Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Well, this is very late, but there is an explanation.

Harry

In the first week of July our dear kitty Harry died suddenly. Harry would have been six this month, but he was the baby of the brood, the kitten who never really grew up, never lost his wide-eyed, innocent look. Harry was a sweet, sweet kitty, and his death was a horrible shock to us. We still don’t know what happened. He developed sudden difficulty breathing one evening, and we rushed him to the emergency vet, where he spent the night in an oxygen cage, and died the next afternoon. His sister and protector Phoebe is clearly bereft. She left her (and Harry’s) hangout on the second floor and climbed to the top of the tallest china cabinet in the dining room, where she stayed for almost two weeks.  She still won’t come upstairs. I know how she feels. Harry spent most of his time in my office and we had breakfast together nearly every day. He was very fond of buttered toast crumbs. I must have said, “What’s happenin’, Harry?” a thousand times over the years.

This is what I wrote back in 2004 about how Harry, Phoebe and Gus came to us:

Elsewhere in the news, I was wandering around the yard two weeks ago, and in the small wood that borders our northern field I found three small kittens, one orange, one brown striped, and one Siamese-looking,  mewing piteously.  So I gave them some food and water, but when I checked back later they were gone.  Oh well.

A few days later, elsewhere in the yard, the orange kitten emerged alone from the underbrush and began following me around, so I took him inside and gave him food, and a day later took him to the vet for a checkup.  But there was no sign of the other two, even though I searched over the next few days.

Harry took up residence in my office and gradually lost his shyness, chasing his ball and jumping up and down on my keyboard with glee.  But every few minutes he would stop playing, look around the room and start to cry.  He obviously missed his siblings, but there was nothing more we could do.

Exactly one week after Harry arrived, we were walking down the road late at night when we heard a crash in the underbrush and the two missing kittens came tumbling out a few feet away, meowing loudly.  My guess is that they recognized my voice as being that of The Food Guy.  I easily snagged the Siamese-looking one, but the little striped one bolted back into the bushes.  So midnight found me crawling through rusty barbed wire and poison ivy with a flashlight and a plate of Fancy Feast.  After a few minutes of discussion, Gus decided to come back to the house as well.  And Harry doesn’t cry any more.

Pictures of the kittens from those days can be found here.

I want to write more about Harry, and will link here when I do, but I’m not ready yet. There’s also the fact that Fuzzy Wuzzy, our enormous bobtail cat, is pretty seriously ill right now with a urinary blockage aggravated by veterinary incompetence.  Don’t get me started. And Harry’s brother Gus has his own problems, most likely a thyroid condition, still under investigation.

None of this comes cheap, of course, so if you’ve ever wondered when the right time to subscribe might be, this is as good as it gets.

Meanwhile, I discovered that it was possible to set up a Word Detective page on Facebook without actually being personally on Facebook, so you’ll see a link to that in the lower right column. You can’t “friend” me, but you can “like” the page, and every little bit helps.

And now, on with the show…

Cloak of deceit.

Dear Word Detective:  I was just reading an old column of yours on the phrase “made it up out of whole cloth” to mean “lying” and wondered, given the textile reference, if there is any connection between “fabrication” and “fabric.” — Tim Maguire.

That sounds like the foundation of a bad pun, but it’s actually a good question.  Of course, that presumes that there is such a thing as a “good” pun, an assertion I would contest.  For some reason, probably born of a childhood trauma now buried in a cobwebbed corner of my psyche, I loathe puns. Feh.

Don’t mind me; I’m in a bad mood because I have to type this with an index finger badly bitten by an ungrateful cat.  Long story.  Where were we?   Yes, there is a family connection between “fabric” and “fabrication,” but the connection between “fabric” in the “cloth” sense and “fabrication” in the “lie” sense is very indirect, akin to that between two second cousins who  only met once, as children.

But before we proceed, we’d better take a moment to explain “to make something up out of whole cloth,” meaning to invent a story that contains not even a smidgen of truth.  “Whole cloth” has been used since the 15th century to mean a large piece of cloth in its original state, not yet cut up for sewing.  As a metaphor in use since the 19th century for a story completely invented out of thin air, “from whole cloth” carries the same sense of “starting from the absolute beginning” as is found in the phrase “starting from scratch,” which originally referred to a scratch or line drawn on the ground as the starting line for a race.

In the case of “fabric” and “fabrication,” the connection is a common root, the Latin noun “faber,” meaning a craftsman such as a carpenter or blacksmith.  The derivative “fabrica” meant “workshop” or “product,” and the verb “fabricare” meant “to make or build.”

That verb “fabricare” eventually gave us the English word “fabricate,” which appeared in the late 16th century with the meaning of “to make, construct or manufacture” anything that requires skill, but by the early 20th century “fabricate” had taken on the specific meaning of “to semi-finished materials into a finished product,” as one might “fabricate” bumpers from rolled steel.  (Whatever happened to steel bumpers, anyway?)  Meanwhile, back in the 18th century, that “make or construct” sense had led to the use of “fabricate” to mean “constructing” a story that was utterly untrue, which gave us “fabrication” meaning just such a lie.

The original meaning of “fabric,” when it first appeared in English in the late 15th century (derived via the French “fabrique” from the Latin “fabrica”) was, literally, “building”  (“A vaulted fabric without wood or iron-work, three stories high,” 1756).  “Fabric” went on to mean pretty much anything that could be built or manufactured, but settled down in the mid-18th century to being used in our modern sense to mean “textile, cloth.”  Interestingly, so complete has this narrowing process been that even figurative references to “the fabric of the universe,” etc., are usually based on this “textile” sense of “fabric” (“Faith in the Unseen and reverence for the Divine … are inwoven in the very fabric of our nature,” 1877).

So there is a connection between “fabric” and “fabrication,” but it has nothing to do with “whole cloth” and making stuff up.  Honest.

The noodle knows.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m reading about the famous 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, and it has repeated mentions of people referred to as “macaroni.”  It brings to mind other references from a decade or so before that, of it being a compliment to be told, “You look very macaroni.”  I looked up the definition, and — after wading through descriptions of pasta — it says the term was used for a while to refer to young men who affected foreign mannerisms.  Can you tell me how “macaroni” came to be used in this way?  I’m especially surprised that it was a compliment about looking or acting high-class, since — at least for those of us of Italian descent — macaroni is such a basic, down-to-earth food. — Rosemarie Eskes, Rochester, NY.

Well, there you go.  Another gap in my education surfaces.  I was unaware that the Mona Lisa had ever actually been stolen, and that both Picasso and the poet Apollinaire were initially considered suspects.  It was eventually recovered, of course, and returned to the Louvre, but, according to Wikipedia, it’s been the target of attacks by aggrieved nutjobs ever since.  That explains why, when I saw it in Paris twenty years ago, it was behind bulletproof glass so thick that it might as well have been underwater.  Why can’t those crackpots just collect twine like the rest of us?

The Louvre employee who was eventually found to have stolen the painting was an Italian chap who felt that the painting belonged in Leonardo Da Vinci’s homeland, but I’m not sure that particular Italian connection is relevant to your question.  So perhaps it’s best to begin at the beginning.

Macaroni is, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, “A variety of pasta formed in short, narrow tubes, usually boiled and served with a sauce, esp. in Italian cookery; a dish consisting of this.”  The source of the word “macaroni,” which first appeared in English at the end of the 16th century, was the Italian “maccheroni,” which in turn was derived from the Greek “makaria,” meaning “food made from barley.”

But the fact that the word “macaroni” was known in English that long ago didn’t mean that the pasta itself was even remotely as popular outside of Italy as it is today.  In fact, non-Italians were likely to encounter it only on trips to Italy, and in the 18th century, wealthy young men who had been to Italy formed an exclusive “Macaroni Club” in London, adopting the pasta’s name as the mark of sophistication.  The general public was less than impressed, however, and “macaroni” soon became a slang term meaning “dissolute fop.”  This is the same “macaroni” found in the song “Yankee Doodle,” originally sung by British soldiers to annoy the American colonists by suggesting that the American bumpkins would think that sticking a feather in their cap would make them “cool.”  It’s possible that this is the sense of “macaroni” that you encountered in reading about the Mona Lisa theft.

But it’s more likely, especially given the date of the crime, that the “macaroni” in question was a later and sadly predictable use of the word in England as a derogatory slang term for anyone of Italian nationality or extraction.  This use first appeared in the mid-19th century and was still going strong in recent years (“The macaronis are shooting each other and it’s hard to tell who’s on whose side,” Elmore Leonard, 1985).  Given that the theft happened in 1911, it’s probable that this is the sense of “macaroni” you encountered.

Is your hair on purpose?

Dear Word Detective:  I heard a coworker talking about her husband, and she used the word “unkept.”  I told her I thought the term she meant was “unkempt,” but she didn’t believe it was even a word.  I think we have gotten lazy and changed it to “unkept.”  When I proved it was an actual word, everyone, including me, started wondering where such a word came from. — Todd.

Well, there you go.  It’s the fault of “unkempt” itself for being such a freaking weird word. No wonder people decided to fix it and make it “unkept” (although I would decline being included in the “we” who did it).  I’m sure “unkept” will be a much happier word (as long as it stays away from spell-checkers for the next few years, of course).

I haven’t run into the substitution of “unkept” for “unkempt” yet myself, but it sounds like a perfect example of an “eggcorn,” the replacement of an unfamiliar word or phrase with one that sounds similar but makes a bit more “sense.”  The replacement of “for all intents and purposes” with “for all intensive purposes” and the substitution of “coming down the pipe” for “coming down the pike” are both classic eggcorns.  More can be found, along with an explanation of the term “eggcorn” itself, at the Eggcorn Database at www.eggcorns.lascribe.net.

“Unkempt” means, of course, “disheveled, untidy, neglected,” and is used in reference to both personal appearance (“Tall, uncouth, unkempt fellows … seated on a bench smoking,” 1877) and general tidiness (“DeSoto County Supervisors are still grappling with what to do about overgrown subdivisions and unkempt lots,” DeSoto Times-Tribune, Jan. 2010).

When “unkempt” first appeared in English in the late 16th century, it meant literally “uncombed,” and was formed on the Old English verb “kemb,” meaning “to comb the hair” (also the root of our modern “comb”).  The more common form of the word since the 14th century had actually been “unkembed,” but “unkempt” gained a foothold because many people were familiar with its earlier Flemish form “ongekempt.”  Oddly enough, however, “unkempt” faded from use in the 17th century, but regained its popularity in the 1800s.

“Uncombed” being a good description of many things besides hair, “unkempt” immediately came into figurative use, applied to anything messy and “not in proper order.”  The first recorded use of the word, in fact, from 1579, refers to the “rugged and unkempt” use of language.  The 19th century saw the application of “unkempt” to anything, from a farm to a poem, not considered “up to snuff.”

There is, incidentally, a positive form of “unkempt,” which is simply “kempt,” meaning “in proper condition or order” (“A spacious expanse of greensward, smooth and kempt as the ancient turf of an Oxford college,” 1954).

There’s no way to prevent the English language from changing, and the slide from “unkempt” to “unkept,” if it proceeds, may simplify life for some people.  But “uncombed” seems such a poetic and perfect description of so much of life that I truly hope we can preserve  “unkempt.”

Well, the Super’s name is Earl Duke.

Dear Word Detective: Why are apartment buildings known as “arms”? — Jane Bellotti.

That’s an interesting question, and although I first answered it more than a decade ago, when I went back to check on what I had written and to see whether it could be expanded (as I always do), I found myself wandering in an unexpected direction.

It seems that back in 1945, a fellow named Arthur Minton published an article in American Speech (the journal of the American Dialect Association) entitled “Apartment-House Names.”  Minton’s focus was primarily the five boroughs of New York City, where, he estimated, one fourth of the apartment buildings at that time had names.  Approximately one-third of those names included the words “Court” or “Arms,” and a lesser but still significant number of buildings ended in “Hall” (e.g., “Harrowick Hall,” etc.).  The remainder of named buildings sported less grandiose names such as “Terrace,” “Gardens,” “Towers” and “Plaza.”  New York being New York, some people didn’t know when to stop, and Minton mentions such florid creations as the “Manor Palace” and the “Palais de Mosholu” (on Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx).  At the other end of the scale, he found the weirdly recursive “Arms Apartments,” also in the Bronx, whose name, Minton notes, “suggests an unprecedented exhaustion of the imagination.”

The terms “Hall,” “Court” and “Arms” in the names of apartment buildings are preceded in most cases by British or pseudo-British personal or place names (“Kensington Arms,” “Mountbatten Court,” etc.) that attempt to lend an air of historical grandeur, prestige and tradition to what is, in most cases, a fairly utilitarian building.  But while such grandiose names for apartment houses are largely an American affectation, we got the idea from the Brits themselves.

Back when England was awash with Dukes, Earls and similar nobility, many happy centuries before motel and restaurant chains, the local inn or pub (or, indeed, the whole town) frequently sat on land owned by the Duke of Earl, or whomever.  This was also a time when many people were illiterate.  So pubs and inns relied on highly recognizable graphic signs, perhaps calling themselves “The Blue Swan,” signified for non-readers by a blue swan on the sign.  In many cases, the most recognizable symbol in town was the coat of arms of the local nobility, so if one paid rent to the Duke of Norfolk, it made sense to feature the Norfolk family coat of arms on your sign and to call your establishment “the Norfolk Arms.”

Incidentally, although today we use “coat of arms” to mean the heraldic insignia of a noble family or other group, usually featuring a shield, a motto and perhaps some fierce animals,    the original meaning took “coat” very literally.  A “coat of arms” was a linen or silk coat, worn by a knight over his armor on formal occasions, and decorated with his (or his sponsor’s) heraldic emblem.

Not to mention the damp, tasteless pizza.

Dear Word Detective:  “Yokel,” meaning a country bumpkin, is pretty well known, but where does it come from?  Perhaps from its rhyming with “local”?  “Local yokel” is often heard, but then there must be, by implication, alien or visiting yokels.  Any chance it has some Scandinavian roots: “yoke” for joke?  A local joke with a Scandinavian accent becomes “local yoke”?  Or am I way off base? — Barney Johnson.

Well, you may be wandering a bit, but under the circumstances, that’s understandable.  “Yokel” is a pretty strange word. By the way, your musing on “alien yokels” rang a bell with me.  After living in a rural area for more than ten years now, I’m firmly convinced that some of our neighbors are not native to this solar system. I know it sounds crazy, but think about it. Wouldn’t it make more sense for invaders from outer space to colonize the boondocks than to try to blend into our cities?  Especially if their species subsisted on weird stuff like sausage gravy and Jello with marshmallows and mayonnaise?  Makes sense to me.  It would certainly explain banjos.

“Yokel” is one of a number of derogatory terms applied to dwellers in rural areas by people living in, or at least closer to, big cities.  Along with such terms as “hick,” “rube,” “hayseed,” “bumpkin,” “clodhopper” and “yahoo,” “yokel” implies that the person is not only unsophisticated and provincial, but probably uneducated and intellectually impaired as well.

“Yokel” isn’t quite as old as one might suspect, first appearing in English in the early 19th century (in the spelling “youkell”).  The origin of “yokel” is, unfortunately, uncertain, but there are two plausible theories about its source.  The simpler theory traces “yokel” to the German personal name “Jokel” (Jacob).  The tradition of calling country dwellers by names thought to be typically rustic is well-established; both “rube” (from Reuben) and “hick” (a “pet”  form of Richard) follow this pattern.

A more interesting theory, also with some precedent, traces “yokel” meaning “hick” to the old English dialect term “yokel” as a name for the green woodpecker, a bird fairly common in Europe.  “Yokel” as the name of the bird was apparently formed as an imitation of its distinctive call.

The use of the name of a woodpecker as a general term for a “hick” has an interesting parallel in the use of “peckerwood” (a simple reversal of “woodpecker”) as slang, especially among African-Americans in the southern states, for a poor rural white person (“Even a Delta peckerwood would look after even a draggle-tail better than that,” Go Down Moses, Faulkner, 1942).

Why woodpeckers?  To someone visiting the country from the city, a woodpecker would be a highly noticeable novelty, and thus a fitting emblem of country life.  Humans also have a very old habit of comparing people they regard as stupid to birds (e.g., “bird brain,” “dodo” and “silly goose”).  Today the term “yokel” is almost always found in the phrase “local yokel,” and it’s likely that the rhyme has contributed greatly to the persistence of “yokel” in the popular lexicon.

Flying fools.

Dear Word Detective:   I am reading Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens and right now I am regretting not having sought out an annotated copy. The latest word to throw me is “gull,” which noun Dickens uses to describe Lord Frederick. I know, of course, that a gull is a bird, and I have also found a secondary definition meaning “fool,” and a related verb form meaning “to fool.” So does it have another, archaic meaning, referring to a peer or lord, or is Dickens simply calling Lord Frederick an idiot every other time he pops up? — Jacob.

Oh boy, Dickens.  Speaking of Dickens, if you own a TV, you absolutely must snag the DVD of the BBC/PBS serialized production of his novel “Little Dorrit” made in 2008.  It is truly extraordinary, the best thing I’ve seen on TV in years (and evidently I’m not nuts, because it won seven Emmys).  It was odd to watch this last spring, in the midst of the “global financial crisis,” as much of the story revolves around Marshalsea debtor’s prison in London, and a large role in the story is played by a financial wizard named Merdle (a monicker as apt as Madoff) who turns out to be every bit as rotten as today’s scoundrels.

Most people associate “gull” with the seagull, which is actually not just one bird but rather, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “Any long-winged, web-footed bird of the family Laridae and sub-family Larinae….”   Gulls are almost always found near major bodies of water, although a large number of them live in Central Ohio (not known for its major bodies of water), supposedly driven down here from the Great Lakes by a blizzard in the 1970s.  Could be, I suppose.  All I know is that they definitely didn’t come for the pizza.  This kind of “gull” takes its name from the Welsh word for the bird, “gwylan.”

Gulls are not as smart as crows, but they’re not stupid, which presents a problem in explaining the use of “gull” since the 16th century as slang for “simpleton, dupe, sucker.”  One possible explanation lies in the fact that there is another, entirely unrelated, “gull,” dating back to the 14th century, that means a very young bird of any species.  This “gull” probably derives from the Old Norse word “gulr,” meaning “yellow,” referring to the pale yellow plumage of many baby birds.  Such young birds are not very bright, so that would fit with the “simpleton” sense of the slang “gull.”

There’s another possible source for “gull” meaning “fool,” and that is yet another “gull,” an old English dialect word meaning “throat” (related to “gullet”), in this case carrying the sense of “someone who will swallow anything.”  Whatever the source, the same root also gave us the verb “to gull” in the 16th century meaning “to play for a fool,” which in turn produced the adjective “gullible.”

That’s a lot of “gulls” for one language, but, unfortunately, there is no other “gull” referring to nobility in a respectful sense.  So yes, Dickens was indeed calling Lord Frederick Verisopht (another great Dickens name) a dupe and a fool.  On the bright side, according to a search of “Nickleby” on Google Books, he only did it twice.

But it always adds up to a bad day.

Dear Word Detective:  Countless times I’ve heard the phrase “to do a number on” someone or something, meaning “to affect strongly, often negatively.” I wonder how that came into our language.  It seems like a usage that sprang up with the ’60s and ’70s counter-culture, maybe originating as musicians’ slang. — Slidedaddy.

“Do a number on” is one of those stealthy little phrases that you pick up without really thinking about it and then use for years, blissfully never questioning what the “number” might be or how one “does” a number in the first place.  Of course, most slang spreads in just this casual, unquestioning fashion; few of us would think to ask a friend exactly what “number” his latest fender-bender “did” on his car.  Asking is uncool.  One interprets such things from context, and it’s pretty clear that nothing was ever improved by having a “number done” on it.

“Number” is, as you can imagine, a very old word.  It first appeared in English around 1300 with the meaning “the precise sum or aggregate of a collection of individual things or persons” (“He sayth that then shall the nomber of sore and sick beggers decreace,” 1529).  The root of “number” was the Latin “numerus” (meaning “sum” or “total,” which also gave us “numerous,” “numeral,” “enumerate” and other modern English words), which in turn came from a root meaning “to divide or distribute.”  The use of “number” to mean “symbol of arithmetic value” appeared around 1400.

As most core English words do, “number” has acquired a wide range of figurative and  slang senses.  One of the older uses of “number” in slang is “playing the numbers,” i.e., betting in an illegal lottery, a use common in US cities since the mid-19th century. Also in the 19th century, we began to use “number” in a very vague sense to mean “one of something,” such as an article of clothing (“[A]n exquisite but throat-high ‘little number’ redeemed by lumps of jade,” 1953), or even a person (“Have you seen a little blond number named Adeline?”, 1955).

In the mid-19th century, we began to use “number” as theatrical slang to mean “a particular item in a program of musical entertainment,” most likely because items in a printed program given to audience members were often literally numbered.  This led to the use of “number” to mean “a song” as well as, at least within the theatrical community, to mean a “bit” or “routine” associated with a particular performer.  This led in turn, by the late 1960s, to the use of “number” to mean “manner or routine pattern of behavior” (“Bob always does his poverty  number, but he actually has pots of money.”).

All of which brings us to “to do a number on,” which first appeared in the African-American community in the late 1960s meaning “to act with destructive impact on” (“There were about four or five cats doing a number on (beating hell out of) a Puerto Rican,” New York Times, 1972) or “to criticize severely.” This slang sense seems to combine the intentionally vague use of “number” to mean an unspecified “something” with the sense of “a personal routine or characteristic behavior,” in this case ranging from an angry tirade to a physical beating.  The phrase “do a number on” has been tempered somewhat as its use became more mainstream, and it’s often now used to mean simply “affect negatively” (“Frigid temperatures can do a number on your plumbing if your pipes aren’t properly insulated,” 2010).

The buck stops in their pockets.

Dear Word Detective:  I live in Cook County, IL, where a synonym for politician is “crook” in all too many instances. “Crook” apparently has a few meanings, but when and why did it ever come to mean “criminal” or “thief”? Do the terms “straight and narrow” and “bent” spring from the same source? Please shed some light on this. — Bill Lundeberg.

But if I shed light on politicians, won’t they all just run behind the stove?  Anyway, while Cook County may be a bit above average in the “elected crook” tally, the rest of the US is, from all indications, not far behind.  I actually have a theory about this.  Since politicians are so widely reviled (twenty points below puppy-kickers, last I checked), the only positive reinforcement the poor creatures get is from real-estate developers and defense contractors itching to fill their pockets with bribes.  It’s a sad cycle of abuse, and the solution is obvious:  ignore politicians who promise to be honest and elect only people who are already in jail, where we’ll be able to keep an eye on them.

“Crook” does indeed have many meanings,which isn’t surprising since it first appeared in English way back in the 13th century, derived from the Old Norse word “krokr,” meaning “hook.”  The initial meaning of the English “crook” was “hooked tool or weapon” (still found in the “crook,” or hooked staff, traditionally carried by shepherds), and “crook” was soon applied to nearly anything bent sharply in the approximate shape of a hook.  But “crook” was also used, almost as soon as it first appeared, to mean things “morally bent or twisted,” including, by the 19th century, a dishonest person. This “crook” also gave us, of course, the adjective “crooked” meaning “characterized by dishonesty.”  Incidentally, when students “play hookey” and skip school,  the “hookey” comes from the related 19th century slang term “hookey-crooky,” meaning “dishonest.”

“Bent” in the slang sense of “dishonest” is, as you suspected, simply an alternative and arguably more diplomatic way to say “crooked” (“What made the witness think the two officers were offering a bribe? Mitchell replied, ‘I had known for years that certain members of the Brighton police force were what we call bent,’” Times (London), 1958).

“Straight and narrow,” meaning “a path of moral and law-abiding behavior,” also takes its meaning from the contrast with such terms as “crooked.”  The phrase is often “corrected” by purists to “strait and narrow,” referring back to the apparent source of the idiom in the Bible (“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it,”  Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 14).  But in the Bible text both “strait” and “narrow” mean the same thing (“narrow or constricted”), while in popular use “straight and narrow” vividly suggests a path both “straight” (direct and not “crooked”) and “narrow” (not wavering), which conveys a better sense of zipping through life on the expressway of moral rectitude.  Both forms appeared in English in the mid-19th century, so it’s really not possible to argue that one is “more correct” than the other.

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Fetch with extreme prejudice?

Dear Word Detective:  I noticed how odd the word “siccing” looked in the newspaper and can’t help but wonder from where the verb “to sic,” as “to sic a dog on someone,” came from.  It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with “sic” used in the form “[sic]“. — Judith Milgram.

The reason that “sic” in the sense of “order your dog to attack someone” seems a bit disconnected from the “sic” you sometimes see added as a notation to a quotation is that they are two separate and completely unrelated words.

I was intrigued by your mention of seeing “siccing” in your newspaper (because it seemed so informal), so I plugged the word into Google News and came up with ten results.  Two of them concerned dog owners using their dogs to attack or intimidate other people (“Miranda denies siccing his dog on the cops,” Gothamist, 1/22/10), but the rest employ “siccing” in a metaphorical sense to mean “to incite a person to attack or confront another” as in, for instance, a basketball game (“Jacobson took turns siccing guards Kwadzo Ahelegbe and Anthony James at Josh Young,” Des Moines Register).  “Sic” can even be used to mean “assign or encourage a person to perform a task,” as in “Faced with a high error rate, Bob sicced Joann on the challenge of bringing it down.”

The key to tracing “sic” in this “gonna get you” sense is that the original (and still common) spelling of the verb is “sick” (“Seems some of the boys … sicked the dogs on him,” 1899).  But this verb is not related to “sick” meaning “ill.”  It’s actually a dialectical English pronunciation of the verb “to seek,” used in a now largely obsolete sense of “to find and attack.”  (Retrievers are also traditionally commanded “to seek dead,” meaning to find and bring back game that has been shot.)  This “find and attack” sense of “seek” is very old (it occurs in Beowulf), but the “sick” spelling (and pronunciation) variant is surprisingly recent, dating only to the mid-19th century.

“Sic” in the other sense you mention is simply the Latin word for “so” or “thus,” most often used, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, as “a parenthetical insertion used in printing quotations or reported utterances to call attention to something anomalous or erroneous in the original, or to guard against the supposition of misquotation.”  If, for instance, I am quoting a letter sent in by a reader in which I am denounced as “a blistering idiot,” I would probably put “sic” in brackets after “blistering” to indicate that I am typing it just as the reader did (and to signal that I know he meant “blithering”).  “Sic” is a useful little device, as long as it isn’t overused.  Deploying “[sic]” when one simply disagrees with, or wishes to make fun of, the original author’s choice of words is rightly considered a cheap shot.

HA-ha!

Dear Word Detective:  When and how did the expression “paste-eaters” come into usage?  That’s one of the funniest, but apt, expressions I’ve heard in a long time! — Eric D. Cohen.

Funny and apt, yes, but also perhaps a little bit cruel and unfair.  After all, there are worse things to eat than paste, and very few people eat so much paste that they could be accused of depriving others.  Paste eating is also usually a very quiet habit, inasmuch as it is difficult to babble with one’s mouth full of paste.  Of course, that leaves us with the problem of explaining the deafening cacophony of political debate in the US, in which paste eaters seem to play a leading role.

A “paste eater” in the original literal sense is a small schoolchild (usually male) who develops a fondness for the taste of the white paste traditionally used by students in the lower grades to glue bits of construction paper together.  Usually kept in small pots with a brush attached to the underside of the lid, the paste invariably ends up on everything but the paper, especially one’s fingers, and most kids become familiar with the taste.  (I thought it tasted awful, personally, though I loved the smell of rubber cement, which may explain a lot.)  But there was almost always one kid in the class who regarded paste as a barfly regards salted peanuts, and would surreptitiously eat big globs of the stuff when the teacher wasn’t looking.  Such behavior was considered weird even by the liberal standards of second grade, and the paste eater, who was almost always weird in several other respects, was usually shunned as the class “nerd” or “dork.”

Probably the most famous “paste eater” in popular culture today is Ralph Wiggum, a character on The Simpsons TV series.  A cheerfully clueless eight-year old known for his bizarre proclamations (“I found a moon rock in my nose!”), Ralph has been caught on several occasions eating paste and is often depicted with a pot of paste in his hand.  According to the show’s website, “Despite his fractured English, paste eating and occasional ringworm, Ralph has lots of friends — all imaginary,” but for a paste eater, Ralph is well treated.  In the real world, “paste eater” has long been derogatory shorthand for someone regarded as mentally deficient, emotionally maladjusted, and socially ostracized.  An adult described as a “paste eater” is someone considered not only clueless and uncool, but extremely stupid as well.

Just when “paste eater” entered the general slang vocabulary is unclear.  A book about one-room schoolhouses in the early 20th century, titled “Schoolhouses of Minnesota” (available at Google Books), contains a detailed reminiscence of paste eating, so the phenomenon and epithet have probably been around since the 19th century.  As popular slang, “paste eater” really only became popular with the growth of the internet in the 1990s and the rise of political blogs on which “paste eater” became an instantly understandable way to slam the opposition.  As a derogatory slur, “paste eater” has the advantage of being nearly universally understood, and will be as long as small children and paste are together when the teacher’s back is turned.