To serve and hornswoggle.

Dear Word Detective: I recently visited Williamsburg,VA, where, while eating at a restaurant, I noticed that the fork only had three prongs. I made a mention of it to the waiter and they proceeded to tell me that I was eating with a “threek,” and that a fork had four prongs, a “took” had two prongs, and no civilized person would ever eat using a one-pronged fork, called “a stick.” The reasoning seems to make sense, but was this server correct? — David Thompson.

Oh boy, here we go again. Someday, when I am rich (ha) and have nothing better to do, I’m going to travel the world, visiting “historic” tourist attractions and asking innocent questions such as the one you posed. Then, when the waiter or “cowherd” or “blacksmith” feeds me a ridiculous fable, I’m going to smack the miscreant with a trout. I’m not sure why these places make sure they get the wigs and bustles just right, but think it’s perfectly fine to invent insane language lore.

So no, the waiter was was dispensing pure, unvarnished flapdoodle. Incidentally, many of my favorite foods come on a stick. Mmmm, fishsicles!

The entire edifice of deceit foisted upon your innocent tourist soul by that duplicitous waiter rests on one feeble assumption: that the word “fork” has something to do with “four.” It doesn’t. “Fork” comes from the Old English “forca,” which in turn is rooted in the Latin “furca,” meaning “pitchfork.” In English, “fork” referred to pitchforks and similar agricultural implements until the 15th century. Use of the fork in England didn’t really become common until the 18th century (other parts of the world had adopted it earlier), the knife and spoon being the primary dining implements (along with the fingers) before then.

The number of tines on a dining fork has varied over the centuries, and although four-tined forks are most common today, three- or even two-tined variants (for dealing with pickles, shrimp, etc) are not uncommon. The terms “threek” and “took,” however, are almost certainly inventions of public-relations pixies of the sort lurking behind the scones, so to speak, at Williamsburg, and do not occur in any established dictionary. That doesn’t mean that no one ever uses the terms, just that not enough people do to make them “common.”

Two other “fork-like” implements do bear their own names. One is the “trident,” the three-tined spear carried by the Greek sea god Poseidon. The other is the “spork,” a cross between a spoon and a fork (essentially a spoon with three or four short tines at the tip). Sporks date back to the 19th century, and the name has been the subject of trademark litigation pretty much constantly since then, but we will probably never know who actually invented the gizmo.

Ow, my brains!

Dear Word Detective: I often have heard, and have used, the term “smart,” in reference to hurting, as in “Boy, that really smarts.” Is this in any way related to “smart” as an assessment of one’s knowledge? — Van Neie.

As in “I guess trimming my toenails with tin snips wasn’t very smart, because this really smarts”? Good question, and the fact that a sentence like that wouldn’t set off alarm bells in most of our noggins is a tribute to the remarkable ability of the English language to use what appears to be the same word to mean two very different things. Or maybe it means that we’re just not really paying close attention to what we say.

It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that “smart” (learned) and “smart” (pain) are actually two different words from unrelated sources. English is full of such homonyms, words spelled (and often pronounced) the same but with different meanings and different origins. One classic example is the word “fluke,” which can mean a kind of flounder-like fish, the fins on a whale’s tail, the pointy bits on the end of a ship’s anchor, or a stroke of good luck. All those “flukes” come from different sources; English evolved “fluke” four separate times, much as the wings of bats evolved entirely independently from those of birds.

“Smart,” however, is one of those cases where the two primary senses, even though they seem hard to connect to each other, share a common origin. “Smart” meaning “hurt” is actually the grandparent of “smart” meaning “on the ball.” It’s the same word.

The source of “smart” is the prehistoric Germanic root word “smert,” which meant “to be painful; to hurt,” and which eventually produced our modern English “smart.” As a verb, “to smart” has always meant “to hurt,” usually literally, although later uses have invoked the word in a figurative sense (“The fact that it was his own mother who fingered him to the IRS was what really smarted”).

It was when “smart” the verb begat “smart” the adjective that things really started to get interesting. The earliest use of “smart” as an adjective was to mean literally “causing pain, stinging,” as one might speak of a “smart” lash with a whip. But by around 1300, “smart” was also being applied figuratively to “sharp” or “cutting” remarks (“He seldom failed of a smart word or two upon my littleness,” Swift, 1726). This led to “smart” being used to mean “strong, quick, intense” in manner, which led, by the 17th century, to the word being used to mean “clever,” “witty” or “knowledgeable.” The sense of “smart” people being quick, witty and fashionable led shortly thereafter to the use of “smart” to also mean “neatly attired” and “trim.”