January 2011 « The Word Detective

Money pit

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.

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Capitulate / Recapitulate

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.”

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Thereby hangs a tale

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.”

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