Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

What about December? You mean December of last year? Sheesh. I think it’s best if we all just look forward, y’know? There’s nothing to be gained by pointing fingers and dwelling on the missteps of the past. Things happened, mistakes were made, water under the bridge, ship sailed, case closed. Besides, what we have here in our shiny new January is one of those increasingly special times when I post an issue of this little circus in the same month as it says at the top of the page.

Anyway, ave atque vale, annus terribilis 2012. Meanwhile, thanks to all our friends who have subscribed and otherwise contributed to our well-being over the past few months. Quite apart from the fact that your support literally makes this site possible, the morale boost it furnishes is the reason I don’t spend my days watching Family Feud reruns.

As for the Great Thanksgiving Norovirus Adventure, I am better now, but not entirely up to snuff yet. Having missed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years entirely, I hope to be completely well soon, because I have a lot riding on Arbor Day. Anyway, I have all sorts of fun medical appointments scheduled (I seem to be anemic, among other things). I also have an ophthalmic exam coming up, which I hope will fix my inability to read anything. Seriously. I’ve spent the past two months with vision so blurred that I’m almost completely unable to make out lines of type on a computer screen. I am really hoping that the problem can be resolved by new glasses and isn’t a sudden increase in the irreversible loss of vision associated with multiple sclerosis.

Speaking of computer screens, my big LCD monitor gave up the ghost last year, and after spending a week or so struggling to use an old, dim and yellow 17-inch Dell LCD monitor I had left over from about 2001, I went online at Newegg.com (the totally awesome opposite of larcenous dumps like Best Buy) to see what I could reasonably afford. I discovered that while I was sleeping, the world had dumped the old LCD technology, CCFL (cold-cathode fluorescent lamp) backlighting, and taken up with the cheaper, “greener” LED backlighting. OK. Whatever. So I hunted around a bit and found a suspiciously cheap (~$125) 24-inch Dell LED LCD monitor. (I think the deal must have been a drastic sale, actually, because the same monitor is now almost $200). So it comes, I plug it in, and boy howdy, that thing would have been visible from space. I’m now running it at 40% brightness. It looks like it might be sharper than my old LCD, but it’s hard to say because, as I said, I can’t actually read anything on the screen. Grrr.

So at the moment I’m relying on my aging but trusty T60 ThinkPad laptop, which has a slightly dim screen (which is OK because everything around me seems way too bright), but also sports 1024 x 768 resolution (a la 2004) and thus is much easier to read. I love my T60.

But speaking of ThinkPads, Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM’s personal computer division several years ago, has announced that, after keeping the ThinkPad line largely intact so far, they have decided to change the classic ThinkPad keyboard as part of an ill-advised attempt to compete in the “glamor” market with the MacBook. This is a terrible idea, as outlined here and here. ThinkPads have always had the best keyboards on the market, so good that IBM actually sold them as stand-alone keyboards for desktop PCs. This decision is stupid and depressing.

On the bright side, we have headlines such as this –  Windows 8 Killed My PC — to keep us warm and cozy with schadenfreude. Having played with this misbegotten system while killing time in Staples recently, I can believe every word of that article. I abandoned Windows back in 2005 or so in favor of Linux, but my experiences with Microsoft crap during the preceding twelve years left me with a visceral revulsion toward anything Redmond produces. I actually have a computer with a Windows 7 partition on it, but I’ve never been able to bear using Win 7 for more than about ten minutes at a time. It’s just too damn annoying. As for Windows 8, which is essentially a tablet OS, many folks predict that the whole touchscreen desktop shebang will fail because of “gorilla arm” syndrome, the fatigue and weird feeling that you get in your arms and hands after a while from reaching out to use a touchscreen that you’re not holding close to your body.

Personally, I’m still using Ubuntu 10.04, a three-year old version,  because every subsequent version of Ubuntu has been screwed up in very Microsoft ways, and the most attractive alternative, Linux Mint, is buggy and not really ready for primetime. Hey, this works, which is all I want.

So that’s the news from East Bump. Please consider subscribing.

None for me, thanks.

Dear Word Detective: In DAR records from the 19th century, it was stated that a relative of mine “suffered depredation.” Was the usage of this word different in the 19th century than we would expect today? What would it have meant then? — Karl Gabosh.

Whoa. Blast from the past. By “DAR,” I’m assuming you mean the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization founded in 1896 and open to any woman able to prove that an ancestor had some connection to the American Revolution. My maternal grandmother was active in the DAR, and I vaguely remember being enrolled in the CAR (Children of the American Revolution) myself, though I seem to have forgotten the secret handshake. I believe a tenuous genetic connection to Button Gwinnett was my personal ticket to ride, but I’m probably wrong and expect to be corrected by my more attentive relatives shortly.

It’s hard to say exactly what the DAR records mean by “depredation” without knowing more of the context in which the word is used. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “depredation” as meaning “A predatory attack; a raid,” as well as “Damage or loss; ravage,” giving the example “[Carnegie Hall has] withstood the wear and tear of enthusiastic music lovers and the normal depredations of time” (Mechanical Engineering). So I guess the word today can mean anything from a vicious physical attack to some minor wear and tear on your awnings.

To get a better sense of what the DAR might have meant by “depredation,” we’ll hop in the Wayback Machine and take a gander at the roots of the word. “Depredation” first appeared in English in the late 15th century, modeled on the French “depredation” or “depredacion,” which was in turn derived from the Latin “depraedation,” a noun derived from the verb “depraedare,” which means “to plunder.”

The early literal sense of “depredation” in English was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “the action of making a prey of; plundering, pillaging, ravaging.” That’s not surprising, because that Latin “depraedare” was formed from the prefix “de” (in this case meaning “thoroughly”) plus “praedari,” to make prey of, formed on “praeda,” meaning “prey” (and also the source of our English word “prey”).

While “depredation” has certainly been used to mean the act of physically attacking something or someone as a predator (another related word) would, or various acts of robbery or plunder, “depredation” has also long been used in a more figurative sense of “destructive actions, processes or ravages,” as of disease, hunger, exposure, etc. Even natural processes of consumption or evaporation have been described as “depredations” (“The Speedy Depredation of Air upon Watery Moisture, and Version of the same into Air, appeareth in … the sudden discharge … of a little Cloud of Breath, or Vapour, from Glass,” Francis Bacon, 1626). “Depredation” has even been used to mean “harsh literary criticism” (“Sterne truly resembled Shakespeare’s Biron, in the extent of his depredations from other writers,” 1798), although the literary world is often not as different from the cheetah chasing the antelope across the veldt as one might imagine.

Given the wide range of literal and figurative uses to which “depredation” has been put, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what the DAR record means by the word. The 19th century didn’t assign a particular meaning to “depredation,” but considering the historical context it probably was being used to mean something worse than a bad book review. My guess is that it referred to “depredations” at least of poverty or other unfortunate circumstance, but possibly (worst-case scenario) actual physical attack, perhaps during the US Civil War or in its aftermath.

This just in.

Dear Word Detective: If it’s possible to “pre-empt” something, is it possible to just “empt” it? — Jo.

Yeah, sure, there’s an app for that. There must be, right? I discovered the other day that a disturbing number of you people out there read this column on your telephones, which strikes me as fairly weird, and makes me wonder if I should be writing shorter sentences with shorter words. Like this one. In case your bus comes. Or something. I actually did set up a “mobile” version of my website a few months back, but it made my deathless prose look like a ransom note, so I pulled the plug.

“Pre-empt” is one of a class of strange little words (“co-opt” is another) that make many people uncomfortable and drive spell-checkers nuts. It’s the hyphen that does it, but there’s really no way around it unless both words become as commonly used as “cooperate,” which you still frequently see spelled as “co-operate” outside the US. “Pre-empt” is increasingly spelled “preempt” here in the US, but that form still makes me look twice, which is not what you want in a word.

“Empt” actually is a verb in English, but (Star Wars reference ahead) it’s not the verb you’re looking for; it’s related to “empty,” it means “to be or make empty,” and it’s considered obsolete to boot. To “pre-empt,” on the other hand, means “to preclude, to forestall, to prevent an anticipated occurrence or to take action before another person is able to.” We usually hear “pre-empt” in the TV sense of “replacing a scheduled program or event with another deemed more important,” but it’s also commonly used in the “act before someone else has a chance” sense (“It is hoped the move could pre-empt an announcement by the Government that it has found a way to alter planning laws,” 2005).

“Pre-empt” first appeared in print in the mid-19th century, and the verb was actually a “back-formation” from the noun “pre-emption,” which dates back to about 1600. (“Back-formation” occurs when a simpler word, often a verb, is created from an older, more complex form. The verb “to sculpt,” for instance, was formed long after “sculptor” appeared.)

Pre-emption,” of course, is also commonly used today meaning simply “the act of pre-empting” in all its various senses.

But the original meaning of “pre-emption” gives a hint as to its source. When “pre-emption” first appeared, it was in the specific sense of “The purchase by one person or party before an opportunity is offered to others; the right of making such a purchase in certain circumstances” (Oxford English Dictionary). The word was formed from the prefix “pre” (before) plus “emption,” a legal term meaning “to buy.” The root of “emption” was the Latin verb “emere,” to buy; the agent-noun of that verb is “emptor,” famous from the Latin phrase “Caveat emptor,” or “Let the buyer beware.”

There have been several legal doctrines based on various “rights of pre-emption,” usually entitling either the state to seize property or a private party to purchase public property with a promise to improve it. When a new law overrides an existing one, that process is also called “pre-emption.” There’s also the military tactic of “pre-emption,” making a surprise “pre-emptive” attack on a putative enemy deemed sufficiently threatening. And, if the conflict is sufficiently momentous, such a “pre-emptive” attack will probably result, at least on the “pre-empting” end, in “pre-emption” of America’s Top Model by men in ornate uniforms standing in front of maps, at which point it might be a good idea to meditate a bit on “caveat emptor.”

No runs, no hits, big trauma.

Dear Word Detective: I’m searching for the meaning of the expression “out for a duck,” as used in “The first time Milne went to see his son play in a school cricket match, he was out for a duck, not scoring a single run.” — Ehrenberg H. Peter.

Ah yes, as the great existential philosopher Chico Marx once put it, “Why a duck? Why not a chicken?” Of course, in the film (Cocoanuts, 1929), Chico has misunderstood Groucho saying “viaduct,” and the dialogue then descends into Chico wondering why Groucho needs a Ford to cross the river when he has a horse, but “Why a duck?” is about all we have time for at the moment. The relevant clip, like every other worthy bit of human history, can be found on YouTube. While you’re there, check out some clips from the Marx Brothers’ subsequent film “Duck Soup.” The boys seem to have had a thing for ducks.

But who among us, as John Kerry so famously is said to have said, does not enjoy ducks? The English language certainly does. The humble but endearing waterfowl we know as the “duck” has contributed dozens of colorful phrases to our speech. When we put our affairs in order, we say we have “all our ducks in a row” (as a mother duck leads her brood of ducklings), we shed adversity “like water off a duck’s back,” we learn a new job (we hope) “like a duck takes to water” (easily), we greet a gloomy sky as “a good day for a duck” but regard sunshine as “ducky” (from the use of “little duck” and similar terms as endearments), and if something is very easy, we declare it “duck soup” (the origin of which is, sadly, a complete mystery).

Our modern English word “duck” comes from the Old English “ducan,” which did not, interestingly, mean any sort of bird. “Ducan” was a verb meaning “to plunge underwater suddenly, to dive or dip.” The name “duck” for the fowl came from its habit of feeding by “ducking,” plunging its head into the water. So when you have to “duck” your head when climbing into a compact car, don’t blame the ducks for bad design.

The phrase you cite as an example of “out for a duck” actually comes from an account of the strained relationship between A.A. Milne, author of “Winnie the Pooh” and other works, and his son Christopher Robin Milne, who starred in many of his father’s stories. The fact that the younger Milne failed to score in that cricket match was evidently a source of great disappointment to both him and his father.

“Duck” as slang for scoring no hits (or meaning a player who scores no hits) originated in cricket in the mid-19th century, but is now used in other sports as well. “Duck” in this sense is short for “duck’s egg,” meaning the zero placed beside the player’s name in scoring sheets. It first appeared in schoolboy slang in Britain, where it is also used to mean “nothing” in a general sense. To finally score after a time at “duck” in cricket is to “break one’s duck,” but if that doesn’t happen and the game concludes with a player not having scored even once, that hapless soul is said to be “out for a duck.” In the US, we more simply refer to zero as a “goose egg.”

Or perhaps he meant “scoot.”

Dear Word Detective: In “True Grit” by Charles Portis, a horse trader describes the murderer Tom Clancy as being “on the scout” in the Indian Territory. I’ve never seen “scout” used in such a way. It certainly seems from the context that “scout” here means “hiding out” or “on the lam,” and not “exploring” as is the more common meaning of the word today. Perhaps you can shed some light on this use of the word? — Bill Lundeberg.

That’s an interesting question, and that use of “scout” strikes me as a bit odd, too. I must admit that my knowledge of “scouts” and what they do is drawn almost entirely from the TV “horse operas” of my youth (e.g., Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and similar pacifist fare). There was also the occasional historical painting depicting some famous scout standing on an outcropping of rock pointing to another, apparently identical, outcropping of rock in the distance. Even at the age of ten, doing that for a living seemed boring to me. And that buckskin clothing looked scratchy.

There are actually, and somewhat surprisingly, several distinct “scout” nouns in English, plus two verbs. The oldest noun, dating back to around 1400, is an obsolete “scout” meaning “overhanging rock,” from the Old Norse “skute,” which is related to the verb “to shoot.” I just report this stuff, folks. Next up are “scouts” meaning “a flat-bottomed boat,” “a kind of sea bird,” and “scout” as a term of contempt, which seems to have been imported from Scandinavia as a verb meaning “to mock” and is also related to the verb “to shoot” (and possibly “to shout”). College servants at Harvard, Yale and Oxford have also been known as “scouts” since the 18th century.

None of those, with the possible exception of “scout” meaning “servant,” however, seem to be connected to “scout” in the “explorer” sense. That “scout” comes from the Old French “escouter,” meaning “to listen,” which itself came ultimately from the Latin “auscultare,” also meaning “to listen.” That “listening” meaning of “scout” is the key to the word.

To “scout” when the verb first appeared in English around 1400 was not to map out the best routes for travel and rate restaurants along the way, but to perform what we today would probably call “espionage.” A “scout” was a spy who prowled around in search of information, specifically a soldier sent in advance of the main force of an army in order to locate the enemy and report back to his superiors (“Others from the dawning Hills Lookd round, and Scouts each Coast light-armed scoure, Each quarter, to descrie the distant foe,” Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667).

This military sense of “scout” soon broadened to mean “a person sent out to gather information” in a general sense, largely devoid of those “sneaky spy” overtones, and in many uses (as in the once-popular wagon train dramas), a “scout” was simply a knowledgeable rider who investigated the trail ahead to insure the travelers’ safety. Eventually we developed such wholesome uses of “scout” as in “Boy Scouts” and “Girl Scouts,” which led, in the early 20th century, to the slang use of “good scout” to mean an honest, reliable person. The same period saw the rise of the slightly-less-wholesome “talent scouts” and “sports scouts” prowling obscure bars and small-town football fields looking for the Next Big Thing (“Vaudeville scouts approached us. Our pictures were in the papers,” Paul Whiteman, 1926).

The phrase “on the scout” (or “in the scout”) dates back to the 17th century, and means to be acting as a “scout” in the original sense of a spy or surreptitious observer (“Capt. Baker … without my leave, went upon a scout and … was shot,” 1775). In the sense that you mention, I’d say that the author meant that the criminal was traveling “as a scout would,” i.e., secretly, trying to avoid detection, definitely on the lam in a sneaky fashion, looking for nothing except a way to avoid being caught.

No, your “Pizza Inspector” badge doesn’t count.

Dear Word Detective: Can one use “aegis” and “purview” in the same sentence or would that constitute a redundancy? I want to write a letter to the FDA proposing that certain aspects of the cultivation, licensing, sale, use and taxation of marijuana should fall under their jurisdiction. — Dick Stacy.

Hmm. Are you sure you want to do that? Chances are you’ll just get a boilerplate form letter response, you know. But there’s also the chance that it’ll be delivered by guys wearing body armor and driving a tank. Out where I live they’ve taken to sending SWAT teams out at 4 am to talk to people adjudged to be using implausibly large amounts of electricity. Maybe it has to do with the light bulb law, ya think? Bright lights, big trouble, as Reddy Kilowatt would say.

Using “aegis” and “purview” in the same sentence wouldn’t be truly redundant, because the words are not precise synonyms. They are similar in meaning, however, so the syntactic logistics of usage might be tricky. You don’t want to distress the poor cubicle rats at the FDA.

“Aegis” and “purview” both first appeared in English in the 15th century. “Purview” was originally a legal term meaning the “substance and intent” of a statute, what the FDA would call the “active ingredients” of the law. Our English “purview” comes from the Anglo-French phrase “purveu est ke,” meaning “it is provided that,” which was a standard clause preceding the specific terms of a law. Over the next few centuries, “purview” expanded to mean “scope, authority, supervision” of nearly any office, agency, person, etc., which is the sense most often seen today. Many of the more general modern uses of “purview” seem to have been influenced by the “view” part of the word, which has lent “purview” a connotation of “oversight or range of vision,” both figurative and literal (“In a twinkling she was hidden by the turn [of the road] from the purview of the castle,” 1903). But usually “purview” just means “authority or control.”

“Aegis” (pronounced either “ee-jis” or “ay-jis,” your choice) is actually a Latin word, from the Greek “Aigis,” the name of the shield of Zeus in Greek mythology. “Aigis” is presumed to come from “aix,” meaning “goat” (specifically “aigos,” or “of goat”), because the shield was made of goatskin. (“Shield” in this context includes protective clothing, which makes that “goatskin” a bit more plausible.)

“Aegis” was initially used in English in specific reference to Greek mythology, but by the mid-18th century it came to be used in a figurative sense to mean “impregnable defense or shield” or, more generally, “the backing or support of a person, institution, etc.” (“He cast over them the aegis of his own mighty name,” 1865). “Aegis” is often used in the phrase “under the aegis of,” meaning “under the control, auspices or authority of” a person, agency, government, etc. (“More than half of the pupils studied were enrolled at schools under the aegis of the Chicago International Charter School,” 2006). “Aegis” is also often used in the sense of “strong influence or guidance” or even “control.” All these figurative uses of “aegis” only began to appear in the 1930s, and were roundly denounced by usage traditionalists even in the 1960s, but are considered standard today.

So “aegis” and “purview” share a bailiwick and nearly overlap in sense at times, but there remains a shade of difference. In terms of the FDA, for example, the classification of drugs falls within their “purview,” but a change in the legal status of a drug would be done under their “aegis,” i.e., with their official approval. You could say that “purview” is the scope of their authority and that “aegis” describes the exercise of that authority or control.

I’ll take a jumbo hoagie with a side of BRAINS!

Dear Word Detective: Many small restaurants in the Northwestern Pennsylvania area, especially those built from a trolley or railroad dining car, have the spelling “dinor” on their sign. Is this only for this area or is this found anywhere else? And why this spelling? — Tenderrlee Hughes.

Why? Why ask why? Oh right, because this is a column where I answer questions. OK, well, if you read the fine print I plan to add to my web page as soon as we’re finished here, it says that twice every year, when faced with a weirdly disturbing question, I am allowed to paraphrase the classic line from the 1974 film Chinatown. If you’ve never seen Chinatown, you need to go watch it right now. I’ve seen it about twelve times, so I’ll wait here. Back so soon? No, I’m not talking about “My sister, my daughter…,” much as I love that scene. I mean the final line of the movie, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Well, forget it, it’s Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania, you see, is weird. Ask any dialectician. Pennsylvania has enough strange terms, phrases and pronunciations found nowhere else to raise serious questions about lost colonies of Martians and the duplicitous government agencies that cover them up. Furthermore, judging by the way “people” in Pennsylvania talk, we’re dealing with more than just one alien settlement. Pennsylvanians in the Philadelphia area in the eastern part of the state, for instance, tend to pronounce “merry” like the rest of us say “Murray” and “sure” like “shore.” They also tend to transport their small children in a “baby coach” down the “pavement,” which is what Earthlings call a “sidewalk.”

But, as is generally true in the US, the further west you go, the weirder it gets. I have always believed that when driving through central Pennsylvania it’s best to avoid stopping and to keep your arms and hands inside the car because of the zombies, but eventually you hit Pittsburgh and all hope is lost. While Philadelphia can boast of enriching generations of cardiologists by inventing the “cheesesteak,” Pittsburghians will forever be known for persistently referring to bologna lunch meat (aka “baloney”) as, for some inscrutable reason, “jumbo.” Compared to that, the local use of “nebby” to mean “nosy” (“neb” being an old English dialect word for “beak”) and “to redd up” for “to clean” seem almost normal.

Given the notable quirks of language in Pennsylvania, spelling “diner” as “dinor” seems only mildly strange. But the fact that it’s only spelled that way in the immediate vicinity of Erie in the northwestern corner of the state is very strange indeed. Yet when you plug “dinor” into Google, you get tons of hits for restaurants using that spelling in their names, and they’re all (cue the spooky music) around Erie.

A “diner,” of course, is a small, economical eatery, originally housed in a railway dining car (known as “diners” since the 1890s) retired and refitted as a stationary structure. The term “diner” was first applied to a non-mobile restaurant in the 1930s, and even today “diners” are often built to resemble the railroad cars they never were, complete with gleaming metal siding and aerodynamically-rounded corners. The New York City area used to be home to hundreds of such diners, often run by Greek immigrants, but the herd has been tragically thinned in recent years by the predations of the fast food empires. The classic Greek diner menu, twenty pages of colorful photos of improbable dishes, all supposedly available around the clock, really belongs in the Smithsonian.

As to why the folks around Erie spell “diner” as “dinor,” nobody knows, and nobody elsewhere, as far as I can tell, does it. My guess is that it started back in the middle of the last century (the heyday of the diner) with a simple typographical error in a sign, which was then copied and spread when other diners in town were established. Being somewhat isolated and off the beaten track up there in northwestern Pennsylvania probably helped. Or maybe it’s just a zombie thing.

Pick a peck of soul-crushing boredom.

Dear Word Detective: What do the English words “kip” and “spike” mean? I found them in Orwell’s biography in Wikipedia, but I could not find any proper definitions in any dictionary. — Jana, Czech Republic.

Thanks for an interesting question. Then again, it’s hard to imagine an uninteresting question that involves George Orwell (pen name of Eric Blair, 1903-50), author of 1984, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, and many other books and essays. The Wikipedia page about Orwell actually does a good job of briefly recounting his peripatetic and amazing life.

The two terms you encountered, “kip” and “spike,” are both associated with Orwell in the 1930s, when he set out to document the conditions of London’s poor and homeless. Orwell dressed as a vagrant and frequented the dive bars, flophouses and hangouts of the poor, and his experiences furnished the material for his first published essay, titled “The Spike” (1931). His further experiences “undercover” in London (and elsewhere) eventually resulted in his book “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933.

Of the two terms, “kip” is the easier to explain. A “kip” in the sense Orwell meant it is a lodging house, usually humble, in which beds are rented by the night or week. “Kip” is also used in extended senses of “a bed in such a place,” “a bed” in general, or even “sleep” in a general sense (“I got to have a rest. I ain’t had no kip,” 1938). “Kip” in this sense first appeared in print in 1879, but it had been used in the sense of “brothel” since 1766. It appears to be related to the Danish word “kippe,” meaning “hut” or “low alehouse” (i.e., a “dive” bar).

“Spike” takes a bit more explaining, but it’s also a more interesting word. In Orwell’s accounts of life among the poor and homeless, a “spike” was a workhouse, a public shelter for the homeless where food and board were supplied (just barely) in exchange for menial work performed by the residents. Workhouses (or “poorhouses”) had been established in England in the 14th century, but were still common in the 1930s. Originally established to care for the poor and indigent, workhouses proliferated in the 18th and 19th century, and depended on the labor of their residents to remain solvent. The labor usually consisted of mind-numbing tasks such as crushing stone or “picking” oakum (“He had heard of a work-house, in this city, into which refractory servants are committed, and put to hard labour; such as pounding hemp, grinding plaister of Paris, and picking old ropes into oakum,” 1804).

“Oakum” is the short, coarse fibers of hemp, jute or flax, which are separated from the longer, smoother fibers that are used to spin cloth. Oakum was used to caulk ships, seal plumbing joints, and even as dressings for wounds (“Who should it be but Mr. Daniel, all muffled up … and his right eye stopped with Okum?” Samuel Pepys, Diary, 1666). One source of oakum was old ropes made of hemp, which were laboriously picked apart by hand to free the fibers of oakum for re-use. The picking of oakum from old rope was most often done by hand with a large metal nail, or spike, and it’s likely that the workhouses got the nickname “the spike” from this instrument of long hours of toil. Picking oakum with a spike all day every day was almost certainly the most painfully memorable aspect of life in a “spike.”

Interestingly, the Latin word for oakum was “stuppa,” and back in Roman times “stuppa” was often used to seal the necks of jars or bottles like a stopper. This practice spawned the Late Latin verb “stuppare,” which, a few centuries later, produced our English verb “to stop” in all its senses, from “stopping” the flow of water from a leak to “stopping” a speeding car.

La-di-da.

Dear Word Detective: For a few years, I have been trying to figure out if “blithely” and “blindly” have historically been used interchangeably. My understanding of “blithely” is, basically, “doing things without thinking about them, therefore running the danger of doing dangerous things.” And some uses of the word “blind” definitely would fit with that, such as “following someone blindly” or “going blindly forward.” My guess is that some phrases might have originated with either “blind” or “blithe” as the word, and then people misheard them. The reason I have been wondering this is that a couple years back, I studied the history of the organized blind movement. While studying, I learned about the use of blindness as a negative metaphor for the inability or unwillingness to think. I know there are a lot of such phrases, but some at least seem like mistakes. — A. Greenwick.

There are indeed a lot of such phrases, many of which began as metaphors but have become established English idioms, usually in a derogatory sense. Strike the “usually” — I can’t think of a single positive case. One such use that I have watched wax and wane in the course of my life, and currently seems to be increasing again, is the use of “retarded” (or “retard”) applied to a person perceived to be either wrong on some question or simply uncool. This obnoxious use seems especially popular on the internet, where it is, unfortunately, impossible to simply punch the offenders in the nose. Come on, developers. There should be an app for that.

“Blind” first appeared as an adjective in Old English, based on Germanic roots carrying the sense of “sightless” as well as “obscure, dim, in darkness.” But “blind” also brought with it the figurative senses (as enumerated by the Oxford English Dictionary) of “lacking in mental perception, discernment, or foresight; destitute of intellectual, moral, or spiritual light,” and these senses were used in English as often as the literal “sightless” sense. The use of “blind” to mean “undiscriminating, reckless, not discerning, etc.” (“The blind veneration that generally is paid to antiquity,” Hogarth, 1753) dates back at least to the 15th century. So the modern use of “blind” as a negative metaphor is nothing new in English.

“Blithe” is a completely separate word with a much happier history. The roots of “blithe” lie in early Germanic forms meaning “gentle, kind, happy, cheerful” and the like, and the ultimate source of “blithe” seems to be a root meaning “to shine.” Can’t get much cheerier than that. In English, where “blithe” first appeared in Old English, it meant simply “kind or friendly” to others or “happy and cheerful” in demeanor (“His spirit was blithe and its fire unquenchable,” 1872).

This “fun to be around” sense of “blithe” chugged along happy as a clam until the 1920s, when (perhaps reflecting the disillusionment born of World War I) it suddenly took a darker turn. In “England, My England,” a collection of short stories, D.H. Lawrence employed “blithe” in a new, negative sense of “heedless, careless, or unthinking” (“From mother and nurse it was a guerrilla gunfire of commands, and blithe, quicksilver disobedience from the three blonde, never-still little girls.”).

This “who cares?” sense of “blithe” is now, unfortunately, by far the most common (“The era of cheap fuels led to a blithe disregard of second-law fundamentals,” 1977), and seeing “blithe” used in any sense more positive than “unrattled” (“The story’s part-blithe, part-resigned tone … will ring familiar,” LA Times, 3/11/12) is rare.

The relatively-new “heedless, careless, or unthinking” meaning of “blithe” certainly overlaps with the much older figurative uses of “blind,” but I doubt that confusion of the two words has played much part in their evolution (which is not to say that some people haven’t confused them at times). The change of the meaning of “blithe” from “cheerful” to “witless” seems a natural evolution of the sense of the word.

All I want for Christmas are my new front teeth.

Dear Word Detective: When I was a kid, the older boys in my south Minneapolis neighborhood spent a lot of time building and riding go-carts. At least, they are called “go-carts” everywhere else in the world, including most of Minneapolis, but in our weird little micro-logoverse, they were called “chugs.” (They were not powered, which may have been implied.) Have you ever come across this, or is this the ultimate in regional dialect? — Charles Anderson.

One of the great things about writing this column is that it gives me a good excuse to relive my childhood. I well remember building, with my friends in the early 60s, various wheeled death-traps we called “go-carts,” even though ours were cobbled together from old packing crates and lacked the engine, steering and brakes of a “real” go-cart (which was probably a good thing). I also vividly remember the day that my friend across the street was given a Thunderbird Junior, a miniature electric car, by business associates of his father (it had a huge Pepsi logo on the side). That car so effectively trumped anything the rest of us could possibly muster that I took up rock collecting a week later.

Speaking of “go-carts,” which we use to mean a very simple, often home-made, racing car with or without an engine, I was surprised to see that the term dates all the way back to the 17th century. It was originally applied to a wheeled wooden frame in which children learned to walk without falling.

“Chug” is a very interesting word, for two reasons. First, although “chug” has, as a noun, a verb, and in combination with other words, produced dozens of varied meanings, it’s a relatively young word. “Chug” first appeared in print as a noun in 1866. Secondly, all the various senses of “chug” refer, in some way, back to its origin, which was onomatopoeic, or “imitative” of a particular sound. In the case of “chug,” the particular sound is a dull, muffled and somewhat explosive sound, a little bit more energetic and mechanical-sounding than a “thud,” but definitely in the same aural ballpark (“The ponderous brother came down upon the floor with a ‘chugg’ that shook the house,” 1866). Although it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what sound inspired “chug,” it is so often likened in dictionaries to the sound of a steam or internal-combustion engine that it’s reasonable to assume that some sort of engine gave us the word.

The most common use of “chug” is, no doubt, in reference to the sound of an engine, especially a steam engine, such as on a locomotive. Applied to a car engine or some other machinery, “chug” often indicates either that the contraption is under-powered or that the engine is running a bit roughly. “Chug” as a verb is also used, by extension, to mean “moving along slowly but steadily” (“After dinner we hit the road again, and passed Harry about 20 miles up the road, still chugging along in his old Pinto”).

“Chug” has also, in US regional speech and slang, been used to mean “to hit” or “to punch,” or “to throw a heavy object into water,” again referring to the dull sound produced. But the most well-known use of “chug” as a verb is probably to mean “to drink a great quantity (usually of beer, etc.) without pausing.” This “chug” is actually a short form of “chugalug,” meaning the same thing, which is a US coinage dating back to the 1940s. The “alug” in “chugalug” is meaningless, but makes the word perfectly imitative of the sound of someone “chugging” a pitcher of beer (minus the subsequent retching, of course).

The closest I’ve found to the use of “chug” to mean “go-cart” comes from the 1920s, when “chugwagon” was US slang for an automobile (“I could buy and sell guys that’s got three homes and a couple of chugwagons,” Burnett, Little Caesar, 1928). I haven’t found any documentation of “chug” as widespread slang for any sort of homemade car, so I guess you and your Minneapolis friends were a linguistic lost tribe in that regard. “Chug” in that sense does do a good job of evoking the slow and precarious nature of such vehicles; we should probably be glad it never appeared in a newspaper headline.

Worse for wear.

Dear Word Detective: “Shent” is a word my family uses to describe a garment that is worn out, frayed at the edge, threadbare. I can find no reference for this word. Is it a made-up word or does it have some other root? My family is from Yorkshire (England), so there are many local words, often Norse-based. — Christopher Steward.

Thanks for a fascinating question. It also neatly rescued me from answering a question again that I had answered twelve years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Perhaps the person asking it simply wasn’t paying attention that day. Incidentally, did you know that there’s an internet abbreviation for that phrase, “NTTAWWT”? The phrase itself comes from an old Seinfeld episode.

Your family must use some pretty obscure words. Most of the dictionaries I consulted don’t even mention “shent.” (Yes, you may “look things up” in a dictionary, but I “consult” them. It’s a tax thing.) Anyway, the one dictionary that did come through with anything not uselessly cryptic was our old friend, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

According to the OED, “shent” is very much a word, an adjective meaning “disgraced, lost, ruined; stupefied.” The first print citation in the OED for the word, now considered archaic, is from around 1440, and the most recent is from around 1850 (“Till, starting up in wild bewilderment, I do become so shent That I go forth, lest folk misdoubt of it,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti).

That “ruined” meaning of “shent” would certainly seem to cover the “worn-out, threadbare” sense used by your family, but the history of the word proved to be even more interesting than the word itself. We’ve been talking about an adjective, but “shent” is (or was) also a noun, primarily in Scotland, meaning “disgrace.” According to the OED, this “shent” was actually a variant of “shend,”of the same vintage, meaning “disgrace or ruin.” That noun “shend” came from much older verb “to shend” (appearing around 825), which means, variously, “to disgrace or confuse,” “to blame or scold,” or “to destroy or spoil” (“My papers have been shended and rended and cast to the wind,” Arthur Conan Doyle, 1907). According to the OED, after the 15th century “shend” largely disappeared as a verb and was usually used only in its past participle form, which is (ta da) “shent.” So the adjective your family used may just have been that participle (not that it makes any real difference).

Meanwhile, back at the starting line for all this “shend/shent” business, it all began with the Old English “scendan,” which also produced the form “shond,” which, predictably, also meant “to disgrace or ruin.” Follow the trail even further back, into old Germanic, and you eventually hit the Old Germanic root word “skam,” which not only produced “shend/shent/shond,” but also our more modern and vastly more familiar English word “shame.” So the ultimate root of “shent” carried the general sense of “shame, disgrace or destruction.” There’s some indication that even further back was a root word meaning “to cover,” the logic being that a typical response to personal shame is to cover oneself.

The same family tree also produced our common English word “sham,” meaning “a hoax or trick,” which is thought to have actually originated as a Northern English variant of “shame,” although the logical connection has never been explained.

Rats.

Dear Word Detective: What happened to the relationship between “appoint” and “disappoint”? They seem to have become estranged. — Doris Render.

Sad, isn’t it? I remember when you’d see them strolling hand-in-hand through the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon, texting each other. At least I assume they were texting each other. I wouldn’t know because, brace yourself, I’ve never texted anyone in my life. No, I’m not a neo-luddite. I’ve just developed the knack of becoming bored with things before I’ve done them. Saves pots of time.

So, anyway, my understanding is that “appoint,” a basically positive word, just couldn’t take the negativity of “disappoint” any longer. “Appoint” is actually the older of the pair, first appearing in English in the late 14th century. We adopted “appoint” from the Old French word “apointer,” which in turn was formed on the phrase “a point,” meaning literally “to the point.” “Appoint” also inherited its main senses from the French “apointer.” The first was “to bring matters to a point; to agree,” Most of the uses associated with this sense are now obsolete, but we continue to use the sense of “agree on a time and place for a meeting, etc.” when we speak of a “doctor’s appointment” or an “appointed time and place.”

The second sense was a bit more forceful and less mutual, wherein “appoint” meant “to fix, declare or decree authoritatively.” This sense is used today mostly to mean “to ordain, nominate or establish” a person in a certain office or position, etc. (“The father was empowered to appoint persons of his own choice to be his children’s guardians,” 1883). The third major sense of “appoint” is “to put in suitable and orderly condition; to prepare,” now almost only encountered in the past participle form “appointed” (“Their several Lodgings, which were as well appointed as such a season would permit,” 1664).

“Disappoint” finally showed up in the early 16th century. Although the prefix “dis” in “disappoint,” as usual in English, means “not,” the story of “disappoint” is more than just a simple negation of “appoint” in its various senses. The source of “disappoint” was the French “desappointer,” which meant specifically “to undo an appointment; to deprive of an appointment, office or position; to remove from an office” that had been previously granted by official power (“A Monarch … hath power … to appoint or to disappoint the greatest officers,” 1586).

That specific “clear out your desk” sense of “disappoint” is now obsolete, but it had been quickly generalized and gave us our most common modern sense of the word, “to frustrate the desire or expectations of a person; to defeat a person in the fulfillment of their desire.” Today nearly anything that fails to live up to our hopes and expectations can be said to “disappoint” us (“Ormandy’s CBS album of the Berlioz Requiem.., of which I had high hopes, disappoints,” 1966).

The one other original sense of “appoint” which produced a parallel sense of “disappoint” is that of “agree on a time and place.” Although it often overlaps with the “let down” sense of “disappoint” outlined above, “disappoint” is also used to mean specifically “to break or fail to keep an appointment” or, more broadly, “to undo or frustrate anything previously agreed upon.” This sense does not necessarily imply the “frustrated desire” and emotional letdown of the other sense, only a rupture in an appointment which had been arranged and expected. So if you develop a cold and thereby “disappoint” our plan to go to a dinner theater presentation of “Cats” together, I may very well not feel personally “disappointed” at all.