Search us!
Search The Word Detective and our family of websites:
This is the easiest way to find a column on a particular word or phrase.
To search for a specific phrase, put it between quotation marks. (note: JavaScript must be turned on in your browser to view results.)
Ask a Question! Puzzled by Posh?
Confounded by Cattycorner?
Baffled by Balderdash?
Flummoxed by Flabbergast?
Perplexed by Pandemonium?
Nonplussed by... Nonplussed?
Annoyed by Alliteration?
Don't be shy!
Send in your question!
Columns from 1995 to 2006 are slowly being added to the above archives. For the moment, they can best be found by using the Search box at the top of this column.
If you would like to be notified when each monthly update is posted here, sign up for our free email notification list.
Trivia
All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.
Any typos found are yours to keep.
And remember, kids,
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
|
Truth be told, that show made me want to live in New York City.
Dear Word Detective: While we watching a rerun (obviously) of “The Andy Griffith Show,” one of the characters used the phrase “tick a lock.” While its meaning is fairly clear, with the inclusion of the hand gesture imitating the use of a key to turn a lock, I was wondering where the term came from. — Brenda Chastain.
Well, there you go. This is why I don’t get anything done. I just spent a half-hour reading all the Wikipedia pages associated with that show and learned all sorts of interesting things I’ll forget later this afternoon. I wasn’t a huge fan of the show as a kid (liked Barney Fife, wanted to strangle Gomer Pyle), but I’m not surprised that reruns of it are enduringly popular. The denizens of Mayberry are so deeply rooted in America’s subconscious that when a White House official resigned in 2001 and derided his former colleagues as “Mayberry Machiavellis,” some people may have been unclear on just who Machiavelli was, but Mayberry was instantly understood as the archetypal American small town. (And yes, Niccolo Machiavelli, like Victor Frankenstein, is unfairly tarred, as an eponym, with the sins of his creation.)
There are, it’s safe to say, a lot of “ticks” in English. The oldest is the bloodsucking arachnid known as the “tick,” the modern form of the Old English “ticca,” which has close relatives in many other Germanic languages. Next up (dating from the 15th century) is “tick” meaning “pillow-case” or “mattress cover,” ultimately from the Latin “teka” and better known in the form “ticking,” meaning the sort of durable cloth from which such “ticks” were originally made. There’s also a “tick” that first appeared in the mid-17th century meaning “credit” or “trust,” most often in phrases such as “on tick” meaning “on credit” (“When he had no funds he went on tick,” Thackeray, 1848). That “tick” is probably just a shortening of “ticket” in the sense of “IOU.”
That brings us to the “tick” that appeared in the mid-15th century meaning “a light tap or pat” or, a bit later, in the 17th century, “a quick, light, clicking sound” of the sort made by a watch or clock. This “tick” has relatives in several other languages (e.g., Norwegian “tikke,” to touch lightly), and the whole family of “ticks” was almost certainly formed “echoically,” in imitation of the action or sound of a light, quick pat or touch.
This “tick,” as both a noun and a verb, went on to develop a dizzying range (I’m dizzy just writing this) of meanings both literal and figurative, from “tick” meaning “a single moment” (from the tick of a clock) to “mark next to an item on a list” (“to tick someone off” originally meant “to reject or dismiss,” probably from being crossed off a list).
One meaning of “tick” the verb that developed in the early 20th century was “to operate with a light, quick effort or action,” as one might “tick out” a message with a telegraph key, and this brings us back to Mayberry. “Tick a lock,” judging by the entry for the phrase in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), was used a number of times by characters in the show, especially Andy’s Aunt Bee. The phrase was also a favorite of Archie Bunker in All in the Family, and it’s apparently still popular throughout the American South and South Midlands. DARE notes that the expression is usually accompanied by a gesture of turning a key in a lock, but the lock is a metaphorical one, a lock on your lips. “Tick a lock” (sometimes “tick-a-lock” or “tickalock”) means “to keep quiet” or “to keep a secret” (the equivalent of “zip it” or “put it in the vault” on Seinfeld). “Tick a lock” can thus be either a command (as Aunt Bee usually used it) or a promise not to tell a secret or say something unpleasant (“I’m Mr. Sunshine for the rest of the year, y’all. If I can’t say something good about a person or topic, I’ll just zip it. Tickalock, OK?” AR Times (Little Rock) 2006). “Tick a lock” is also used in some children’s games to declare a time out, claim immunity, or designate another player as being “in jail” and temporarily out of the game.
This just in … well, you could at least wipe your feet.
Dear Word Detective: I am looking for the origin of the phrase “hot wash,” which is used in the emergency management world to refer to an informal debrief or discussion after an exercise or emergency response. So for example, “After the derecho-response exercise, the participants conducted a brief hot wash to review the results.” — Ken Lerner.
Derecho response? I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to figure out a way to convey a rueful laugh in print (“heh … hehhehheh”?), but we’ll just have to pretend this column has sound effects. We had two derechos (which is the Spanish word for “straight,” referring to the 80-plus mph straight-line winds of these storms) in quick succession around here a year ago. The first knocked out our power for eight days and the second deposited several huge trees on our lawn. Our “derecho response” consisted of sitting in the sweltering darkness eating peanut butter from the jar and chanting our ancient meditation mantra (“I can’t believe this is happening”) several thousand times. I say our mantra is “ancient” because it got really old after a few days. And I now hate peanut butter. Thanks a lot, Weather Gods.
According to the official FEMA Glossary (FEMA being the people who put the electrodes in your cousin Artie’s brain, of course), “hot wash” means “… a facilitated discussion held immediately following an exercise among exercise players … designed to capture feedback about any issues, concerns, or proposed improvements players may have about the exercise.” So a “hot wash” is a kind of “immediately after the action” debriefing, a slightly more formal “So, how’d it go?” session. Some sources use the term “cold wash” to mean a more detailed review conducted at a later date.
The term “hot wash” (which is sometimes rendered as one word, “hotwash”) originated in the US military, where it is used as an informal equivalent of “After Action Review,” the debriefing of personnel immediately after they return from a mission, patrol, etc. Grant Barrett, co-host of the public radio language program A Way with Words (www.waywordradio.org), listed “hot wash” in his Official Dictionary of Unofficial English back in 2005. The first example he found in print was from 1991 (“The day the fighting ended, senior Army aides presented to Army Chief of Staff Carl E. Vuono their first observations on the operation. Such an initial review of a just-concluded operation is called a ‘hot wash.’,” LA Times). In his dictionary entry, Grant notes that “This term appears to be migrating out of the military, where it originated,” and the years since have proven him right. “Business leadership” websites are in love with the term, and some even offer free Powerpoint (of course) presentation slides you can use to browbeat your desperate employees into pretending they value and enjoy the “hot wash” process after every meeting with clients. (Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe management consultants?)
For a term that seems to have popped up in the early 1990s, “hot wash” is a bit of a puzzle, and I’ve found no authoritative explanation of its origin. One clue to the term may lie in the fact that the process is apparently often called a “hot wash-up,” which might indicate that it came from the idea of a discussion taking place while soldiers literally “washed up” (with soap and water) just after returning to base. That the participants would still be “hot” from exertion, or that their experience in the field would be “hot” in the sense of “fresh,” might also play a role in the phrase.
It’s also possible that the phrase originally referred to washing off a horse after a race or a day of hard work. The popularity of the phrase “ridden hard and put away wet” (meaning “not properly cared for,” referring to an exhausted horse being put back in its stall while still sweaty and ungroomed, which can make a horse very sick) might have contributed to “hot wash.”
Yet another possibility is that the source is a more figurative use of “wash,” specifically in the sense found in the phrase “to come out in the wash,” which first appeared in print in the early 1900s meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “(of the truth) to be revealed, become clear; (of a situation, events, etc.) to be resolved or put right eventually.” The “wash” in “come out in the wash” is a metaphorical laundering process, and that figurative sense of “wash” may play a role in “hot wash.”
|
Makes a great gift! Click cover for more.  
400+ pages of science questions answered and explained for kids -- and adults!
FROM ALTOIDS TO ZIMA, by Evan Morris
 
|
can be found 
Recent Comments