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.”

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.