Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Today’s fast fact: Nearly 77% of all paper towels bought in the US last year were used to clean up cat vomit.  At least 77% of the ones bought around here were.  Speaking of cat vomit, I’ve noticed that the Garage Cat Boys (Boots, Marley and Yo-Yo) all start making a weird howling sound about ten seconds before they puke.  It’s really quite handy, as it gives you time to lift the afflicted creature gently off your desk and toss it out the window into the hall.  Kiki and her crew (Gus, Phoebe and Harry), on the other hand, are more than willing to puke in your lap with no warning.

Onward.  If the real Steve Jobs were this funny, I might buy a Mac, but he’s not, so I won’t.  Speaking of the real Steve Jobs, disgraced stock tout Henry Blodget (as Fake Steve Jobs calls him) has apparently developed a major obsession with the (real) Jobs, especially his former hair. Check it out. (Yes, that’s not his byline, but he runs the site.) The Life And Awesomeness Of Steve Jobs? Weird.  I wonder how much Apple stock Henry holds.

Elsewhere in the cyberverse, some of us don’t care for Google and its plans to sell your soul to the highest bidder, but it seems to be Amazon that is getting most of the flak at the moment.  Apparently some malcontents (who doubtless bear watching in any case) bought hinky books for their Kindles and were subsequently shocked to discover that Amazon had the power to wirelessly vaporize said books in the dead of night.  The fact that the books in question were Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 does win our annual This Is All A Dream, Right? award, but for the benefit of the slow learners out there still scratching their heads over how such a thing could happen, it’s worth pointing out that those weirdos had not actually bought those books in the sense that one buys a slice of pizza (or real book).  They had bought a license to view the books, a license that came with legal restrictions dictating what device they could read them on (Kindle, duh), whether they could transfer them to another device (nope), and whether they could sell them when they were finished reading them (nope again).  The fact that those restrictions did not specifically say that Amazon could, at a publisher’s behest, zap “your” Kindle with its death ray may make for an interesting court case. But the same sort of you-don’t-really-own-this “license” applies to nearly all proprietary software for Windows or Mac computers. Of course, Amazon has since promised to never, never, ever vaporize any Kindle owner’s books ever again.  Right.

Anyway, I find this all fascinating because, in a moment of madness last month, I decided to publish The Word Detective as a monthly subscription on Kindle (Amazon actually sent me an invitation, believe it or not).  I don’t own a Kindle, and I have no plans to buy one (and I don’t even want one).  Thus I have no idea of what TWD looks like on the Kindle.  But a bunch of people have actually subscribed to TWD on the Kindle, which leaves me faintly amazed and, given the brouhaha over the Orwell “books-but-not-books,” with a sense of diabolical empowerment.  Here I sit, in the middle of nowhere in a tumbledown manse infested with cats, poor as a churchmouse, and yet I have the ability, if I so choose, to reach out and zap somebody’s sleek, expensive Kindle.  Bwaahaahaa. Now I know how Dick Cheney felt, minus the robot heart, of course.

I would never, ever do that, honest. But the best way to ensure that I can’t do that is to subscribe to TWD-by-Email, which would not only deliver TWD to your emailbox in a firmly irrevocable form, but actually enable me and my kittycat pals to eat.  And, of course, to buy lots of paper towels.

And now, on with the show…

So I bit him.

Dear Word Detective:  I don’t know if you get lots of emails with jokes of varying quality, some dubious and some hilarious, but I just got to the bottom of one (with the usual “scroll down,” “keep scrolling,” etc.) to find that it was a classic “shaggy dog” story.  Then, of course, I wondered what a shaggy dog has got to do with a joke with a strange ending.  Don’t know how many dogs you have in your menagerie of cats, but perhaps they could help.– David, Ripon, North Yorkshire.

I take it that you haven’t met many dogs.  We have two, and the only thing they’ve ever done to “help” around here is to bark furiously when rabbits are massing to attack the house.  If it weren’t for Doorbell and Barkie, I’d have been nibbled to death long ago.

I actually don’t get many joke-laden emails anymore, probably because the same people who send them also used to send me ridiculous urban legends.  I would politely point out that said tales weren’t true, and I was rewarded by being deleted from their mailing lists.  It’s a shame, because I really miss seeing all those rainbows and animated unicorns.

A “shaggy dog story” is a kind of joke that might best be called an anti-joke.  It typically involves a long, excruciatingly detailed build-up leading, eventually, to a punchline that is only “funny” as a practical joke where the listener has been tricked into paying close attention to a long, pointless, unfunny story.  The term “shaggy dog story” itself dates at least to the 1930s, as Esquire magazine printed an article about them in 1937.

There seems to be general agreement that “shaggy dog story” as a category of humor takes its name from an actual joke involving a shaggy dog, but opinions vary on what the joke itself might have been.  My parents, William and Mary Morris, in their Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, traced the term to a story about an international competition to find the shaggiest dog in the world.  Much pointless narration later, the winning dog is presented to the haughty fellow underwriting the quest, who declares, “I don’t think he’s so shaggy.”  End of joke.

Another proposed original “shaggy dog” joke involves a man placing a very detailed “lost dog” advertisement for a shaggy dog, and answering his door a few days later to find a boy with a dog on a leash, who says, “You advertised a lost dog?  Medium size?”  “Yes,” says the man. “Light brown?”  “Yes.” “Slight limp?”  “Yes.”  “Answers to Rex?” “Yes.”  “Shaggy coat?”  The man peers at the dog and says, “Not that shaggy.”

“Shaggy dog story” has also found wide use in the figurative sense of something that may be full of sound and fury but in the end signifies nothing.  The soap opera twist of explaining an exceedingly improbable plot line with “it was only a dream” is a classic “shaggy dog” gambit.  And the films of M. Night Shyamalan (The Village, The Happening, et al.), which often rely on a sort of “deus ex cornball” final twist, are so routinely labeled “shaggy dog stories” by critics (“The whole enterprise is a shaggy dog story,” Roger Ebert, 2004) that a lesser (or lower-paid) director would have thrown in the towel long ago.

Don’t look at me.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the origin of the word “lie”? — Cristy Clark.

That’s a good question, but you really ought to give us a “backstory,” some details about why you’re asking it.  You could say, for instance, “I was watching TV the other night and discovered that my favorite politician had been lying to us about taking bribes from the Indonesian pencil cartel, and I was so upset about the little schoolchildren being stuck with substandard pencils that I had to go lie on the bed.  Are these two kinds of “lie” related, and where does ‘lie’ come from, anyhow?”  See how that makes the question more vivid?  By the way, you can get bonus points for including cats in your tale, so if you don’t have a cat, just say the word and I’ll send you a few.

As you can probably infer from the little fable I concocted, there’s a bit of ambiguity in your question, because there are actually two kinds of “lie” in the English language.  There’s the “lie” meaning “untruth or falsehood,” which can be either a noun or a verb, but there’s also the verb “to lie,” meaning “to recline, to position oneself horizontally.”  The two “lies” are, fortunately, entirely separate English words, with completely different origins and histories.  I say “fortunately” because I just finished a column explaining (I hope) how the one word “present” can mean both “the time that is happening right now” and “a nice gift on Christmas morning” (as well as a bunch of other things).  It’s much easier when the two words look alike but have no tangled historical relationship to decode.

Both kinds of “lie” are, however, very old words that were handed down to us from Old English.  The “lie” meaning, as a noun, “the deliberate misrepresentation of facts in order to deceive” comes from an ancient Germanic root meaning “to tell a lie,” as does the verb “to lie,” which first appeared in Old English as “leogan.”  The key to “lying” is, of course, intent.  A “lie” is a blatant attempt to deceive the listener;  if I tell you that it’s snowing outside and it actually stopped an hour ago, I am probably not “lying.”  A “lie” usually must be deliberate and of some consequence.  “Your hair looks fabulous” may be a little “fib” (or “white lie”), but it doesn’t attain the level of malevolent dishonesty of an outright “lie.”

The other kind of “lie,” meaning “to recline horizontally,” exists primarily as a verb in modern English (although a noun form of “lie” in a related sense is used in golf and other sports to describe the position of the ball — how it “lies” — in relation to the course or playing field).  This verb “to lie” also comes from a very old Germanic root, in this case meaning “to lie down.”

One slightly sticky aspect of this “lie” comes from confusion with the separate transitive verb “to lay,” meaning “to put or set down” (“Lay down your gun and raise your hands”).  This confusion comes in part because the past tense of “to lie” is also “to lay.”  The best way to keep the two verbs straight is to remember that “to lay” is a transitive verb, one that must act on an object (“Lay an egg”), while “to lie” is intransitive and requires no object (“Go lie on the couch and I’ll get some aspirin”).

Mr. Skim of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe called.

Dear Word Detective:  Is the word “finagle” of Gaelic descent?  My maiden name was Nagle.  We descended from County Cork, Ireland.  Just wondering. — Catherine Meyer.

Hey, I understand.  Names are very personal things.  When you’re a kid you try to imagine where your name came from, some way it makes sense and how the particular mojo of your name might shape your life.  If your name is Baker or Smith, of course, somewhere way back on the family tree there probably was a baker or a blacksmith.  But does it also work the other way?  How many kids today subconsciously tilt towards a career in cooking because their name is Baker?  And how many little Smiths are doomed to a life of furtively registering in seedy motels?  Such questions are, sadly, beyond my ken, which is another name fraught with questions.  But hey, how weird is it that the  Ponzi scheme uncovered last year that bilked investors of $50 billion was run by a guy whose name is pronounced “made off”?   Next time the Clue Phone rings, folks, I suggest you consider answering it.

Where were we?  Right, the “Nagle-finagle” connection, if any.  Well, if you’re wondering whether your true calling might have been as a flim-flam artist, I’d say no.  As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no connection between your name and the verb “finagle,” meaning “to use dishonest or devious tactics to get something by trickery.”  And while I’m not an expert in onomastics (the study of proper names, from the Greek “onoma,” name, which is related to the word “name” itself), “Nagle” strikes me as an eminently trustworthy moniker.

“Finagle,” on the other hand, even sounds shifty.  A “finagler” is a schemer, someone who doesn’t so much swindle you as maneuver you into doing something good for him.  “Finagling” also often means “to fudge, to fiddle” with rules or figures, or to bypass rules or restrictions with smooth talk (“Any attempt to fudge or finagle or to get ahead of the other fellow will be recognized by the judge for what it is,” 1955).

Although “finagle” first appeared in the 1920s and is considered US slang, its roots apparently lie in the English rural dialect term “fainaigue,” meaning “to cheat.”  There are some indications that the term may originally have come from cards, where it meant to fail to follow suit (play a card of the same suit as the preceding) when able or required to do so.

Be here when?

Dear Word Detective:  The Kung Fu Panda DVD has that old saying “Yesterday is history.  Tomorrow is a mystery.  Today is a gift.  That is why it is called the Present.  Open it and enjoy.”  That got me thinking about “present” (verb tense) and “present” (gift).  Is there any relationship between the two?  Perhaps in the dawn of the spoken word? — Don Wilkinson.

That’s a darn good question.  I must admit (to the probable mortification of everyone who knows me) that I had no idea, until a few minutes ago, of what “Kung Fu Panda” is.  (Thanks, Wikipedia!)  Then again, I also routinely fail to recognize major celebrities on TV, although I maintain that it’s not my fault.  C’mon, don’t Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and, um, whatshername, really all, you know, kinda look alike?  Anyway, if you liked that aphorism, you should swing by our house, where our motto is “Yesterday was a mystery, today is a muddle, and tomorrow is giving me a headache.”

There is indeed a relationship between “present” as a verb tense and “present” as a noun meaning “a gift.”  In fact, “present” can also be used as an adjective and adverb meaning “in the place being spoken of” (“Freddy was present for all the meetings with the FBI”) as well as an adjective or adverb meaning “existing or occurring now” (“He thought only of his present problems and refused to worry about his old age”).  But wait, there’s more!  “Present” (pronounced only in this case with a long “e” in the first syllable and the stress on the second) is also a verb meaning “to show or place before” (“May I present the star of Quack, Len the Duck”).  “Present” is a very versatile, if sometimes confusing, word.

It all started with the Latin adjective “praesens,” which means “being here now,” formed from roots meaning roughly “to be before one,” in the sense of standing in front of someone.  All the meanings of “present” we use today involve either one or both of these root senses of “right here” and “right now.”

The noun “present,” meaning “the period of time that is now occurring,” first appeared in English in the early 13th century, and gave us the “present” verb tense, in which the action of the verb is occurring right now.  This noun “present” originally also had a number of other forms, all now obsolete, which referred to something “present,” on the scene, at a particular time.  As I said, the “here” and “now” senses of “present” can be difficult to untangle.  “Present” as an adjective and adverb appeared in the early 14th century meaning both “right here” and “at this time.”

This brings us to the verb form of “present,” which appeared in English around 1300 with the meaning “to bring or place before someone,” as in a formal introduction (“He … led me into his hut … and presented me before his wife, as if she had been the Queen and I a duke,” Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886).  This verb “to present” could, however, cover the offering of things as well as people “placed in front of” the recipient, and so “to present” also meant “to give as a gift or prize.”  This gave us the use of “present” as a noun meaning “a gift given to another.”

So the “present” meaning “right now” and the “present” meaning “gift” are actually the same word.  But, notwithstanding Panda wisdom, that’s not “why” we call today “the present,” although there have been some days lately that I would cheerfully return for exchange.

Whither withers?

Dear Word Detective:   Is the word “dewlap” Shakespearean?  I mean, did Shakespeare make it up? — Andy McCollough.

That’s a good question.  And while we’re at it, what’s up with all the obscure terminology associated with farm animals?  “Dewlap”?  “Fetlock”?  “Withers”?  “Pastern”?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that all mammals shared the same basic bits — head, ears, hips, legs, feet and so on.  Now, I have in-laws who seem to spend most of their time queuing up for major elective surgery, such as hip or knee replacements.  Listening to these people is an anatomy lesson in itself.  But not once have I heard one of them announce that Doctor Lamborghini thinks they need a “fetlock replacement” or a “pastern repair.”  Someone has some explaining to do.

Speaking of “pasterns,” one of my favorite stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first true dictionary of the English language, concerns Johnson’s response to a woman demanding to know how he could have erroneously defined “pastern” in his dictionary as “the knee of a horse” (which it isn’t).  “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance,” Johnson replied.

Onward.  A “dewlap” is, as you probably know, the fold of loose skin which hangs from the throat of cattle and similar animals, and, by extension (in humor or unkindness), from the throats of some people.  Similar formations in some animals, particularly chickens and US Senators, are called “wattles.”

Shakespeare didn’t coin “dewlap,” but he was, apparently, fond of the word.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists two citations for “dewlap,” in early spellings, both from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“When she drinkes, against her lips I bob, And on her wither’d dewlop poure the Ale” and “My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kinde … Crooke-kneed, and dew-lapt, like Thessalian Buls”).

When Shakespeare was writing at the end of the 16th century, however, “dewlap” had already been in use for at least two centuries.  It first appeared, as far as we know, in 1398 applied to oxen.  The “lap” of “dewlap” is from the Old English “laeppa,” meaning “pendulous piece or flap,” but the “dew” part is a bit of a mystery.  You might assume that, as the animal grazes in a morning meadow, that flap of skin collects dew from the grass.  But in the related and equivalent forms of “dewlap” in Scandinavian languages (e.g., the Danish “doglaeb” and the Swedish “droglapp”), the first element does not mean “dew.”  That’s a problem.

Etymologists now believe that the first part of “dewlap” was originally a word that sounded a bit like “dew” but has now become obsolete and unfamiliar, and that over the years people replaced it with the more familiar “dew.”  This process of substituting the familiar for the obscure is known as “folk etymology,” and it’s how, for instance, “catercornered” (“cater” being an old English word for “four”) became “kittycornered” after people forgot what “cater” meant.  “Kittycornered” made no sense at all, of course, but it had the virtue of at least sounding a bit less alien.

Look out below.

[Note: This column appeared in newspapers and was sent to subscribers in December, 2008.]

Dear Word Detective: What are the origins of the word “inauguration”? — Jackie Davis.

Oh look, a topical question, torn, as the teevee people say, from today’s headlines.  I’m sorry, I don’t do topical questions.  It’s a policy I instituted (inaugurated?) years ago, when I noticed that people only wrote to ask me about “turkey” and “Yuletide” in the two or three days preceding Thanksgiving and Christmas, respectively, leaving me no time at all to write columns that would appear before they became irrelevant.  (Yes, I could have invented my own questions on those topics with time to spare, but apparently I’m not that bright.)  Anyway, we’ll be doing “inauguration” sometime in July, so be sure to check back then.  And now, on to “Jack O’ Lantern”!

Oh, all right.  It’s only every four years, after all.  And “inauguration” is actually a very cool word.  The inauguration at hand is, of course, that of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States on January 20th, 2009.

The verb “to inaugurate” means, in its original and still primary sense, “to induct into office in a formal ceremony.”  Since “inaugurate” first appeared in English in the 17th century, it has acquired several more general meanings, including “to cause to begin, especially by marking such beginning with a formal announcement or ceremony” (“The Mayor inaugurated the budget cuts by listing his own desk on eBay”), or “to open to the public with a ceremony,” as a community center might be “inaugurated” with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Presidential inaugurations are occasions of pomp and ceremony, of course, with dignitaries and luminaries as thick on the ground as tourists in Times Square.  But if we were to consider “inauguration” in its original meaning, the pigeons on the roof of the Capitol might be the most important players of the day.  English adopted “inaugurate” from the Latin word “inaugurare,” which also meant “to install in office.”  But the original literal meaning of “inaugurare” was “to foretell the future from the flight of birds.”  The Romans thought it vital that officials not be installed in office until the omens and portents of the future were judged to be favorable, a process that involved watching the flight and feeding patterns of birds (and occasionally examining their entrails).  A Roman “augur” (from “avis,” bird, plus “garrire,” to talk) was a religious official who foretold the future by such means, and we still use “to augur” as a verb to mean “to bode or foretell” (as in “Falling house prices do not augur well for the economy”).

A similar bird-watching trail was followed by the English word “auspice,” (usually found in the plural form “auspices”) meaning “patronage or guidance,” which is based on “avis” plus “specere,” meaning “to look.”

People had pretty much given up looking to birds to foretell the future by the time “inaugurate” appeared in English, although, considering the state of the world at the moment, it may be time to give it another shot.  It’s hard to imagine chickens doing a worse job of running things.

OK, when I say “Go,” flap your arms and run toward the edge.

Dear Word Detective:  My wife has been going through a tough project at work and as part of the work, they were attempting a “dry run” to see if things will work in a test environment.  On a car trip, I had to ask, “What was the origin of  ‘dry run’”?  One of our ideas was it was from plumbing:  to make sure the pipes didn’t leak, they put air in and tested the joints.  Could we be close? — Rich Harrington.

Wow.  Some people actually discuss word and phrase origins while they’re on a road trip?  In our car the dialog seems to focus on questions like “Is that noise coming from our car?” or “Do you smell something burning?”  Other big hits include “Did you see what that guy just did?”, often followed by “How could you not have seen what that guy just did?” and the ever-popular “Maybe I should drive.”  By the way, did you know that the driver of a car has the absolute legal power to determine what music is played in the car?  It’s in the US Constitution.

A “dry run,” of course, is a rehearsal or practice session conducted to make certain that a system works or that a procedure can be carried out without serious mistakes.  While practice may not make perfect, it does make it a lot less likely that you’ll be scanning the help wanted ads the day after your snazzy new escalator pitches your boss into the koi pool.

Of course calling it a “dry run,” rather than just a “practice run” or the like immediately raises the question of why “dry,” and whether there might be such a thing as a “wet run.”   The first citation for “dry run” in the “practice” sense listed by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)  is from 1941, although the OED does list earlier uses of “dry run” to mean a dry creek bed or desert arroyo.  But since no one has ever come up with a plausible scenario linking the two senses we can safely assume that the two uses are unrelated.

As a matter of fact, until just a few years ago, no one had come up with a truly convincing explanation for the origin of “dry run,” and the only theories proposed were halfhearted attempts to connect the phrase to such phrases as “dry heaves” (slang for unproductive vomiting).  But in 2004, Douglas Wilson, a poster to the mailing list of the American Dialect Society (ADS), offered (and, more importantly, documented) what I believe is a slam-dunk answer to the “dry run” question.
It turns out that “dry run” comes from the jargon of fire departments (where a “run” is a dispatch of a fire brigade).

Beginning in the late 19th century, fire departments in the US began conducting practice sessions where engines were dispatched and hoses deployed, but water was not pumped, thus making the exercises literally “dry” runs.  Public exhibitions and competitions between departments also typically centered on such “dry runs.”  Conversely, a real run to a “working fire” where water was pumped was known as a “wet run.”  In his posting to the ADS list, Doug Wilson found instances of this use of “dry run” dating back to 1893.  Just when the term came into more general use meaning “practice session” is uncertain, but it seems to have been after “dry run” was widely used in the US Armed Services during World War II.

Outta here.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the origin of the word “quit”? — Rex.

That’s a good question.  It’s also a topical question, because I imagine that the number of people “quitting” — voluntarily leaving — their jobs has probably taken a nosedive in the current “economic climate,” as the pundits call the mess we seem to be in.  Incidentally, I dread to think what our actual climate would be if, like the picture of Dorian Gray, it reflected the parlous state of our economy.  I imagine a parched, smoldering desert baking under a merciless sun, the silence punctuated only by screeching of vultures and the screams of consumers who have fallen into the pits of scalding quicksand, the horizon barren except for a faded and scorched sign reading “Ozymandias Securities, LLC.”

OK, back to work. Incidentally, vultures don’t screech. The only sound they make is a loud huffing noise, rather like a bull snorting.  I know because a family of vultures lives right outside my window.  They’re very nice.  We’re pals.

OK, really back to work.  “Quit” is a very old word which has, as very old words often do, a wide range of meanings and platoons of interesting relatives.  It all began with the Latin noun “quies,” which meant, as the Oxford English Dictionary enumerates, “sleep, rest, repose, absence of activity, absence of noise, freedom from disturbance, freedom from anxiety, placidness, serenity, tranquility, peaceful conditions.”  “Quies” produced a derivative verb “quiescere,” (to be still or quiet), and its past participle “quietus” gave us our modern English word “quiet.”

One of the key meanings of “quies” and “quietus” was that of “freedom” from war, anxiety, or debt.  When English first adopted the Anglo-Norman word “quit” (a descendant of “quietus”) in the early 13th century, it was in the sense of “free or released from a debt or obligation,” whether legal, financial or personal.  The verb “to quit,” which developed a bit later, carried the sense of “to set free” in general, but soon developed dozens of specific meanings, from “to repay a debt” to “to release from bondage or debt” to “to prove a person innocent of a crime,” a meaning now handled by the related English word “acquit.”  Other derivatives include “requite,” which originally meant simply “to repay, to return,” but which is now found most commonly in the form “unrequited,” as in “unrequited love,” affection which is not shared by its object.  Even our common English word “quite” is derived from “quit,” and originally meant “absolutely, completely” (“free of any opposition”), but has, since the 19th century, been weakened to mean merely “somewhat” or “moderately” (“The woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses … in a potato sack,” Virginia Woolf, 1915).

The most common sense of “to quit” today, that of “to leave,” arose in the 16th century (“We know our exit, And quit the roome,” 1623).  But “to quit” meaning specifically “to leave, resign or withdraw” from a job, line of work, committee, etc., is more recent, dating to the early 17th century (“He was design’d to the Study of the Law; and had made considerable progress in it, before he quitted that Profession, for this of Poetry,” Dryden, 1680).  The use of “to quit” to mean “to stop doing something” (smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.) also first appeared in the 17th century.

Shaddup your face.

Dear Word Detective: My gym teacher always says “No comments from the peanut gallery” to this one group of kids in my PE class, then when I got home my step-dad said the same thing.  I was wondering, what does that mean? — Jessica.

Well, just for starters, it may mean you have the world’s oldest gym teacher.  Just kidding, of course.  But I’m mildly amazed that this phrase is still floating around out there and I’d be surprised if either your teacher or your step-dad knows what a real “peanut gallery” was.  I actually explained “no comments from the peanut gallery” back in the 1990s, but that was, after all, in the last century, so we’ll give it another go.

“Peanut gallery” goes back to the 19th century, which (for those of you whose schools dropped History class in favor of Media Studies) was before TV, the internet or even movies.  Entertainment back then was live and delivered for the most part in theaters that bore little resemblance to today’s mall multiplex.  The seating sections were steeply canted, and the higher and further from the stage a tier of seats was, the cheaper the tickets.  Thus the cheapest section in a large theater was all the way back and up, so close to the ceiling that they are today  sardonically called the “nosebleed seats” (referring to the fact that truly high altitudes cause nosebleeds in many people).  To the extent that opera houses and concert halls still exist in large cities in the US, the cheap seats are still up near the ceiling.

The folks who filled this upmost tier, or gallery, of seats tended to be less “refined” than the swanky lot in the seats down front, and they were known for their willingness to point out any perceived shortcomings of the actors on stage with boos, catcalls, and, occasionally, small projectiles.  Since peanuts were one of the favorite snacks of these rowdy folks (and made dandy missiles when the mood struck), this seating section became known as “the peanut gallery.”  Almost immediately, “peanut gallery” was pressed into service as a synonym for “the rabble” or “the hoi polloi.”  Interestingly, the first example of “peanut gallery” in print listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is of the phrase being used in this metaphorical sense (“As a bid for applause from the political pit and peanut gallery it was a masterpiece,” 1876).  So “No comments from the peanut galley” is another way of saying, “Be quiet, you little hooligans.”

But the fact that “peanut gallery” is still part of our common vocabulary is almost certainly due to the Howdy Doody Show, an immensely popular children’s TV show in the 1950s.  Howdy Doody (a marionette), Buffalo Bob (who provided Howdy’s voice), Clarabell the Clown, Princess Summerfall Winterspring and the rest of the cast performed with a studio audience of children seated in bleachers known as “the Peanut Gallery.”

Incidentally, so popular was “Howdy Doody” and his “Peanut Gallery” among a generation of children that in 1950, when United Features decided to syndicate Charles Schulz’s comic strip, then known as “Li’l Folk,” they insisted, over Schulz’s vigorous objections, on changing its name to “Peanuts.”

I honestly don’t get it.

Dear Word Detective:  After a long night of drinking, I awoke this morning with a pretty nice hangover.  Surprisingly, my brain was still functioning enough to wonder where and how the word “hangover” was coined.  I would imagine it has to do with being hung over a barrel vomiting or some variation of the sort but I’ve also heard it simply means “unfinished business.”  Could you possibly provide a cure to my hangover conundrum? – Carmen, Utica, NY.

Well, there’s another thing I don’t have to worry about.  I keep a list of such things to cheer myself up.  Don’t laugh.  It’s a real help when I check my bank statement or watch the news to be able to say, “At least I don’t have to worry about being eaten by a polar bear.  Or what I’m going to wear to the Oscars this year.”  If you work hard at it (and I do), you can come up with a list of literally thousands of bullets you’ve dodged.  It makes forking over $700 you don’t have for a car part you’ve never heard of (as I recently did) a teensy bit easier.  Always look on the sunny side, I say, albeit through clenched teeth.

In any case, I don’t worry about hangovers because I’ve been truly, utterly drunk only once in my life, when I was 19, and I decided right then never to do it again.  I do remember that hangover quite vividly, however.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “hangover” as “The unpleasant after-effects of (especially alcoholic) dissipation,” but even I know that doesn’t do the affliction justice.  A full-blown hangover can include severe nausea, a blinding headache, excruciating sensitivity to light and aching pain darn near everywhere.

Your theory about “hangover” referring to the posture of literally “hanging over” a receptacle while feeling the after-effects of one’s excess makes perfect sense, since that posture is almost universally a low point of the recovery process.  But the “unfinished business” explanation you’ve heard is the dull, but true, source of the word.

When “hangover” first appeared in English at the end of the 19th century, it was in the general sense of, as the OED puts it, “A thing or person remaining or left over; a remainder or survival.”  The “hang” in the word is the verb “to hang” in the meaning of “to remain unsettled or unfinished,” as we might say an unanswered question in a press conference is “left hanging.”  “Over” carries the sense of “surplus” or “left after the finish,” as one might have the “leftovers” of Sunday dinner for lunch on Monday.  This “something left over or left undone from an earlier time” sense of “hangover” is is still in use (“The oversized dormitories … are hang-overs from the old lunatic asylums,” 1973).  But the use of “hangover” to mean “aftermath of excess alcohol,” which first appeared in 1904, is now by far the more popular usage.

Filching food from the Trustees’ Luncheon probably didn’t help.

Dear Word Detective:  I notice you frequently feature slang in your columns, but what is the etymology of the word “slang” itself?  Is it a blending of “language” (or perhaps “langue”) and the “‘s” from the preceding possessive noun?  Or am I just being fanciful? — Steve Giannelli, Athens, OH.

Hi there, Athens, Ohio, which is generally considered to be the Athens of Ohio.  Hey, it  beats being the Akron of Ohio.  Just kidding.  Athens is a lovely town, and bears the twin distinctions of being home to Ohio University and, not entirely coincidentally, the only place where I have actually been ordered to leave town by the local police.  Something about  “aggravated mopery and inciting to skepticism,” as I recall.  But that was many years ago, and I shan’t hold it against your fair city.

It’s true that I often write about the roots of slang, primarily because slang terms tend to be both more fun and more mysterious in origin than “standard” English words and phrases.  My readers also tend to ask about slang terms more often, which is not surprising since one of the characteristics of slang is that it tends to be the distinctive vocabulary of an “in” group (even if that group is quite large, such as teenagers) and designed to be unintelligible to those not in the group (such as adults).

Oddly enough, linguists have been arguing for more than a century about precisely how to define “slang.”  In a 1978 article in the journal American Speech, linguists Bethany Dumas and Jonathan Lighter suggested four criteria, meeting any two of which would qualify a term as “slang”:  (1) use of the term lowers “the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing,” (2) its use implies familiarity with the thing itself or a with group familiar with the thing (e.g., calling motorcycles “choppers”), (3) its use would be forbidden or avoided in conversation with persons of greater social status (e.g., you wouldn’t say “groovy” when your boss asks how lunch with a client went), and (4) it replaces a conventional synonym that the user wishes to avoid for various reasons (e.g., saying a relative “croaked” rather than “died”).

Given that slang has proven so hard to define, it’s not surprising that the origins of the word “slang” itself, which first appeared in the mid-18th century, have proven equally elusive.  Your theory tying “slang” to the “lang” in “language” is actually one of the two most commonly proposed explanations of “slang.”  The possessive “s” in such phrases as “thieves’ language” or “gypsies’ language” could indeed have been blended into “slang.”

The other leading theory of “slang” traces it to Scandinavian roots, in particular the Old Norse “slyngva,” meaning “to sling,” found in the Norwegian “slengenamn” (“nickname”) and “slengja kjeften,” meaning “to verbally abuse” (literally “to sling the jaw”).  Personally, I find this the more plausible of the two theories, but the Oxford English Dictionary and other reputable etymological sources don’t find either theory convincing and still label “slang” as “origin unknown.”