readme:

Well, Spring has officially sprung here at TWD World Headquarters.  Twitchy the Squirrel is eating himself sick at the bird feeder, the mourning doves are building nests in the most inappropriate places imaginable (atop the door post of the garage, for instance, making every day a series of heart-stopping alarms for the little feathered idiots), and twilight brings vast herds of rabbits running in circles on the lawn.  Best of all, Babs and Monroe, our two resident turkey vultures, have returned from their winter hideaway (Palm Beach?  Costa Rica?) to nest, as they do every year, in our spooky dead tree down by the road.  If you follow that link, you’ll see that vultures have gotten a bad rap in popular culture and are actually peaceful, devoted family birds that only want to help us.  They are also seriously cool close up.  In the afternoon Babs and Monroe swoop low over our side yard, 10 or 15 feet off the ground, and they are huge.  As the article notes, vultures are almost voiceless, unlike the red-tailed hawks around here, which have a chillingly primal scream.  The only noise I’ve ever heard Babs and Monroe make is a kind of very loud huffing sound, like a large bull snorting.

It really is like living in a zoo.  Whenever the emergency squad takes off from the firehouse in town a few miles away, every coyote within earshot chimes in with mournful howling.  I was out late with Brownie and Pokie a few nights ago when the squad took attendance, indicating that there were several coyotes in the underbrush about a hundred feet from us.  Uh, time to go inside, girls.

Onward.  All of the columns in this month’s issue were actually written (and sent to newspapers and subscribers) in August and September of last year, so please do not be alarmed by the anachronistic references to the election, etc., to be found therein.  The solution for folks who do find this sort of thing disquieting is, of course, to subscribe, which brings us to the nudge du jour.  As I said last month, things are getting grim around here.  Newspapers are dropping like flies, book publishing is on the ropes, and my multiple sclerosis precludes my getting a job doing something else.

Worst of all, the dismal state of the economy has dramatically reduced the number of readers able to subscribe, cutting my income from this site to nearly nothing just at the point when it was stepping into a starring role in our financial drama.

So, please consider subscribing for a measly $15 per year. A pittance, really. You’ll never even notice it’s gone. But you’ll be making a passel of kittens very happy.   (Actual kitten shown at left.)

If you can’t swing a subscription at the moment, please consider donating any amount ($1, $5, $32 billion, etc.) via the PayPal button below:

Incidentally, if you happened to visit this site earlier this week, and you were using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you may have noticed that the entire site seemed to be weirdly garbled. Sorry about that. There was a malformed tag in a widget in the left sidebar that didn’t affect Firefox at all but caused IE to have a nervous breakdown. Just a little glitch, only took me two solid hours to figure it out. People sometimes write me with suggestions for improvements to pass along to my “web designer.” Ha. I am the man behind the curtain, folks. There is no staff, there are no assistants. Just moi.

Lastly, our sister websites Ask for It by Name! and My Favorite Word have recently been updated.  I will do my best to keep them current from now on.

And now, on with the show…

I have the dim neighbor.  Anybody got a spare horse?

Dear Word Detective:  I don’t know why, but lately I’ve been unable to rid my consciousness of the phrase “tilting at windmills.”  Unable to, and hardly more willing to, find it anywhere, I turn to you and your wonderful staff for help. — Richard Clow.

That’s a good question, but I’m afraid my wonderful staff won’t be of much help, as they are occupied (quite literally) at the moment by an infestation of fleas.  Gus the Cat is perched atop the Frigidaire scratching furiously, and Pokie the Dog is apparently so intent on chewing her tail that she hasn’t answered the phone all week.  But I’ll do my best to carry on without them.

“To tilt at windmills” is a venerable English idiom meaning to pursue an unrealistic,  impractical, or impossible goal, or to battle imaginary enemies.  In current usage, “tilting at windmills” carries connotations of engaging in a noble but unrealistic (usually wildly unrealistic) effort, an endeavor which may garner the admiration of onlookers but which usually strikes other people as delusional (“Rather eccentric … inclined to tilt at windmills,” Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile, 1937).  The phrase is especially popular in the US media during the presidential election season every four years, when at least two or three candidates pop up who have something to say but exactly zero chances of actually winning.

The first occurrence of this phrase found in print so far (in the form “fight with windmills”) dates to 1644, which is remarkable because the source of the phrase had first been published only a few years earlier, in 1605, and in Spanish to boot.  The relative rapidity of the spread of the phrase in English is a tribute to the enormous popularity of its source, the novel “Don Quixote” (in full, “The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha”) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, first published in English in 1620.   In Cervantes’ story, a retired eccentric obsessed with the ideals of medieval chivalry imagines himself a knight and sets out on a quest for adventure, which is made considerably more dramatic by the fact that “Don Quixote” (as the hero has dubbed himself) misinterprets just about everything he encounters.  In the relevant passage early on in Quixote’s sojourn, he and his companion Sancho Panza (a dim neighbor he has recruited as his squire) encounter some windmills, which Don Quixote charges on his horse, his knight’s lance extended, believing them to be not windmills, but malevolent giants.

Had they actually been giants, of course, Quixote’s effort would have been noble but probably futile.  The fact that they were actually windmills made the episode a perfect metaphor for an effort that is noble and futile but also deluded and a bit silly.  “Tilt” in the phrase “tilting at windmills” is an antiquated sense of the verb “to tilt” meaning “to engage in combat,” specifically for two mounted knights to charge each other with lances extended.

The enduring popularity of “Don Quixote” is also the source of our English adjective “quixotic” (usually pronounced “kwik-SAH-tik,” in contrast to “Quixote,” which is usually pronounced “kee-HOH-tee”).  “Quixotic,” as you would expect, means “foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals,” but also carries connotations of “unpredictable” and “fickle.”

Obviously undermedicated.

Dear Word Detective: In the poem “Casey at the Bat,” one line reads “But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake, And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake.” Why is Flynn a “hoodoo” and Blake a “cake”? — Robert L. O’Brien.

Hooray for baseball, the one sport, in my opinion, worth watching. Unfortunately, year after year, I keep forgetting to actually watch any games on TV. But I know I like baseball because if I happen to tune in halfway through a game, I’m perfectly happy to watch the rest of it. I don’t even care who’s playing.

Of course, if I were a real baseball fan, I’d probably be able to recite “Casey at the Bat” from memory. It’s not only the most famous sports poem ever written, but it’s been declared the most famous poem of any kind written by an American, and it’s certainly been the most widely performed and recorded. Written by Ernest L. Thayer and originally published in the San Francisco Examiner newspaper in 1888, “Casey” tells the story of the fictional Mudville team’s crunch moment in a game, losing by two runs with two outs in the ninth inning. All hope rests on “mighty Casey,” the local star, who comes to bat with runners on second and third.

Flynn and Blake are those runners, and the mere fact that they both get base hits is considered a small miracle, as reflected in the poem’s third stanza: “But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake, And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake; So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat, For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s getting to the bat.”

You’ll notice that the word applied to Flynn is “lulu,” not “hoodoo.” Thayer’s original poem was modified several times after its original publication, and later versions changed “lulu” to “hoodoo,” though why the change was made is unclear. A “lulu” in baseball slang of the period was “an unskilled player,” probably a sarcastic use of “lulu” meaning “something very good.” A “hoodoo,” however, was a player whose very presence was a jinx, bad luck. I guess someone though that changing “lulu” to “hoodoo” (probably just a modification of “voodoo”) would heighten the tension of the poem.

“Cake” was also slang at the time for “a player of dubious skill,” which is nearly the opposite of the use of “cake” in current baseball slang to mean “something very easy” (a shortening of “piece of cake”). In The Annotated Casey at the Bat, Martin Gardner explains that “cake” when Thayer wrote his poem was “a slang word of the time for a dude, dandy, or male homosexual. Here it probably means no more than a handsome, vain ball player, much concerned about his personal appearance, but a weak player.” Later versions of the poem changed “cake” to “fake.”

But while Flynn and Blake may have been considered weak players, at least they got base hits. As for Casey, he gave the world the immortal final stanza of the poem: “Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville— mighty Casey has struck out.”

Formerly known as Ishmael.

Dear Word Detective:  This is a bit of a cheat as there are probably three questions in one here.  Staring at the word “lorry” the other day, I realized it was pretty ridiculous.  Our “lorry” is your “truck” and neither seem to have any clear origin.  Then, of course, we say we are having “no truck” with something, meaning that we don’t want to have anything to do with it.  Are there any explanations for “lorry,” “truck” and “truck”? — David, Ripon, Yorkshire, England.

Hey, you’re right.  I’ve just spent a few minutes staring at “lorry” and it is indeed a very silly word for a vehicle.  “Lorry” sounds more like the name of a small, useless fish.  But I may not be a good judge of such things, because I get the same feeling after a few minutes of staring at my own name.  That cannot possibly be my name.  My real name is Frank, or Joe.  Vinny?  Something beginning with a consonant, that’s for sure.  I’m sure I’ll remember it soon.

I would, however, say that your “lorry” is a much nicer-sounding word than our “truck,” which strikes me as the kind of sound you’d make if you were beaned with a softball.  Compared to “truck,” “lorry” is positively euphonious.  Unfortunately, as you have apparently discovered, the roots of “lorry” are a bit mysterious.  Actually, they are very mysterious, and the best guess is that it comes from the obsolete English dialect term “lurry,” meaning “to carry or drag along.”  Unfortunately (again), no one knows where “lurry” came from either, so the trail goes cold at that point.  We do know that “lorry” first appeared in print in the early 19th century meaning “a long, low wagon,” and by 1911 had acquired its modern meaning of “a large motor vehicle used to carry cargo.”

Compared to the fog surrounding “lorry,” the roots of “truck” in the “large vehicle” sense  are satisfyingly clear.  “Truck,” which first appeared in English around 1611 meaning “small wheel or roller” (specifically the sort mounted under cannons aboard warships), is a shortened form of the older word “truckle,” meaning “wheel, roller or pulley,” which appeared in the 15th century and was derived from the Latin “trochlea,” meaning “pulley.”  The first use of “truck” in print in its modern sense of “wheeled vehicle used for transporting heavy items” came in 1774.

When we say that we want to “have no truck with” someone or something, we are using a “truck” completely unrelated to the vehicle kind of “truck.”  When this sort of “truck” first entered English around 1225, derived from the French “troquer,” it meant simply “to exchange something with someone else.”  By the 1400s we were using it to mean “to barter, to sell or exchange commodities for profit,” and, by the 17th century, “truck” had taken on the its more general modern sense of “to have dealings with.”  Today this “truck” is almost always found in the negative phrase “to have no truck with,” i.e., to have no dealings or social contact with (“Mebbe your Ma’s right. Mebbe you hadn’t ought to have no truck with the Forresters,” M.K. Rawlings, The Yearling, 1938).

Incidentally, the one place you’re likely to find that old “sale or barter” sense of “truck” still being used is in the phrase “truck farm,” meaning a small farm producing vegetables, etc., for sale rather than the owner’s own use.

Executive Summary:  Beats me.

Dear Word Detective: My buddy and I were wondering what the origins of the word “bamboozled” were. I know it means to take advantage of someone in a business transaction, but does it have Asian roots, with the “bamboo” root of the word? — Jonnie Wethington.

That’s an interesting hunch, and one that never occurred to me. Come to think of it, I could probably concoct a superficially plausible story about sailors in the Far East guzzling booze made from bamboo and waking up with their wallets gone. But that, as Richard Nixon once declared in a slightly different context, would be wrong.

You mention business dealings in connection with “bamboozle,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “to take in by elaborate methods of deceit; hoodwink.” But it’s worth noting that this is a presidential election year here in the US, and a cynic (that’s me) would say that we’re knee-deep in bamboozlement already with more than two months to go. It’s enough to drive one to guzzling bambooze, if there is such a thing.

What makes dreaming up a nifty story about “bamboozle” so tempting is the unfortunate fact that the actual source of the word is shrouded in mystery. (I like “shrouded in mystery” much better than “unknown,” don’t you?)

What we do know about “bamboozle” is that it first appeared in English at the beginning of the 18th century, just in time to make the list Jonathan Swift (author of “Gulliver’s Travels” and “A Modest Proposal”) was compiling of words that were, in his opinion, corroding, if not destroying, the English language (as outlined in his “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue,” 1710). Swift also, by the way, objected to the words “mob” and “banter,” as well as the contractions “I’d” and “can’t.” Since most of the terms that drew Swift’s ire were, at that time, slang used by the lower classes in England, it’s fair to assume “bamboozle” originated in the same precincts.

One of the more plausible theories about the origin of “bamboozle” ties it to the Scots word “bombaze,” meaning “to confuse or mystify.” Efforts have also been made to connect it to the French word “embabouiner” meaning “to make a fool of” (literally, “to make a baboon of”). It’s also possible, of course, that “bamboozle” was simply dreamed up out of thin air. That’s never a very satisfying explanation, but English is full of words that were invented to fit a momentary need and then went on to lead long and happy lives.

“Gobbledygook,” for instance, was coined in 1944 by US Representative Maury Maverick (grandson of Sam Maverick, whose habit of not branding his cows gave us “maverick” meaning “independent”). Rep. Maverick, overseeing factory production during WWII, described the doubletalk and jargon he was encountering from government officials as “gobbledygook” one day, and the word was an instant hit. He later explained that “gobbledygook” was his attempt to imitate the sound a turkey makes. But in one inspired moment he gave us the perfect word for the sound a bureaucracy makes.

I’ll take two Value Sprees and a small absinthe, please.

Dear Word Detective:  I just cashed my paycheck and told the bank teller that I could now go out and “paint the town red.”  Why would I say that? — Phil Norton.

Because you’re doing your patriotic duty as an American and spending every last dime you get so our national personal savings rate remains safely below zero?  Or maybe you’re just tormenting me, knowing full well that if I set out to paint our little town red I’d have to settle for some really bad pizza and a gallon of Jolt from the Quickee-Mart.

To “paint the town red” means to celebrate flamboyantly and publicly, especially to go on a wild spree, usually involving multiple bars, restaurants and clubs plus copious quantities of alcohol.  “Painting the town red” is, by definition, a group activity, requiring at least two people, and must be conducted in a spirit of giddy jubilation.  One lonely guy on a crosstown bender is not “painting the town red.”  Of course, alcohol is not strictly required.  Lottery winners, for example, often “paint the town red” after their wins, sprinting from store to store and acquiring plasma TVs, cars, multiple pedigreed pets and scores of brand new distant cousins as they go.

The two questions that pop up when considering the phrase “paint the town red” are, of course, what it could possibly mean to “paint” in this sense, and why red in particular?  The verb “to paint” is, as you would imagine, quite old, derived from the Latin “pingere,” meaning “to paint.”  Interestingly, the noun “paint” arrived later than the verb (and was derived from it, in a process called “back formation”).

The original meaning in English of “to paint” was “to depict a subject using paint,” still a standard sense today.  The “make that wall dark blue” sense of “to paint” came a bit later, but it’s that sense of “completely transform” we find in “paint the town red.”  A band of celebrants “painting the town red” sets out to transform the humdrum with their excitement, to liven up every corner of the city, to make the locals sit up and take notice, to cast restraint to the wind and make the town theirs for a night with no worry about the morning after.

The first use of “paint the town red” in print found so far dates back to a New York Times article of 1883 (“Mr. James Hennessy offered a resolution that the entire body proceed forthwith to Newark and get drunk… Then the Democrats charged upon the street cars, and being wafted into Newark proceeded, to use their own metaphor, to ‘paint the town red’.”).  Red does seem to have always been the color of choice, although Rudyard Kipling, in 1889, fussily specified “vermilion” (an shade of red with a hint of orange).  James Joyce, in Ulysses (1922), differed slightly (“And there he was at the end of his tether after having often painted the town tolerably pink”), but stayed within the red spectrum.

So why red?  It’s the color usually used to connote power, vitality and excitement (often with a hint of danger), all the features of a really good spree.  And “painting the town blue” sounds like no fun at all.

I hope we’re all taking notes, because these are the old days of the future.

Dear Word Detective:  Is it true that in the “old days” the “threshold” was to help hold in the stuff on the floor of a dwelling? — Decee Ray.

Ah yes, the old days, land of mystery and strange customs.  Has anyone noticed that, as the far corners of the world have become more familiar through tourism and technology, we’ve started attributing to our own ancestors the sort of weird customs that previously would have been credited to inhabitants of, say, the remoter precincts of Borneo?

What brings that to mind is the fact that your question repeats a small fragment of a much longer essay, entitled “Life in the 1500s,” which has been circulating on the internet since about 1999.  Apparently prompted by the release of the film “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998, this anonymous “believe it or not” description of the “quirky aspects” of life in 16th century England asserts dozens of absurd “facts,” such as cats and dogs routinely living in the roofs of thatched-roof dwellings.

Worse, the focus of the essay is to use these fabrications to explain the origins of common English words and phrases, such as “raining cats and dogs,” which, the essay confidently explains, comes from those roof-dwelling household pets losing their footing during a downpour.  It doesn’t, and, as I said when I first read this pile of nonsense ten years ago, even the parts that are not overtly insane are still breathtakingly wrong.  I don’t have room here to dissect the whole essay, but the folks at www.snopes.com have done a good job.  Just search there for “1500s.”

Onward.  Midway through this cavalcade of bunk, the authors announce that it was common to spread “thresh” (presumably reeds or rushes) on the floor of one’s house to prevent slipping, necessitating the addition of a piece of wood in the bottom of the doorway, called a “threshold,” to keep the “thresh” from “slipping outside.”  Voila, our modern word “threshold” for the bar of stone or wood at the base of a doorway.

It is true that floors of the period were sometimes covered with a layer of rushes or reeds (known as “thresh” in the 17th century — Snopes is wrong on this one point).  But “threshold” has nothing to do with “threshes” on the floor.  The word “threshold” first appeared in Old English as “therscold” or “threscold.”  The first part of the word carried the meaning of “to stamp with the feet, to stomp noisily,” which is, of course, what one does when entering a room with mud or snow on one’s shoes.  The second part of the word is a mystery, but it is fairly certain that it was something other than our modern word “hold,” and it was transformed into the more familiar “hold” over time.

Interestingly, “thresh,” which we use today to mean “to separate grain from husks and chaff,” originally meant “to beat or stomp,” because the earliest method of separating wheat from the chaff, etc., was simply to stomp on it, like crushing grapes for wine.

Look on the bright side.  Most groundhogs never get to read the New Yorker.

Dear Word Detective:  In rural Missouri, teens often ride around and knock over the mailboxes setting on posts along the road. While mending the post one day, it made me think if the “post,” the piece of wood that is now in splinters, and the “post,” as in the letters and bills scattered on the ground, were related to more than just the scene of the crime.  Also, the prefix “post-” (as in “postmortem”), is it also part and parcel of this root?.– Margherita.

They still do that where you are?  The first few years we lived in rural Ohio, we lost three or four boxes to marauding adolescents, but lately they seem to be too busy text-messaging each other at 65 mph to take time to bash our mailbox.  Thank heavens we can still count on the myopic nitwit from the township road crew to smash our post to smithereens with his tractor at least once every summer when he mows the berm.

There is no direct connection between the wooden “post” on which your mailbox sits (or sat) and “post” in the sense of “mail” (including such terms as “post office” and “postal workers”).   The prefix “post,” meaning “after” (as in “postwar,” “postgraduate,” etc.), is unrelated to either of them.

“Post” meaning “upright column or pillar” (usually of wood) is the oldest of the three, derived from the Latin “postis,” meaning “doorpost,” which was probably formed from the combination of “por,” meaning “forward,” and a form of “stare,” meaning “to stand.”  Interestingly, this “post” is also the source of the verb “to post,” originally meaning to fasten a notice to a post (or, today, a bulletin board or the like), as well as “poster” in the sense of a large notice or graphic placard.

The “post” in “post office” and similar terms, however, comes from the organization of early mail systems in Medieval Europe.  To carry mail long distances, riders were placed at set intervals along major roads (later known, logically, as “post roads”), and the mail was passed from one rider to the next in a relay system similar to the Pony Express in the Old West.  These early mail riders were “posted” at their stations, “post” in this sense coming from the Latin verb “ponere,” meaning “to place.”  (The same verb “ponere” also gave us our modern English word “position.”)  Although there may have been wooden “posts” (poles) at these “posts” (positions)  for riders to hitch their horses, the two kinds of “posts” are not related.

I hate to add to this “post-post” tango, but there is another verb “to post,” based on this “position” kind of “post,” meaning “to send by mail.”  This “to post” is more common in the UK than in the US, where we generally use the verb “to mail.”

The prefix “post” meaning “after” is from yet another source, the Latin adverb (and preposition) “post” meaning “behind” or “after.”  There’s no connection between this “post” and either the “mail” or “wooden column” kinds of post.  But it’s interesting that the verb “to postpone” brings together “post” in this “after” sense with our pal “ponere” meaning “to place” (which gave us the “post” in “post office”).  “Postpone,” of course, means to delay something (an appointment, a deadline, etc.) after its original date.

Pete and Re-Pete go sailing.*

Dear Word Detective: “Quaint,” to me, means “somewhat outmoded, a little peculiar, and yet oddly appealing” — kind of like the word itself. But in thinking about it, I wondered if it is related to “acquaint.” If so, it would seem that “quaint” originally meant something like “familiar” or “well-known.” Am I even close? — Charles Anderson.

That’s a great question. English is full of words that sound as if they might be related in some way, and it’s a toss-up whether the pairs that actually are are more or less interesting than the pairs that aren’t. I tend to think that the best cases are actually words that are related, but mean such different things today that the connection between them leads the explorer down a twisted and nearly impenetrable path.

“Hearse” and “rehearse,” for instance, come from the same Latin root “hirpex,” meaning “rake.” In Old French, the derivative “herse” came to mean the “rake-like” metal frame that held candles in a church, especially over a coffin during a funeral, and eventually “hearse” in English came to mean the carriage that carries the deceased to the funeral. Meanwhile, that literal “rake” sense of “herse” gave us “rehercer” in French, “rehearse” in 14th century English, meaning “to rake again,” i.e., “to say over and over again” in preparation for a performance.

“Quaint” and “acquaint” also share a Latin root, but although their paths diverged early on, these two words never wandered as far apart in meaning as “hearse” and “rehearse” did. The ultimate source of both is the Latin verb “cognoscere,” meaning “to know,” also the root of “cognition,” “cognizance” and related words.

In the case of “acquaint,” the verb “cognoscere” further developed into “accognoscere,” meaning “to know well,” which passed through Old French as “acointer” and eventually produced, in the late 13th century, our English word “acquaint.” The initial sense of “acquaint” in English was simply “to make oneself known, to introduce yourself,” but it soon took on the sense of “to become familiar with, get to know” as one might “acquaint” oneself with one’s new neighbors. This use is now largely obsolete, replaced by the more cumbersome “to become acquainted with.” Another sense that developed, still very much in use today, was “acquaint” meaning “to gain personal knowledge of,” as in “At lunch I decided to acquaint myself with the restaurants in the neighborhood.”

“Quaint” veered off the path followed by “acquaint” back in Old French, where the Latin “cognoscere” had also produced “coint,” an adjective meaning “clever or knowing.” When “quaint” appeared in English in the early 13th century, it meant, of a person, “cunning” or “ingenious,” and, of a thing, “elaborate” or “finely made” (i.e., produced by a skilled artist). These senses are all obsolete now. But by the 14th century, “quaint” had also come to mean “remarkable or unusual” and “mysterious,” which eventually gave us our modern meaning of “attractively unusual in appearance or character” and (the most common meaning today) “pleasingly old-fashioned.”

So “quaint” and “acquaint” were indeed closely related at the starting line, but have been running on different routes for hundreds of years.

—-

* Smatteryou?  You were never 10 years old?  Pete and Re-Pete went out in a boat.  Pete fell out and who was left?

Like a rut, but cool.

Dear Word Detective:  I was watching Antiques Roadshow and saw what they called a “transitional piece of pottery from the Neoclassic to the Modern” by an artist named Gruebe who was working in the ’30s and ’40s.  The decoration was simple leaves, but the artist left the “hand throwing” lines in the body of the piece, making it look “groovy” to me.  Could the work of this artist be the derivation of “groovy”?  And how many countless thousands of others have made this connection before me? — Jim Queen.

As far as I can tell, you’re it, Jim.  That doesn’t mean that your insight is wrong, of course.  Einstein was the only person who thought certain things, and he turned out to be right.  Then again, Larry down the road from us thought certain other things, and he’s no longer allowed to play with sharp objects.  This is why I keep all my major discoveries to myself.

“Groovy” is known today, of course, as quintessential 1960s “counterculture” slang meaning “excellent, great, very fashionable” (“There are a lot of guys going round with groovy hair-styles,” 1968).  Having lived through that period and social milieu myself, however, I must note that anyone in my circle of friends who had used “groovy” in anything but a sarcastic tone would have been suspected of being an undercover cop.  And it wasn’t just “groovy” that was considered bogus.  Several other supposedly popular catch phrases of the day (e.g., “far out,” “peace, baby” and “down with the system”) were actually popular only in the imaginations of “Dragnet” and “Mod Squad” scriptwriters.

The emergence of “groovy” in the 1960s was actually a sort of reincarnation of the word, which had first appeared in the jazz subculture of the 1930s and was originally spelled “groovey” (“‘Groovey,’ name applied to state of mind which is conducive to good playing,” American Speech, 1937).  “Groovey” itself was based on the phrase “in the groove,” used by jazz musicians to describe playing that was smooth and effortlessly excellent.

“Groove” is, of course, a very old word, derived from a Germanic root meaning “pit,” the same root which gave us the English word “grave.”  The original sense of “groove” was, in fact, “mining shaft or pit,” and it wasn’t until the 17th century that “groove” acquired its modern meaning of “channel or hollow cut in the surface of something.”  By 1902, however, “groove” was being used to mean the spiral track on the surface of a phonograph record in which the needle rides.  So when jazz musicians spoke of “being in the groove” while playing music, it meant that they felt (or sounded) as if they were producing the music as easily, fluently and flawlessly as a phonograph needle following the grooves on a record.  Not that there was anything mechanical about their playing; to be truly “in the groove” is to lose oneself in the creative process, what some writers call being “in the flow.”

Anyway, the bottom line is that the origin of “groovy” has nothing to do with Mr. Gruebe and his pottery, but, considering the overlap of the jazz and arts worlds in the 1930s and 40s, it’s entirely possible that Gruebe himself had to suffer through some labored puns about his “groovy” work.

Take your pick.

Dear Word Detective:  Could you tell me the origin of the expression “full monty”?  I tried dictionaries, encyclopedias, and friends, without any success.  Everybody knows what it means but nobody knows its origin. — Elzbieta from Montreal.

Hey, there’s a question I haven’t seen in a while.  Exactly ten years ago I was inundated with queries from readers about “the full monty.”  I get such waves of questions fairly frequently, always prompted by the sudden prominence of a word or phrase in the popular media. The impetus in this case was the release in the US a few weeks earlier of a British comedy called “The Full Monty” about a group of unemployed steel workers in the north of England who decide to form a Chippendales-style male striptease troupe.  What made the “monty” wave funny was that a few months earlier, the film’s US distributor had actually called me on the phone, asking me to explain the title of their own film to them.  I really should have demanded a screen credit.  Or at least some free popcorn.

Since I’m not certain that everybody does know what the phrase means, I should explain that “the full monty” is British slang for “everything, all the way, the works,” making it essentially synonymous with “the whole shebang” or “the whole nine yards.”  In the film, “the full monty” refers to complete nudity in a striptease show, the subject of some debate among the men (with one character shouting, “No one said anything to me about the full monty!”).  But the phrase most definitely did not originate with the film, having been current in northern England at least since the early 1980s and possibly much earlier.

Just where “the full monty” did come from is a question that may never be definitively answered, although there is no shortage of theories.  One of the most often heard is that the phrase originated as a reference to the famed British military leader of World War II, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (popularly known as “Monty”).  According to this theory, “the full monty” refers either to Montgomery’s blinding raft of medals on the chest of his uniform,  or to his insistence on starting each day with an elaborate breakfast.  Unfortunately, there isn’t even a shred of evidence for either version of the Montgomery theory.

Another theory traces “monty” to “Monte,” Spanish for “mountain” and the name of a now-obsolete card game in which the “pot” of money at stake was called “the Monte.”  To win the pot would therefore be to take “the full monte.”  There is evidence that “monte” was used in this sense (the “shell game” racket known as “three card monte” is certainly alive and well), but, again, there’s not enough evidence to close the case.

Yet another theory, considered by many authorities to be the most plausible, traces “monty” to a well-known chain of tailoring shops owned by Montague Maurice Burton (1885-1952).  A complete three-piece suit bought from Burton’s shops (one of which was in Sheffield, where the film is set) was, according to legend, known as “the full Monty.”  So if a regular guy were getting married, for instance, he might well save up his money and splurge on “the full monty” for the occasion.  I’d say that this is probably the actual origin of the phrase, since Burton’s shops were quite popular and a formal three-piece suit strongly matches the common “whole shebang” usage of “the full monty.”

A little dab’ll do you.

Dear Word Detective: I was telling my English penpal that I am reluctant to let my landlord paint my apartment, because the job would be merely “a lick and a promise.” She remarked that the phrase is used in the same way on both sides of the Pond, and we both wondered what it means literally, and where it came from. Can you shed some light? — Judith Baron, NYC.

I think your trepidation is well founded. Beware of clowns bearing paint cans. Before we bought our house, we noticed that much of the interior had been recently painted, which seemed like a good sign. It wasn’t. When, much later, we pulled up the cheesy wall-to-wall carpet the previous owner had installed, we discovered that he had covered the nice wooden floors with a Jackson Pollock splatter-fest of cheap white paint.

“A lick and a promise” means, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it, “a superficial effort made without care or enthusiasm.” To perform a task with “a lick and a promise” is to do the absolute minimum required, and often far less than that. With “a lick and a promise,” you’re not really tackling the task, only half-heartedly pretending to chase it.

Of course, almost any field of human endeavor has its slackers, from car mechanics who only feign changing your oil to playwrights who try to skate by on momentum, as Mary McCarthy noted in a 1948 review: “The Dublin Gate players … had a slapdash style of acting that suggested an Irish house-maid flailing about with a dust-cloth — they gave their roles a lick and a promise and trusted to the audience’s good-nature to take the will for the deed.”

The metaphor of a careless maid, however unfair it probably is, harkens back to the original meaning of “a lick and a prayer,” which was “a superficial cleaning,” specifically what the Oxford English Dictionary pegs as “a slight and hasty wash,” the “wash” being the process of washing one’s face and hands. Imagine a child, sent to wash up before supper, who skips the soap and only splashes some water on his hands, yet stoutly asserts that he is squeaky clean.

The “lick” in “lick and a promise” is the standard noun, based on the verb “to lick” in the sense of, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “to pass the tongue over (something), e.g., with the object of tasting, moistening the surface, or removing something from it.” The noun “lick” has been used in this sense of “quick and casual cleaning” since the 17th century, quite possibly drawn from the way a cat cleans itself (although cats are known for their hygienic diligence).

“Promise” in the phrase, however, is a bit mysterious. It could mean an implicit promise to do a better job next time, or a promise that no one will notice the shoddiness of the job, or it might be just a reference to the dreamy, inattentive mentality of the slacker.