

“Thereby hangs a tale” means, roughly, “there’s an interesting story about that” or “there’s more to this matter than you know” (“Yes, Dwayne went to the dance with Heather, not Mary, and thereby hangs a tale”). Shakespeare used the phrase in at least three of his plays (Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Taming of the Shrew), but he apparently didn’t actually coin it, as it has been found in print at least twenty years earlier.

You can’t blame Shakespeare for appropriating a good line, however, and “thereby hangs a tale” is a great line. Its kick lies in it being a fairly subtle pun on the homophones “tale” and “tail” as well as invoking two senses of the verb “to hang.” The tail of a horse, for instance, literally “hangs,” is loosely suspended, from the stern of the animal. But a figurative sense of “to hang,” in use since Old English, has meant “to depend upon, especially for support or authority” (as in “Bob’s defense hangs on his brother’s testimony”). So “thereby hangs a tale” invokes the image of a “tale” which “hangs,” is directly connected to and often an explanation of, the point just mentioned.

“Hang” used in this sense is strikingly similar to our familiar verb “to depend,” which originally meant literally “to hang from; to be suspended,” but which we now use to mean “to rely upon or be a consequence of” something. That archaic literal “hang from” meaning is now rarely seen, but the great humorist S.J. Perelman put that sense to good punning use in one of my favorite Perelman lines. Writing of narrowly dodging a sticky social embarrassment through pure chance, Perelman noted that “On such gossamer threads does our fate depend.”