The wee small hours of Where am I?

Dear Word Detective:  Please give me a definition of the term  “dog shift.”  It refers to working hours.  I have searched with no luck. — Pam.

Dear Word Detective: When I first started working at newspapers, in the mid-70s, the midnight to 8 am shift was called, not the “graveyard shift,” but the “lobster shift” or “lobster trick.” It was suggested that the name started because many of the staff would go drinking before work and come in “boiled,” but that seems like a stretch. — William Fisher.

This sudden flurry of questions having to do with work shifts is interesting.  Is there something I should know about going on with the economy?  Speaking of the terminology of employment (or the lack thereof), I heard an interview last week on NPR with someone who had been recently laid off, who noted that the equivalent to “laid off” in Britain is “made redundant,” a term which the interviewee said would make him feel less than “personally unique.”  (I did mention this was NPR, didn’t I?)   I’d actually go a bit further and say that “made redundant” has always reminded me of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”  Just don’t fall asleep and you’ll be OK.

Sleeping normal hours is out of the question, of course, if you work a “graveyard,” “lobster” or “dog” shift, all three of which are slang terms for a late night shift, usually from  midnight to 8 a.m.  I’ve never worked a graveyard shift, but I did, for several years, work a “swing” (evening) shift, so-called because such shifts often overlap both the day and night shifts and mark a metaphorical pivot point between the two.

I had never heard the term “dog shift” before, and it doesn’t seem to be very common, although it does turn up fairly frequently in the context of police work.  I was puzzled as to its derivation until I realized that it is almost certainly a modified form of “dog watch.”  This was originally (in the 18th century) a nautical term for a short period of duty “on watch” (two hours instead of the standard four).  Such “dog watches” were, however, very unpopular because they  made the sailor miss his normal dinner time.  The “dog” in “dog watch” is yet another case, one of many, of man’s best friend being used as a symbol of misfortune (e.g., “a dog’s life,” one of misery).   “Dog watch” has, since the early 20th century, been used to mean the late night shift, especially in newspaper offices (“The building shakes with the rumble of the presses; the ‘dog watch,’ detailed to duty in the event of news demanding an extra, opens its game of poker,” 1901).

“Graveyard shift,” a term that dates to the early 20th century, comes from the presumed quiet of the workplace at that hour, although many are just as noisy then as at noon.  The origin of “lobster shift” (originally “lobster trick,” “trick” being an old nautical term for duty at the helm) has been disputed almost since it first appeared in the 1940s.  The story about newspapermen arriving for their shift as florid as lobsters is certainly possible, as is the less plausible explanation that there was so little to do on the night shift that the staff dined out on   lobster and champagne in the wee hours.  But the truth, sad to say, is that “lobster” was, beginning in the 19th century, popular slang in New York City for “a fool or dupe,” probably because lobsters were considered very stupid creatures.  So “lobster shift” probably reflects the sentiment that only a fool (or an incompetent worker) would wind up working the midnight shift.

But if I put this bag on my head, I am invisible. I know because nobody talks to me when I do.

Dear Word Detective:  I would like to know the origin of “up to par” and “up to snuff.”  In golf being over par is not a good thing, so being “up” to it should not be a good thing.  “Up to snuff” makes no sense to me as a positive term other than snuff goes up the nose. — John N. Pierre.

Hmm.  I was under the impression that we weren’t supposed to stick things up our noses.  I recall that lesson as one of the few things I learned in third grade, right up there with the indigestibility of chalk and the fact that tying a towel around one’s neck does not confer the ability to fly.  It’s really a miracle that some of us ever make it to puberty, isn’t it?

Onward.  That’s a good question.  “Up to par” and “up to snuff” mean roughly the same thing, and are both used to describe someone or something that meets a certain common standard of sufficiency or well-being.  Both of them also date back to the 19th century, although “up to par” is the more recent of the two, first appearing nearly 80 years after “up to snuff.”

“Snuff” is, of course, powdered tobacco, usually inhaled through the nose.  Snuff has been in use since tobacco was first cultivated, and was extremely popular in Europe and America from the 16th through the 19th centuries.  The word “snuff” in this sense is shortened from the Dutch word for the stuff, “snuftabak,” obviously related to “to snuff” meaning “to draw in through the nose,” a word formed in imitation of the sound of the action itself.  Etymologists are not sure if “snuff” in the sense of “to extinguish a candle” (or, in slang, “to kill”) is related to this sniffling “snuff.”

The best clue to the logic behind “up to snuff” comes from the fact that when the phrase first appeared in the early 19th century, it didn’t mean simply “meeting a standard” as it does today.  It meant “shrewd, sharp, sophisticated and not easily deceived,” and it was applied to people who were wise to the ways of the world.  Since snuff was, at that time, largely a habit of adult men of comfortable means (it wasn’t cheap), it seems reasonable to assume that “up to snuff” meant “the sort of person who appreciates and uses snuff,” i.e., a worldly man.  It’s also possible that the original sense was of a man who was sophisticated enough to tell high-quality snuff from the cheap stuff.  The use of “up to snuff” to mean “meeting a common standard” arose later in the 19th century.

“Up to par” doesn’t actually have anything to do with golf.  “Par” (from the Latin “par,” meaning “equal”) was originally, at the end of the 16th century, a term in economics denoting the value of one currency in terms of another.  By the mid-18th century, “par” had taken on the broader meaning of “an average or expected amount or condition,” which gave us such idioms as “above par,” “under par” and, by the late 19th century, “up to par,” meaning “meeting the expected standard.”

The same period saw the first use of “par” to mean the maximum number of strokes a good golf player should need for a particular hole or the entire course.  Of course, given the rules of golf, the whole point is to avoid finding yourself “up to par,” especially when you’re only halfway through the course.  At that point, the only thing to do is tie a towel around your neck and hope for the best.