UPDATE. August 19: We are up and running again, if you don’t count that humongous dead tree lying across the front yard (deposited by a subsequent storm) and various other problems. The August Issue will be posted within the next few days.

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Due to the 80 mph wind that blew down one of the power poles on our land, thereby pulling down several trees and ripping the power feeder cable from the side of the house, there will be a slight delay in our July Issue. At the moment, it’s 100+ degrees F in the house, we have no electricity, no water (well pump doesn’t run on wishes), no a/c, no tv and no computers. They say it may be another 4-5 days until it’s fixed, but with more storms coming, that may be optimistic.

Everyone else on our road now has power. Life not fair. We have lost all the food in our freezer and fridge (~$400), so donations to our storm fund (aka subscriptions) are much appreciated.

(posted from Panera Bread, where I bought a consolation bear claw.)

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

And you may ask yourself What happened to the month of May?

And you may say, This is not my beautiful May Issue of The Word Detective!

And you may say, No, seriously, this is supposed to be a monthly deal! I’m paying to read this on my Kindle!

And I say, Mea culpa. You really wanna know what happened? OK, but after the jump.

Meanwhile, I did finally finish reading the 10,000-page opus 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (on my little Nook, with the font jacked up to 72 points). My one-word review: incompetent. Boy howdy, what a waste. A real shame. And I’m still annoyed at this dead goat of a book. Then again, I’m not alone. I just really wish I’d read this (major spoilers) before I wasted my time and retinas. Ho, ho, ho.

What else? Well, Google+ is pretty definitively kaput as far as I can tell. Frankly, they made it so difficult for non-heavy-hitters to play that I’m not gonna miss ‘em. Keep your dumb old API read-only, see if I care.

On the bright side, I’m here to say that I was wrong about Twitter. Someone recently tweeted (still hate that verb) that signing up for the service was like seeing “mastheads come to life,” which is a good way of putting it. I follow mostly writers, editors and  journalists, and often see pointers to great stuff to read online that I otherwise would have missed. I’m also a fan of accounts like @pourmecoffee, @kenjennings and the late, all too  brief @NotTildaSwinton. I know it was actually just two guys without jobs, but … maybe it really was Tilda. Come back, Tilda. Your Tildren miss you, and we miss your wisdom:

A mission for you. Go outside, hold an animal to your breast. That is real warmth, not the glow of your screen. I typed this on a rabbit.

Or maybe not. I guess wherever you are they don’t have biting flies.

Speaking of biting flies, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent brouhaha occasioned by the decision by The New Yorker to commission a review of Henry Hitchings’ new book “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by their, um, dance critic, Joan Acocella (who may be a fine dance critic but, in this case, has literally no grasp whatsoever of the subject she’s writing about). What, as they say on the internet, could possibly go wrong? A lot, in fact, and Steven Pinker summed it up nicely thus:

Not since Saturday Night Live’s Emily Litella thundered against conserving natural racehorses and protecting endangered feces has a polemicist been so incensed by her own misunderstandings.

Language Log was, of course, there for the ensuing dustup, and a good place to start, for those with lots of spare time and a desire to understand the ruckus, would be here. By the way, my father, William Morris, is mentioned early on in Ms. Aocella’s jeremiad. I’m fairly certain that he would not have been amused by her hallucinations.

So here’s the June Issue, which contains 18 columns (rather than the usual 12 or so) to make up for my tardiness. And thanks to all the folks who have contributed by subscribing lately. It would be awesome if more of you folks did. But it would also be great if you’d just send in some questions, since they are, after all, the raw material I need to run this circus, and the more I have the easier it is.

And now a depressing explanation of where the May Issue went:

So, I had the May issue almost set to go last month when everything went to the damnation bowwows. The car (singular, 1997 vintage) died. The dogs (plural, elderly) both got sick. The temperature went into the low 90s, and then things got really depressing, because my ms decided to prove that they don’t call it “progressive” for the hell of it, specifically by making it damn near impossible for me to walk across the room. I tell my legs to work, but they don’t listen. The foot drop (inability to flex your ankle, a skill fairly central to walking) I’d been dealing with in my left foot for five years has now developed in my right as well, which makes walking at all a real adventure. Your feet just sort of flop around loosely and you clomp along like a marionette. And if I do manage to hold something in my left hand, I now find that I can’t make my hand let go (which really creeps me out).

More importantly, for purposes of this web site, I discovered that even brief (like, five minutes) exposure to the heat is enough to make my vision blur to the point that I cannot see much of anything. It’s like looking through a lens when someone is racking it in and out of focus. And it’s qualitatively worse than it was a year ago. And yadda yadda yadda.

So that happened. I’m still a lot luckier than a lot of people with ms, and way luckier than folks with worse things. But everything takes much longer than it used to, and so that’s what happened to May.

And now, on with the show…

It’s not all that “Fancy” anyway. Tastes like Spam.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve been wondering how “bent,” as in “He has a philosophical bent” came to be, as opposed to just calling it a “bend.” Can you offer anything? — Dalton.

Hmm. Hey, how about a nice cat? Everybody likes cats. And, after a while, they bring out your philosophical bent, even if you never thought you had one. There you’ll be, sitting in your cold, dark house, impoverished by vet bills, shunned by friends who have just developed convenient allergies, with both your furniture and your future in tatters. At that moment, when all seems lost, you’ll pause, muse philosophically, and realize that you still have a prize more precious than gold — the knowledge that you have made one small, furry creature very happy. Because it just won a coin flip with you for the last can of Fancy Feast.

Oh, you meant something useful about “bent.” Yeah, no problemo. “Bent” in the sense that you use it in your example is simply a noun formed from the common verb “to bend.” In this sense we use “bent” to mean “mental inclination or tendency; disposition; propensity, bias” (Oxford English Dictionary), as in “Henry was of a numismatic bent, and spent every day collecting coins and bills; it was several years before the police discovered he was getting them from his neighbors’ houses.” As an adjective, “bent” in this sense means “determined to follow a certain course of action or to pursue a certain goal” (“Despite the intense lightning, Trevor was bent on finishing the tennis game, and eventually triumphed over his opponent, the late Victor Nubbin of Dover”).

The story of “bend” goes back to its Germanic root, which was “band” or “bandjan.” This root produced a number of other English words, including “band,” “bind,” “bond” and “bundle,” all of which carry the general sense of “tying something up.” And so, at first, did the English verb “to bend.” In Old English (as “bendan”), and initially in English, “to bend” meant to bind or constrain something very tightly (usually with a “bend,” the noun form then meaning “bond, shackles, fetters, etc.”).

The question that I’m sure has occurred to you by now (because all my readers are of a logical bent) is “So how did this word ‘to bend,’ meaning ‘tie up tightly’ ever come to mean ‘to form into a curve’?” Good question. It appears that, early in the word’s evolution in English, the sense of “to bind tightly” was applied to the process of stringing an archer’s bow, which requires considerable strength and results, of course, in the bow assuming a curved shape. Thus, to cause other things to take the curved shape of a strung bow became to “bend” them and they were thenceforth described as “bent” (the past participle of “to bend”). This sense of “bent” was eventually broadened to include things that were of any arched, angular or crooked shape, not just the gentle curve of a bow, and today “to bend” can apply to any deviation of a thing from its usual axis, such as when we “bend” our knees to pick up something from the floor. “Bend” is also a perfectly fine noun, commonly used to mean a turn or fold in something, such as “a bend in the river.”

Interestingly, the origin of “to bend” in stringing a bow gave us another sense of the word as well, “to bend” meaning “to direct one’s thoughts, energies or actions toward something.” This sense reflects an earlier sense of “to bend” meaning “to aim a weapon,” reflecting the “bending” of a bow to fire an arrow. It is this “directing one’s thoughts and energies” sense of the verb “to bend” that produced the noun “bent” in the sense of “mental inclination or bias.”

The noun “bend” was also briefly used, beginning in the 16th century, to mean “a turn of mind or inclination,” just as we use “bent” today, but that sense of “bend” eventually became obsolete and “bent” took over its job. The reasons “bent” won out over “bend” in meaning “inclination” are a bit hazy, but it seems that “bent” in this sense with its terminal “t” was formed on the model of other English nouns drawn from verbs of Latin or French origin, e.g., “to descend” produced the noun “descent,” “extend” gave us “extent,” etc.

So there’s really no compelling logical reason why we use “bent” for “inclination” instead of “bend.” That’s just the way it turned out, and today we speak of a politician’s larcenous “bent” as he “bends” the ethical rules.

Dawn already? How do I get those birds to shut up?

Dear Word Detective:  Where did the word “demented” come from? A sleep deprivation experiment was conducted by William Dement at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, and I believe the word comes this. Am I right? — Danny Foster.

Ah, yes. “Sleep, the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast …,” that sleep? Don’t care for it, myself. No time. Things to do, y’know. Haven’t slept in months. Doctor gives me pills. Well, not really a doctor, but I don’t like to pry. I’ve been thinking of running for president, but I can’t find my feet. Is there someone at the door?

And now for the good news: one of us may be crazy, but it’s not you. My initial suspicion was that William Dement was just a figment of an urban legend concocted to explain the origin of “demented.” But he turns out not only to be a real guy (always a plus), but the honest-to-gosh pioneer of scientific sleep research. He basically invented the field, and he’s still at it. (One does wonder, of course, whether Dr. Dement’s name played a role in his choice of career.)

The corporeal existence of the illustrious Dr. Dement notwithstanding, however, his name is not the source of the common English word “demented.” For that we turn to our old friend Latin, where the phrase “de mente” means literally “out (de) of one’s mind (mente).” This produced the Latin verb “dementare,” meaning “to drive out of one’s mind.” The source of the Latin “mente” was the Indo-European root “men,” which also produced “memory,” “reminisce,” “mathematics” (from the Greek “manthenein,” to learn), “mind” and several other common English words.

The English equivalent of the Latin “dementare” appeared in the 16th century as the transitive verb “to dement,” which meant literally “to drive someone out of their mind.” This verb, apparently having little practical application outside of old Vincent Price movies, is rarely used today. But the adjective formed from “to dement,” our friend “demented,” is alive and well and has meant, since it first appeared in the mid-17th century, “out of one’s mind; crazed; mad.” There existed, at one time, “dement” as both a noun (“A dement was known to the writer who could repeat the whole of the New Testament verbatim,” 1888) and an adjective (“Speak, man, speak! Are you dumb as well as dement?” 1856), but both forms are now largely obsolete.

We frequently use “demented” and other terms such as “nuts,” “crazy,” “bats” and so on to denote, often in a humorous way, someone who is eccentric or whose opinions we find questionable. Actual mental impairment or illness is, of course, a serious condition and those so afflicted need and deserve sympathy, understanding and support. The medical term “dementia,” a Latin noun meaning “the state of being demented,” is used to cover a range of mental symptoms and states, ranging from mild to severe.

The past, not surprisingly, is full of synonyms for “demented” that have fallen by the wayside, but one of the strangest must be the obsolete adjective “wood” meaning “insane; mad,” also found in such terms as “woodness,” woodship” and “woodhead.” This “wood” has nothing to do with trees; it’s from the Old English “wod,” derived from Germanic roots that carried the sense of “angry, inspired or excited.” The Old Norse branch of the same root produced the name of the Norse god Woden (aka Odin), memorialized in Wednesday (Old English “Wodnesdaeg,” Woden’s Day).

It’s a cat’s paw that pries.

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the word “tool,” as in “He is such a tool”? — Chris.

Well, first things first. Are we certain that the person in question is not, in fact, literally a tool, as one might find in a carpenter’s kit? I seem to recall that former US Representative Tom DeLay spent a good deal of his time trying to get people to call him “The Hammer,” supposedly in reference to his ruthless enforcement of party discipline in passing legislation. I always wondered whether that nickname was really more of an attempt to compensate for the fact that his name was, after all, “delay.” When I went to check up on whatever happened to The Hammer, I found that he had been convicted (nailed?) for money laundering by federal prosecutors (who probably just wanted to steal that cool nickname). He’s appealing his conviction, so his three-year prison sentence has been, sigh, delayed. By the way, my new nickname is The Laser WordShark.

In its most basic literal sense, a “tool” is an implement used to perform work, such as a hammer, a machine (such as a lathe), or, more broadly and figuratively, something (or someone) that is used to accomplish a task, whether it’s a piano used to play a concerto or a lobbyist employed to draft legislation. Since the use of tools has long been viewed as one of the most singular characteristics of homo sapiens (although other animals, including crows, have lately been observed subversively making and using tools), it’s not surprising that “tool” is itself a very old word. “Tool” first appeared in Old English as “tol,” based on the Old Germanic “towlo,” “tow” carrying the sense of “to make or prepare” and the suffix “lo” being “agentive,” in this case meaning “that which does something,” giving us “something that is used to make or prepare something.”

Not surprisingly for a word so old, “tool” has acquired an impressive range of figurative uses. One of the oldest slang uses has been use of the term to mean various bodily organs, particularly what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) calls, with awesome tact, “the male generative organ.” Moving right along, “tool” has also been used, at least since the 17th century, to mean “a person used by another for his own ends; one who is, or allows himself to be, made a mere instrument for some purpose” (OED), or what was called, in a more literate age, “a cat’s paw.” (As I explained a few years back, an ancient fable tells the story of a monkey who came upon some chestnuts roasting in a fire. Lacking the means to retrieve the tasty chestnuts from the fire, the clever monkey managed to convince a somewhat dim cat to reach into the flames with his paw and fetch them. The monkey got the chestnuts, the cat was rewarded with a nasty hotfoot, and a metaphor for “useful chump” was born.)

This use of “tool” to mean “dupe” or “errand boy” dates back to the mid-17th century. At about the same time “tool” was also being used as slang to mean “an unskilled worker or shiftless person,” one who was fated to be exploited by employers. This use also implied that the “tool” was, in fact, a fool, an easily misled person (“This gained the poor Tool intirely, and he was ready from that time to receive any Impression,” 1747), good only for causing trouble to others (“Tricked, fooled, like a child! and through means of this treacherous, drunken tool,” Bret Harte, 1876).

The current use of “tool” as slang combines the “cat’s paw” and “stupid” senses of “tool” described above to produce something close to “deluded and self-important idiot” in meaning. It seems to be gradually losing that “cat’s paw” sense, and lately I’ve seen it being used to mean simply “arrogant fool.” But I’m probably drawing distinctions where none are needed. If you’ve ever had your boss helpfully remind you about the proper method of stapling the covers on your TPS reports, you know what a “tool” is.

And quit scowling at the drones, Citizen.

Dear Word Detective:  I am curious to learn the origin of the phrase “stand down.” I think that everyone is familiar with its meaning, but this is a curious combination of words and I would be interested to learn its original (literal) usage. The Google doesn’t seem to produce anything useful, so I am turning to you in the hope that you could enlighten me, a humble member of the unwashed masses. — Dave Johannsen.

All right, now here’s a man who’s gotten with the program. Honestly, the hardest part of getting used to Neo-Feudalism is gonna be overcoming what we at the Bureau of Get Back to Work like to call Demon Self-Esteem. I know the 80s were the “Me Decade,” but the New Future is all about doffing your cap when the Kardashians come to inspect the furrow you’re hoeing. Nuff said.

By the way, I happen to have copyrighted the phrase “Google doesn’t seem to produce anything useful,” so you owe me a buck fifty. Keep in mind that Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally wanted to call it “Googol,” a term dreamed up by mathematician Edward Kasner’s nephew Milton back in the 1930s for a very large number, specifically ten raised to the hundredth power. That’s a one followed by one hundred zeros, or roughly the number of spurious answers Google now provides to the average question. But the “googol.com” domain name was already taken, so the lads called their invention “Google,” which, appropriately, doesn’t actually mean anything.

“Stand down” is a specialized use of the verb “to stand,” which, as you might imagine, is quite old and has developed dozens of senses. “Stand” first appeared in Old English (as “standan”) from Germanic roots, and means in its most basic sense, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it regarding people or animals, “to assume or maintain an erect attitude on one’s feet (with distinction, expressed or understood, from sit, lie, kneel, etc.)” or, of things, “to be in an upright position with the lower part resting on or fixed in the ground or other support; opposed to lie.” In addition to various literal uses, “stand” has acquired a wide range of figurative senses, from “to stand by” someone (be faithful and supportive) to “stand” in the sense of “bear, tolerate” (“I could not stand the music in the elevator, so I took the stairs”).

“Stand down” is one of several specifically military uses of “stand” that include “to stand to one’s arms,” meaning “to maintain one’s position in the face of an attack” (the source of the idiom “to stick to your guns,” meaning “to not give in” in an argument, etc.), as well as “to stand to arms,” meaning to assume combat readiness and prepare for action. “To stand down” is the opposite of “to stand to arms,” and means to go off duty or relax from a state of readiness (“‘Stand-down’ was the corresponding order at the end of the Danger Period, used in like manner as an expression for a definite point of time,” 1925). The “down” in “stand down” doesn’t mean literally taking a seat, any more than the command “at ease” means to lounge on the nearest couch, but the contrast is to “on duty” status and alert readiness. “Stand down” first appeared in print in 1919, just after World War I, so we can assume that the term originated in that conflict.

Most uses of “stand down” I’ve found in print are in the military sense, but it is used occasionally in the sense of “to back off” or “to stop an aggressive action” (“Medical marijuana protesters urge feds to stand down,” 10/11). Here in the US, “stand down” seems to be commonly used as a name of community programs and public-awareness campaigns designed to help military veterans facing endemic unemployment and homelessness (“Stand Down gives veterans chance to get help, give back,” 10/13/11).

Old-school spooky.

[Note: This column was distributed to subscribers last October.]

Dear Word Detective: O Grand and Mighty Word Detective, Master of Arcane Linguistic Knowledge! Hear me! …Ahem, sorry. I seem to have been taken over by a touch of the over-dramatic, but then again, it is somewhat related to my question. Perhaps it is because of the Halloween atmosphere right now, but I have suddenly been reminded of being told by one of my Arabic literature professors, some years ago, that the word “macabre” is in fact derived from Arabic, from the word “maqabir,” which is the plural form of “maqbara,” meaning “graveyard.” Now, while I’m generally suspicious of such claims, it does seem pretty enticing: the phonetic and semantic similarity is quite striking, and the explanation offered in my Oxford Concise (“from Danse Macabre ‘dance of death’, from Old French, perhaps from Macabe, ‘a Maccabee’, with reference to a miracle play depicting the slaughter of the Maccabees”) actually feels weaker. So, what do you say? Is the Arabic source actually plausible, or is “macabre” more Hanukkah than Halloween? Or is it something else entirely? — Yael.

Halloween already? I guess so. Speaking of which, today we passed some poor schmuck standing on the curb, trying to drum up business for one of those “Halloween Megastores” that pop up in strip malls at this time of the year. He was, of course, in costume, dressed as … wait for it … Gumby! Uh, Gumby? Was there some late-period Gumby movie, maybe “Gumby and the Vampire Chainsaw of Horror,” that I missed? Because otherwise that’s just depressing.

It’s definitely the time of year for all things “macabre,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “having death as a subject; dwelling on the gruesome; tending to produce horror in a beholder.” The adjective “macabre” has been used in this sense since the late 19th century (“It was the material representation … of the ghastly, the grim, and the macabre which Webster intended,” 1892). “Macabre” can also be a noun, meaning either something macabre or the quality of being macabre (“The macabre of … Baudelaire, gave the impression of decadence,” 1958).

The theory you encountered tying “macabre” to the Arabic “maqabir,” meaning “graveyard” is indeed enticing, and it seems to have been enticing scholars for many years. There was a discussion of just this question on an Arabic linguistic mailing list about ten years ago, in fact. But apparently there are historical problems connecting the two words (the Oxford English Dictionary states bluntly that “there is no evidence” to support that theory), and so most etymologists accept the “Danse Macabre/Maccabees” theory.

The “Maccabees” were a Jewish rebel army who freed Judea from the Greek-Macedonian Seleucid Empire around 164 B.C. and have been celebrated ever since as heroes and martyrs. The deaths of the Maccabees were vividly and gorily described in early religious texts, and eventually reverence for the Maccabees was associated with respect for death in general as well as for Death personified. This was most vividly illustrated in the Middle Ages in Europe by the “Danse Macabre” or “Dance of Death,” a theme in art and literature featuring the classic figure of Death, a skeleton bearing a scythe, leading the living in their dance toward inevitable death. The final scene of Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal” famously depicts just such a “danse macabre,” and if you’re insufficiently gloomy after seeing that film, you can always check out Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th century painting “The Triumph of Death,” in which Death rides a horse and just about everything has gone horribly wrong. It makes great desktop wallpaper, by the way. People who see that on your laptop will not interrupt your work.

The “macabre” of “Danse Macabre” is actually Old French and is thought to have been derived from the Latin “Maccabaeus” (Maccabees) or the Greek form, “Makkabios.” But by the Middle Ages, “macabre” had largely lost its connection to the Maccabees, and few people today even associate the word with the “Dance of Death,” which strikes me as a shame. Halloween ought to be about more than cookie-cutter serial killers and lame pop-cult costumes (Gumby?). The truly “macabre” is the dimension of the deeply creepy and awesomely strange. It’s not just another mechanical “Boo!”

It’s the unknown unknowns that bite.

Dear Word Detective: “Beyond my ken,” a phrase that shows up from time to time in your columns, seems too-little used these days. The financial crisis alone, with its collateralized debt obligations and subprime mortgages, should have triggered an avalanche of its use. Assuming it has nothing to do with Barbie’s soul mate, what insight can you provide? Are things ever spoken of as being “within one’s ken”? — Steve Ford.

Hey, lookie there. My spell-checker doesn’t recognize “collateralized.” It’s not often that I envy my computer its innocence. You make a good point about the reluctance of many people to admit that the financial blowup-meltdown-whatsis was, and remains, “beyond their ken.” I was actually surprised back in 2008 at how much I understood about what was going on, but I guess I picked up a lot through osmosis while working at a Wall Street law firm many years ago. Back then they were trying to market derivatives based on credit card receivables, an idea which struck even me, a humble scrivener, as nuts. But that was before they invented credit default swaps, whereby you could win by losing billions. Someone needs to point out that all this chicanery is not, strictly speaking, capitalism.

“Ken” is an interesting little word. It first appeared in Old English as the verb “cennan,” meaning “to make known” or “to cause to know.” “Cennan” was the causative form of the verb “cunnan,” which meant “to know.” That “cunnan” also produced our modern English verb “can” (meaning “to be able to”) and is related to our modern verb “to know.” Incidentally, “can” originally meant simply “to know,” but over time took on the meaning of “to know how to do something,” and eventually acquired the modern sense of “to be able to do something” (“Becky can dance but Bob is hopeless”). The old sense of “can” meaning “to know” can still be found in the adjective “canny” meaning “sharp, wise” (and “cunnan” lives on in our modern “cunning”).

Meanwhile, back at “ken,” the verb “to ken” in modern English originally meant “to make known” or “to teach,” but by the 13th century “to ken” had also come to mean “to recognize or catch sight of” (“And now he faintly kens the bounding fawn, And villager abroad at early toil,” 1771). This sense progressed to include recognizing a particular person and then to be acquainted with someone or something, and so forth, until “to ken” came to mean “to comprehend or understand, to be aware of” just about anything. By this point you’ve probably noticed that “to ken” is now essentially synonymous with “to know,” and are wondering why you’ve never seen it used in any of these senses. That’s because “to ken,” once a mainstay of speech all over Britain, is now used almost exclusively in Scotland.

“Ken” the noun followed an evolution parallel to that of the verb “to ken,” with an interesting detour. The earliest use of “ken” in modern English, in the 16th century, was as a shortening of the Scots word “kenning,” which was a nautical term meaning “the range of ordinary vision at sea,” normally reckoned to be about 20 nautical miles. In later usage, “ken” evolved a broader sense of “range of vision” or “[in] sight or view of a place or thing” (“Tis double death to drowne in ken of shore,” Shakespeare, 1594). Eventually the figurative sense of “view” and “sight” gave “ken” the meaning of “perception or understanding; field of knowledge,” most often encountered today in the phrase “beyond one’s ken,” meaning “outside one’s field of knowledge” or “beyond one’s understanding.”

I’ve been poking around a bit, but so far I’ve been unable to find any published affirmative use of “ken,” as in “Yes, that’s well within my ken; let me explain it to you in short words, with pictures.” I’m sure someone, somewhere has said or written it, but for the most part a “ken” seems to be that area of personal knowledge that never contains answers to the really thorny questions, such as where all the world’s money suddenly went. Perhaps we should worry less about “too big to fail” and more about “too big to ken.”

Take your chances.

Dear Word Detective: What is the derivation of the name “RoShamBo” for the rock-paper-scissors game? — Frances.

Really? No kidding. Live and learn. I had honestly never heard it called that. Then again, rock-paper-scissors is one of those games I’m not very good at. I tend to get stuck on “rock” and lose right away. Come to think of it, I’m really not very good at any game that involves hand-waving and the like. I’m the only person I know who’s actually been injured in a game of patty-cake.

According to Wikipedia (motto: “We Am Frequently Correct”), rock-paper-scissors (which I will henceforth call “RPS” to save my sanity) dates back to the Han Dynasty in China (206 B.C.) and is now played everywhere on earth. For the benefit of all you non-earthlings, the Oxford English Dictionary definition is fairly succinct: “A game (used especially to settle petty disputes or as a tiebreaker) in which, at an agreed signal, each participant makes a gesture with one hand representing either a rock, paper, or a pair of scissors, the winner being determined according to an established scheme,” which is usually “rock blunts (beats) scissors, scissors cut paper, paper wraps rock.” There is almost always a three-syllable counting phrase (or just “one, two, three”) chanted during the game, which consists of two warm-up feints and then a third swing of the arm when your choice of R, P or S is displayed. I’m sure there are at least three million YouTube videos demonstrating how it’s done.

There is, interestingly, a World RPS Society, whose website (www.worldrps.com) offers all sorts of tips on strategy, variants, and the history of the game. The World RPS Society was founded in London in 1842 as the Paper Scissors Stone Club shortly after a law was passed in England declaring an RPS match “between two gentleman acting in good faith” to be a legally binding contract.
In your question you refer to “RoShamBo,” capitalized in such a way as to imply that it’s a sort of acronym for something, but apparently it isn’t, and it’s usually just written “roshambo.” There are two leading theories about the origin of the word.

The simpler of the two theories ties “roshambo” to the Japanese name for the game, “janken,” and to the three-syllable phrase chanted during the game, “Jan-ken-pon” or “Jan-ken-poh.” The Chinese regional dialect version of the name, “jiang jun bo,” may also figure in this theory. If one of these two was the source of “roshambo,” it was probably via a misunderstanding and later modification of the term by English-speakers who didn’t speak either Japanese or Chinese. The phonological change needed to get from the Japanese or Chinese terms to “roshambo” would not necessarily be too long a stretch in such a case. After all, we managed to turn the Mexican Spanish “vaquero” (cowboy) into “buckaroo.”

The other theory about “roshambo” suggests an origin a bit closer to home for those of us in the US. “Roshambo,” goes this theory, is a phonetic form of the French “Rochambeau,” specifically as found in the name of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807). Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur was a general in the French army, best remembered for commanding a force sent to help George Washington’s troops during the American Revolution. According to this theory, RPS was associated with Jean-Baptiste in some fashion, and he (or his soldiers) may have introduced the game to the American colonists, who may have tacked his name onto it in tribute. Or something like that. For a theory, this one is very hazy, but not impossible.

Intriguingly, the first known use of “roshambo” in print was actually in the form “Ro-cham-beau,” which would seem to lend credence to the Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur theory. Unfortunately, that first known use was in 1936, more than a century after Jean-Baptiste’s death, which raises the question of why it took so long for the gratitude of the colonists to manifest itself.

Fortunately, I have my own theory. It’s not much of a theory, and I have absolutely no evidence for it, so caveat lector. My theory is that “roshambo” has nothing to do with anything Jean-Baptiste Yadda Yadda, Comte de Rochambeau did or did not do regarding RPS. I think it came about because American History courses taught to schoolchildren in the 19th and early 20th centuries almost certainly required them to learn about Jean-Baptiste and to memorize his name. When, during recess, the children then used RPS to settle a dispute, the ornate three-syllable name “Ro-cham-beau” would have been on their little minds and thus a natural for a counting chant during the game. They could as easily have chanted “Wash-ing-ton,” of course, but “Ro-cham-beau” actually sounds like an exotic magic incantation. And “roshambo” is a lot easier to say than “rock-paper-scissors.”

But does the Jolly Green Giant smell like the produce section?

Dear Word Detective:  My late Aunt Thelma used to say “fum” instead of “smell,” like in “You fum good” or “Supper fums good.” We thought it was an old family joke or something, but I’ve been wondering lately, could it be an old expression related to “fumes”? Her generation of the family (from Scotland and Wales) used lots of old words that people look at me like I’m a lunatic for using now. — Nancy.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? When you’re a little kid, you hear people around you using all sorts of words, and you figure out what most of them mean from context (e.g., an “uncle” is a strange man who appears several times a year to tell stupid jokes). Then, as you grow up and move away from home, you discover that most of the people you meet have never heard of a lot of those words, and you (and your new friends) begin to wonder whether you were, in fact, raised by Martians. My mother, for instance, used to speak of someone having a “scunner” against someone else, by which she seemed to mean “a grudge.” It wasn’t until I used the word to several people many years later and got puzzled looks in return that I actually looked  it up and discovered that “scunner” is a Scots dialect word meaning, yes, “a grudge or dislike.” It comes from the verb “to scunner” (to flinch or feel disgust), which dates back to the 15th century and may be connected to either “to shun” or “to scare.” So your hunch that your Aunt Thelma wasn’t just making up nonsense words is probably justified.

The best-known use of the word “fum” is probably in the refrain “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread” recited by one of the giants in the ancient English folk tale “Jack the Giant Killer.” The tale (which is obviously related to but more complex than “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which also contains the refrain) exists in many versions, and was so well-known by 1605 that Shakespeare gave it a shout-out in King Lear (“Child Roland to the dark tower came, His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.”).

But while the giant’s rhyme seems to connect “fum” to the sense of smell, and your Aunt probably knew it by heart as most children once did, it doesn’t necessarily mean that “fum” as she used it came from the tale. Browsing through the two dictionaries of Scots dialect I own (which come in handy more often than you’d think), it seems that the only meaning listed for “fum” is “a useless, slovenly woman,” which isn’t very helpful on any count. But “fume” is defined as “a scent or fragrance,” which does put us back on track. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a sense of the verb “to fume” as “Of food, wine, etc.: To rise as fumes (to or into the head),” which also fits with your Aunt’s use of “fum” to mean “to smell.”

The only hurdle to pronouncing Aunt Thelma’s “fum” simply a use of “fume” in this sense is, obviously, the usual pronunciation of “fume” as “fyoom.” (I’m assuming here that she pronounced “fum” as “fuhm” with no “y” sound.) But it’s not uncommon for a word to change its  sound in dialectical usage, and the usual use of “fume” in a negative sense may actually have contributed to a changed pronunciation for the positive “fum” sense. Perhaps it even came to be regarded as a separate word, i.e., “noxious fumes” versus “nice fum.” It’s also possible that the giant’s “Fee-fi-fo-fum” rhyme from “Jack the Giant Killer” influenced the change. In any case, I’d say that it’s highly likely that your hunch was correct, and your aunt was actually using a specialized sense of our modern word “fume.”

That ain’t right.

Dear Word Detective:  Mom (born 1932) was from Central New York (Otsego and Cayuga Counties) and used an expression whenever something was crooked or misaligned — an example being a skirt whose zipper in the back meandered to the side from normal wear. I don’t know how to spell this, but she pronounced it “squee jaw.” Anyone recognize this? — LadyMayflower.

Anyone? Bueller?… Bueller?… Bueller? Oh wait, it’s just me here. I used to have an imaginary assistant named Edith Freedle, but when readers began writing to complain that I was mistreating her (dispatching her to sit at dull book festivals in my place, for instance), I had to let her go. It was sad, but she lives in Florida now, in one of those humongous cookie-cutter developments where people all ride around in golf carts. She married a retired chiropodist and sends me funny videos of talking cats. Seems pretty happy for someone living in hell.

Gosh, second paragraph already? Better get to work. “Squeejaw” (apparently it’s one word) turns out to be a remarkably uncommon word, at least these days. It’s not listed in any mainstream dictionary I own, and even the American Dialect Society’s mailing list, my go-to guide to weird folk sayings, has apparently never noticed it. It does crop up in several “user-generated” online dictionaries, defined as meaning “crooked” or “cockeyed,” pretty much as your mother used it. But these sites, not surprisingly, don’t offer any hint of where the word came from or how it came to mean “crooked.”

Fortunately, there is a publication, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), whose sole mission is to catalog and trace just this sort of obscure term, and after a bit of digging in DARE, I hit pay dirt. I’m very lucky I persisted, because DARE is a work in progress, and the most recent volume only covers up to “Sk,” somewhat shy of the “Sq” of ‘squeejaw.” But poking around in the “Sk” pages, I found, lo and behold, “squeejaw.”

“Squeejaw,” it turns out, is one of many variants of the term “skew-jaw” or “skewjawed,” “skew” meaning “crooked, misshapen, diagonal, distorted, rickety or wrong” applied to a thing, or “confused, peculiar or awkward” applied to a person. The particular form “squeejawed” turned up in 1950 in an answer to a regional language survey question posed to Wisconsin residents (“When a collar or other clothing works itself up out of place you say it’s …”), so it’s definitely the same term your mother used. According to DARE, the geographic distribution of “skew,” “squee” and other variants (“screw,” “skee,” etc.) includes, apart from the upper Midwest, central and upstate New York.

The “skew” that apparently underlies the first part of “squeejaw” seems to be the common English adjective meaning “at a slant, out of alignment,” more commonly seen in the form “askew.” The “jaw” part is a bit more mysterious. A similar term, “whopperjawed,” has  roots in the dialects of England and means both someone with a crooked or prominent jaw and something that is poorly built and crooked. So the “jaw” of “squeejaw” may have originally literally referred to a person’s misshapen jaw. But variants of “squeejaw,” “skewjaw,” etc., substitute “jay,” “gaw” or “haw” for “jaw,” so there’s a good chance that “jaw” doesn’t really mean much of anything. In Iowa, for instance, a player who makes a flubbed, wobbly shot in a game of marbles is said to be “shooting screw jay.” With so many variations on this theme out there “in the wild,” it’s probably impossible to pin down which came first, but at least we know that your mother’s “squeejaw” came from a very large and popular family.

With all thy going, get lost.

Dear Word Detective: In the midst of composing an email in which I used the words “foregoing,” “forgive,” and “therefore,” I am wondering whether I should have used “forgoing” seeing as I mean “to go without,” and, secondly, whether “for” and “fore” have any relationship and how they came to be used in such ways. — Danny.

That’s a good question. Or two. Actually, depending on how you look at it, it might be  four or eight questions, and that’s not counting that you left out “therefor,” which is a separate word from “therefore.” I may think of others before we’re done. Anybody want more coffee?

If you were to set out to prove that the English language is a tricky racket (which it is), a good place to start would be with the words “foregoing” and “forgoing,” or, as we will here, with the basic forms “to forgo” and “to forego.” The two words have a lot in common, and there’s the rub. Both first appeared in Old English (as “forgan” and “foregan,” the “gan” meaning “go”), and in both words the “go” is our common English verb “to go,” meaning “to move or proceed.” The difference comes in the prefixes of the two words, “for” and “fore,” which differ by only one letter. “Fore” and “for” spring from the same Germanic root meaning “before,” but the two diverged in meaning in Middle English.

The prefix “for” generally carries a negative connotation, expressing senses of “away,” “rejection,” or “off” (as in “forget”), a connotation of prohibition or exclusion (as in “forbid”), a sense of totality or completeness (as in “forgive”), or expressing abstention or neglect, which brings us to “forgo.” The original meaning of “forgo” was simply “to go past or pass over,” both literally (as in bypassing a town) or, figuratively, to neglect, avoid or ignore. This eventually developed into our modern sense of “to go without, abstain from, deny to oneself, etc.” (“The Pleasures are to be foregone, and the Pains accepted,” 1749).

“Fore” as a prefix carries the general sense of “before” (e.g., “forewarn”) or “at the front of,” either in physical space or time (e.g., “forehead”), as well as senses of “preceding” (“forefathers”) and “superior” (“foreman”). “Forego” therefore means simply “to precede, either in position or time.” In practical use you’re most likely to see “forego” in the forms “foregoing” meaning “preceding” (“Bob decided to ignore their foregoing argument and try to work with Sam”) or “foregone” in the sense of “already done or settled” (“The jury was out only ten minutes because their verdict was a foregone conclusion”).

Incidentally, the tenses of both “forgo” and “forego” follow those of “go” itself, so you have “forwent” and “forgone” (“Ted had forgone dinner but regretted it around midnight”), as well as “forewent” and “foregone.” I am also duty-bound to note that “forgo,” meaning “to abstain from,” etc., can also be (but fortunately almost never is) properly spelled “forego.” Don’t ask. English is weird. But “forego” (to precede) cannot be spelled “forgo,” so there’s that.

I said that “therefore” and “therefor” were separate words, and they do have different meanings, but they’re really the same word. Spelled “therefor,” it means “for that thing, act, etc.” (“He shall supply a copy of such report … on payment of the sum of one shilling therefor,” 1885) or “for that reason” (“Tell Briggs that his ticket came safely, and that I am thankful therefor,” 1848). Spelled “therefore,” it means “in consequence of that” or “that being so” (“The Franks were the stronger, and therefore the masters,” 1845).