Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Whew.  That was close.  It’s still March, right?  It must be, somewhere.  Australia?  By the way (he said, deftly changing the subject), is anyone else still creeped out by having to write “2010″?  It seems to have scrambled my noggin so badly that I caught myself writing “1997″ on a check the other day.

Elsewhere in the news, Spring has sprung, of course, sinking its razor-sharp claws into my soul.  The good news is that Monroe and Babs, our resident turkey vultures, have returned to the old hollow tree where they nest every year.  The day they arrived I walked over to the tree to say hi, and one of them took off, swooped down to about six feet above my head, circled around me, and zoomed right back to the tree.  I think they like me.  They should.  I found a dead mouse in the front hall the other day, so I took it to them as a housewarming gift.

The cats whack mice around here every so often, but I don’t always notice right away because the floor is already littered with platoons of mousey cat toys, many of which are very realistic.  If you look closely, of course, you’ll notice that the cat toy mice appear to be a lot happier.

Oh yeah, the bad news is that the grass is growing.

Incidentally, I’d like to take this opportunity to give formal notice to the world that I am no longer paying attention.  At all.  After being a semi-news-junkie for years, I’ve had it.  I think something snapped when I realized that, after intense study, I finally understood credit default swaps, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

So I’ve decided to watch lots of  TV.  So far I’ve taken a shine to a show called Pawn Stars, which is a reality show set in a family-owned pawn shop in Las Vegas.  It’s actually a very funny show.  Really.

I’ve also started watching House, which is easy to do because it’s carried in reruns on, like, five different cable networks.  I had not realized (because I’d never watched it, even though it’s in its sixth or seventh season) that the show was modeled on the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which I’ve always loved.  Yeah, it’s a bit silly and formulaic, but I admire House’s cynical attitude and sardonic humor.  And, of course, there’s the cane thing.

I’ve also spent the past month reading Stephen King’s ten-pound Under the Dome, and I actually liked it a lot, which is a first for me and King’s books.  I had always agreed with the Times (of London) critic who, many years ago, memorably described one of King’s creations as “Five tons of crap in a ten-ton crate.”  But Dome isn’t really science-fiction or horror.  It’s very reminiscent, in fact, of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in theme, scope and style.  And I must say, as a resident of a small, isolated town, that King does not exaggerate in the slightest the potential for corruption and brutality in such venues.  Anyway, I’d recommend reading it before they turn it into a really awful movie.

Onward.  Many kind people have written to me about my ms over the past few months, and I really appreciate your concern and encouragement.  Several readers have asked whether I am taking any of the various interferon ms medications available, and the answer is no.  There are two basic types of multiple sclerosis (there are others, but they tend to be very rare).  By far the most common type is “relapsing-remitting” ms (RRMS), which usually strikes folks in their 20s, and is marked by bouts of symptoms interspersed with long periods of feeling relatively (or completely) OK.  The interferon drugs are approved for this kind of ms because they show some statistical success in suppressing or at least tempering the relapses.

The other main kind of ms, which is the one I have, is called “primary progressive” (PPMS), and tends to strike people a bit older.  Unfortunately, there are no remissions in PPMS —  you just get progressively worse.  Since PPMS is essentially one long, slow decline, and the interferon drugs have never been proven to slow or halt that slide, they’re not approved for treatment of PPMS.  That’s OK with me, because (a) they’re very expensive and I could never afford them, and (b) there are serious questions as to whether they actually do enough good to outweigh the risks of that sort of drug therapy.  I do take tons of vitamins and do my best to stay active. As of right now, I can walk or stand for about ten minutes before my legs hurt like hell, and after another five minutes they simply stop responding to my commands, which is very weird. The whole thing is weird.

Many cases of RRMS, at least as of now, eventually progress to something called “secondary progressive” ms, in which the symptoms of the disease become so constant, with no remissions, that it is, effectively, the same as primary progressive ms.  I think this raises a real question as to whether PPMS and RRMS are actually different forms of ms, or whether RRMS simply so frequently goes undiagnosed in early adulthood that it “pops up” and is labeled PPMS when the patient is finally so debilitated that doctors can no longer ascribe the symptoms to lack of sleep or depression.  I know that many of the symptoms that plague me now, such as leg pain, cramping and numbness, as well as severe pain in my eyes, actually periodically bothered me in my late 20s, but doctors never suggested testing for ms (although both are classic ms symptoms).  Oh well.  I’m actually glad I didn’t know.

Onward.  As I mentioned last month, if anyone has a notebook or netbook computer of relatively recent vintage that’s collecting dust in the corner, I could put it to good use.

Lastly, as usual, please consider subscribing to TWD-via-Email.  Your support makes this site (not to mention my sybaritic, go-go lifestyle) possible.

And now, on with the show….

Dear Word Detective:  I was recently reading a journal of mine from when I was a good bit younger than today and found that I had used the phrase “full fledged” to refer to a rather robust beard, as opposed to a light smattering of stubble.  Any idea where this came from?  Does it have anything to do with an arrow fletcher?  Oh, and just in case this gets answered, I’m a proud resident of the wonderful state of Dela-Where? — Addison Scott.

Well, there you go.  You’ll never know what might catch my eye.  By the way, I included your last line because I think it’s funny and, at least in my case, it’s true.  I honestly have no idea of where Delaware is, though I’m fairly certain that it’s somewhere to the right of Pennsylvania.  Is it near Rhode Island?  Is there really a state named “Rhode Island”?  Weird.  According to Wikipedia (brace yourself), “… in other parts of the country, Rhode Island is referred to as ‘Little Rhody.’”  Yeah, sure it is.  Little Rhody.  It was on the tip of my tongue.  “Dela-Where,” however, is a keeper.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives three definitions for “full-fledged.”  The first, “having reached full development; mature,” is the broadest in modern usage, useful to describe anything from a personal occupation (“Ortega … became a full-fledged matador in 2006 but has been hampered by repeated and serious gorings,” AP, 9/23/09) to a public health crisis (“US prepared for ‘full-fledged pandemic’ if necessary,”  AP, 4/29/09).  The second definition, “having full status or rank,” is good for describing things that have graduated from some larval stage (“Larry is now a full-fledged lawyer”).  But it’s the third definition that gives a hint as to the roots of the term: “Having fully developed adult plumage.”

“Plumage,” of course, means “the feathers of a bird” (from the Latin “pluma,” which also gave us “plume”), but the key here is the word “adult.”  Baby birds usually emerge from their eggs with what you might call “starter” feathers, usually a downy set useful only for staying warm. As time passes and baby birdy grows, the stronger adult feathers appear, until finally the little nipper is ready to leave the nest and fly on his or her own.  This process is known as “fledging,” a verb that appeared in the 16th century, derived from the now-obsolete adjective “fledge,” which meant “having feathers sufficient for flight.”  The adjective “full-fledged,” which first appeared in the late 16th century, is based on “fledge” as a verb, and almost immediately was put to use in its modern figurative meaning of “mature and prepared.”

If we trace “fledge” back to its Germanic roots, we find the West German root word “fluggja,” which also gave us the English word “fly.”  A young bird, nearly fully-feathered but still inexperienced, is called a “fledgling” (1830), a term also applied to a person inexperienced (“unfledged”) in a task or occupation.

Your question about “fletcher” is more complicated than it looks.  A “fletcher” is a person who makes arrows, which, of course, have “flights” (vanes at the tail) often made from feathers.  There is no recent connection between “fletcher” and “fledge,” but “fletcher,” via its French root “fleche” (arrow), may be drawn from the same ancient Germanic root word that produced both “fledge” and “fly.”

Or maybe they work there and can’t afford an apartment.

Dear Word Detective:   What is the meaning of the phrase “to hawk their wares”?– Lisa.

Is this about me selling my books in the Wal-Mart parking lot?  The guy who collects the carts said it was OK.  And my publisher isn’t exactly force-feeding them to Barnes & Noble, so I had to take the initiative.  Besides, it’s not as though I, let’s see, drove my humongous RV over there and set up camp for a month with lawn chairs and a barbecue.  What’s up with that?  You see these people in nearly every Wal-Mart lot.  Do they just really, really like Wal-Mart?  Are they waiting for the mothership?  Or were they on a cross-country trip and finally realize that every place in this country now looks like every other place and just give up?

OK, back to work.  To “hawk” originally meant “to offer for sale in a very vigorous, public fashion, especially by calling out loudly in the street,” in the classic fashion of newspaper vendors.  Modern “hawkers” tend to be found in TV infomercials, where a fast, aggressive and mind-numbingly repetitive sales pitch can hypnotize millions of otherwise sane people into buying musical doorstops and digital clothes hangers.

One might think, especially after watching a few infomercials, that “hawk” in this sense is a metaphor, likening a “hawking” huckster swooping down on hapless customers to a real hawk hunting field mice.  But while “hawking” can have definite predatory overtones, the bird we know as a “hawk” (whose name comes from a Germanic root meaning “to seize”) is not the source of this “hawking.”

The verb “to hawk” in the sense of “to sell” is actually what linguists call a “back-formation,” a word coined by removing parts of an existing word to form a new, more “basic” word that perhaps should have, but didn’t, exist before.  Classic examples of this process are the creation of the new verb “to sculpt” in the 19th century from the existing noun “sculptor” and, in the 18th century, the invention of “to edit” from the existing noun “editor.”  In the case of “hawk,” the existing form, back in the 16th century,  was the noun “hawker,” meaning a traveling street vendor, which was rooted in the old German “hocken,” meaning “to carry upon the back,” as a vendor lugs his goods from place to place.  In other words, it’s the traveling around that distinguished a true “hawker.”  All the shouting was just gravy.

“Wares,” in case you were also wondering about that, is a very old word meaning “article  manufactured for sale,” and comes from a root meaning “object guarded with care” (the same root that gave us “wary”).  “Hardware,” “silverware” and similar words all incorporate this “ware.”

The hits just keep on coming.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the provenance of the expression “back-to-back” (with or without hyphens)?  It is used to mean “consecutive,” which it has nearly driven from the popular lexicon; the sports world would be crippled without it and its incomprehensible derivative back-to-back-to-back (a “three-peat”).  The problem is that the image makes no sense. Surely any consecutive ordering of things with backs and fronts would be front-to-back or back-to-front. What genius of gibberish is responsible for this? — Joe.

That’s a darn good question.  I don’t know who’s responsible for propagating “back-to-back,” but, as you point out, the phrase actually makes no sense at all.  As a matter of fact, the mental image I get when I consider the term literally is of two men, standing back-to-back up against each other, who are about to march ten paces forward, spin around, and engage in a duel.  Considering that at least one of them is very unlikely to emerge from this contest in any shape to repeat the ordeal, “back-to-back” seems an especially bad synonym for “consecutive.”

By the way, you get extra points (which can, if you amass enough, be exchanged for a free cat) for using the fine word “provenance,” which means “origin or source” (from the Latin “provenire,” to come forth), as well as “history of ownership or development.”

The use of “back-to-back” to mean “events following one another without an interval between” or simply “consecutive” is apparently an American invention.  The earliest print citation for the term in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1952, but it is certainly older and some sources believe it first appeared in print around 1900.  It seems to have first appeared in coverage of baseball games in the sports pages of newspapers of the day, and, as you say, it remains a mainstay of sports reporting today.  Of the nearly 25,000 hits for “back to back” on Google News as I write this, at least ninety percent are from sports coverage, used either in the context of games in a tournament played immediately one after another, or with regard to an individual or team record (“The team’s back to back defeats in July stunned Mets fans”).

“Back to back” used in the literal sense is much older than the weird sports sense, the most well-known example being the “back-to-back” style of low-income urban housing common, especially in Britain, up through the 19th century.  Houses built on one street shared a back wall with one facing the next street over, and usually shared side walls with the houses next door.  It’s possible this “jammed together” style of housing contributed to the use of “back-to-back” to mean “one game right after another” in baseball, which then percolated into general usage meaning “consecutive.”

As for why such an illogical phrase has persisted, I think there are two reasons.  The alliterative rhythm of “back-to-back” is appealing in the same way “rock and roll” and “spic and span” are.  Secondly, once a phrase is fixed in the public’s mind, good luck getting it out, even if it makes absolutely no sense.  For example, we say that we fall “head over heels” in love, meaning that we’re figuratively turned upside down by the experience.  But most of us already spend all day long with our head above, “over,” our heels.  Back in the 14th century, the phrase was actually “heels over head,” but in the 1800s, a few writers (one of whom was Davy Crockett) got the phrase backwards, and from then on it was “head over heels.”

No, I might need that someday.  That too.

Dear Word Detective:  I was writing an email today, and used the phrase “cull out.”  Not being sure whether it is used in a positive sense (e.g., “we culled out the interesting documents from the load of old useless invoices”) or a negative one (e.g., “we culled out all the old useless invoices and only left the interesting documents”), I of course checked it online.  The dictionary results seemed to indicate the first option — the Free Dictionary definition is “select desirable parts from a group or list,” with the example “cull out the interesting letters from the poet’s correspondence” — which is how I used it in my email. But when I dug a little deeper later I found many uses in the second way (one good example of many in Google News: “The filters on our computers and systems work overtime to cull out spam”). So now I am confused. Which is correct? Did this phrase start its life in one meaning and then change to mean the opposite, or have I been misled by a free online dictionary? — Yael in Jerusalem.

“Cull” is an ambiguous little word, and the conflict between the sources you cite doesn’t mean either of them is wrong.  As the old saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.  Incidentally, “culling,” or the failure to do so, seems to be the topic of the moment here in the US.  The A&E network is carrying a show called “Hoarders,” exploring the cases of dysfunctional packrats who fill their houses with staggering piles of what they wistfully  call “stuff” but the rest of us would consider utterly useless junk.  And the author E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime, World’s Fair) has just released a novel based on the story of the Collyer brothers, two wealthy New York City recluses who set the standard for clutter, eventually amassing over 100 tons of rubbish in their Fifth Avenue brownstone.  A quick Google of “Collyer brothers” will illustrate just how far off the rails these guys went, but the phrase “ten grand pianos” pretty much sums it up.

The problem with “to cull” is that in its most basic sense it simply means “to pick out.”  In its earliest uses in English after its appearance in the 14th century, the sense was most often of selecting the best (“To cull out of all the people, those which had best courage,” 1593).  But by the early 18th century, “cull” was being used to mean simply “to subject to the process of selection,” whether to “weed out” the clearly substandard or unwanted, or to skim the “cream of the crop” and dump the rest.  The root of “cull,” incidentally, was the Old French “cuillir,” meaning “to gather, select,” itself derived from the Latin “colligere,” to gather (which also gave us the verb “to collect”).

In standard usage today, there seems to be a slight general tilt toward the use of “cull” to mean “remove and discard the unwanted,” but it’s really a word that can only be judged in context.  After all, the basic process of “culling” is simply one of selection, and doesn’t govern what is done with the things selected.  On the other hand, if you overhear someone from the Human Resources department at your job joking about “culling the herd,” it’s unlikely they’re selecting people to receive cupcakes, and it might be time to tune up your resume.

Not bloody likely.

Dear Word Detective:  In books written by English authors, I have come across the phrase “not by a long chalk.”  This seems to mean the same thing as the American “not by a long shot.”  My son thinks this may have something to do with cannon shots, while I’m trying to factor in the old racing tote boards in English betting parlors with odds posted in chalk on high and wide boards. Probably the correct answer is “None of the above.” Help! — Alix G Benson.

Well, you never know.  It might well be “all of the above.”  According to the theory of “overdetermination,” developed by Freud to explain dreams but applied to the social realm by “Loopy Louie” Althusser and others, things don’t always happen for a single reason, but for a whole bunch of reasons, any one of which would have sufficed on its own.  The universe, in other words, is really into overkill, and this makes it very hard to figure out exactly why something happens.  Personally, I have resolved this contradiction by living in rural Ohio, where absolutely nothing ever happens.

Your hunch that “not by a long chalk,”meaning “not even by a remote chance” or “not even close” (“The big fight between inflation and deflation hasn’t been won yet, not by a long chalk,” MoneyWeek, 9/09), refers to chalk marks on a board is right on the money.  The board was most likely in a pub (where scores in darts, for instance, would be tallied) and a “long chalk” was a high score (a long series of chalk strokes), a daunting and thus unlikely obstacle for an opponent to overcome.  To say that the economy, for instance, has not yet rebounded “by a long chalk” is to say that there are huge obstacles to reaching that goal and success is far from certain.

Although “not by a long chalk” is most popular in Britain, it’s not entirely unknown here in the US, and the earliest citation for the phrase in the Dictionary of American Regional English is only slightly more recent than the first example in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But Americans are far likelier to be familiar with “not by a long shot,” used in the same sense of “don’t hold your breath.”  The term “long shot” has been used since the late 18th century to mean a shot taken with a cannon or small arms from a great distance and unlikely to hit its target.  By the mid-19th century, “long shot” was being applied to anything, from race horses to election bids, unlikely to succeed (“A few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track,” O. Henry, 1906).

The interesting thing about “not by a long shot” is that it doesn’t really match the “behind in the score” sense of “not by a long chalk.”  Instead it seems to invoke the great distance and difficulty (and consequent unlikelihood of success) of a “long shot,” which is a bit different in sense.  Or maybe I just drink too much coffee.

One intriguing possibility is that “not by a long shot” is actually the relic of a mistake.  A discussion on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society a few years ago suggested that “not by a long shot” in the US actually arose through a mis-hearing of “not by a long chalk.”  Since “long shot” meaning “remote chance” was already a popular idiom in the US, and pub tally boards were not familiar, it would have been natural to substitute “shot” for “chalk.”

Speaking of weirdos.

Dear Word Detective:  This afternoon, while a couple of my friends and I were waiting around before a choir rehearsal, trying to remember the steps to a Baroque dance we had learned this summer, somebody sat down at the piano and started playing a piece by Kabalevsky which we supposed was a gymnopedie.  We began speculating on the origins of “gymnopedie,” which seemed like a funny thing to call a quiet piece of music.  The best we could guess was that it had something to do with “gymnos,” which is Greek for “unclothed,” but we couldn’t imagine what.  Please enlighten some etymologically puzzled musicians.– Elizabeth  Lightwood.

Good question, and thanks for the opportunity to add “gymnopedie” to my spell checker’s dictionary.  And “Kabalevsky,” of course, which for some reason it wants to change to my choice of “Lobachevsky” or “Dostoevsky.”  Typical.  I notice it’s not throwing a fit over “Madonna” or  “The Beatles.”  I guess I should give it credit for recognizing Lobachevsky, but that’s probably just because it was programmed by math weirdos.  Huh.  It seems to like “weirdo.”  I rest my case.

Speaking of omissions, I was mildly surprised that you asked a question about “gymnopedie” and didn’t mention the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925).  As musicians, you and your friends are doubtlessly acquainted with Satie’s three “Gymnopedies,” quiet and impressionistic solo piano pieces published beginning in 1888 and probably Satie’s best-known works.  What I guess is less well-known is that Satie seems to have invented the term “gymnopedie” himself.  But it’s not entirely clear what he meant by it.  There have been, in fact, scholarly papers written debating exactly how Satie came up with the word.

Satie was, by all accounts, a strange but clever duck.  A famous anecdote, probably at least partly apocryphal, recounts the aspiring composer’s first visit, in 1887, to Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) nightclub, at that time the epicenter of the Paris musical scene.  According to the story, Satie, lacking any artistic reputation at that point, arranged for his arrival to be announced by a friend with the words “Erik Satie, gymnopediste.”  Rodolphe Salis, Le Chat Noir’s formidable proprietor, is said to have been temporarily taken aback, finally responding, “That’s quite an occupation.”

Satie’s purported occupation was indeed impressive.  The “Gymnopaedia” were dances performed at festivals in Ancient Greece by young men bereft, for the occasion, of clothing (“gymnos,” naked, plus “pais,” youth).  That’s the same “gymnos,” by the way, that gave us “gymnasium,” after the Ancient Greek habit of exercising in the buff.

Satie picked the word to impress the crowd, which it certainly did, but what, if anything, he meant by it is a mystery.  Satie’s friend Contamine de Latour had recently used the term “Gymnopaedia” in a poem Satie would likely have read, and any musical scholar would have been familiar with the ancient dances.  Most likely, Satie simply chose the term for its absurdity and risque overtones.

Taken with his own invention, and perhaps pushing the shtick a bit, the following year Satie published the first of his three “Gymnopedies,” the piano pieces which brought him the fame he craved and remain immensely popular today.  Incidentally, a nice video from ABC Classics which uses Gymnopedie No. 1 as its score can be found by searching YouTube for “The Colours of Autumn – Gymnopedie No.1″ or just click here

A stand-in that fills the bill.

Dear Word Detective:  In many a novel I’ve read of people delivering a “parting shot” in the form of “a threat, insult, condemnation, sarcastic retort, or the like, uttered upon leaving.”   Imagine my surprise when I recently started reading the Sherlock Holmes novels for the first time (rather than watching a movie) and found the famous detective firing a “Parthian shot” instead! (“With which Parthian shot he walked away, leaving the two rivals open-mouthed behind him.” — A Study in Scarlet)  I immediately consulted with my trusty 1960s Watson — er, Webster — where I found the second phrase explained.  Apparently, the ancient Parthian archers were famous for a particular horseback maneuver in which they feigned a retreat, then fired backward at the pursuing enemy.  As a longtime reader of your columns, I smelled folk etymology right away.  Obviously, “parting shot” had to be a corruption of “Parthian shot,” right? But when I later looked up the matter on the Internet, I became doubtful. It seems that the chronological order of the appearance of the two phrases is not quite clear.  But since my sources are by no means reliable (Wikipedia, for one), I turn to you for enlightenment.  Surely you, the original Word Detective, could outwit even the great Holmes any time when it comes to word origins. So for your capacity, this small puzzle can be nothing more than elementary.  Right? — Holger Maertens, Germany.

Gosh, I love it when people write my column for me.  I don’t suppose I could get away with simply saying “Yes” at this point, could I?  By the way, Sherlock Holmes in print beats the best movie (or TV) versions by a mile.

With the game well afoot through your detailed exposition, I need only note that the Parthians were the residents of Parthia, an ancient kingdom in what is now Iran, and Parthian horsemen really were famed for their “Parthian shot” fired while turning to retreat.  “Parthian shot” has been used in a figurative sense to mean “a final insult or point of argument made as one is leaving” since the mid-19th century.

“Parting shot,” meaning the same thing and based on the sense of “parting” as a noun meaning “the action of leaving,” also dates to the mid-19th century.  The underlying sense of “a last remark on your way out the door” is older, however, as “parting blow” is found as early as the 16th century (“Thus much I must say for a parting blow,” 1592).

What we have here, I suspect, is a very convenient coincidence.  Given the spotty record  of 19th century printed sources, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty which phrase appeared first, although most authorities assume that “Parthian shot” was the original form.  But even in the 19th century, people who knew who the Parthians were and thus truly understood the reference must have been fairly rare, and as the history of the Middle East became more obscure even among educated English speakers in the West, “parting” stepped up to fill the vacancy.  This was, as you guessed, a classic case of folk etymology, where a more familiar word is substituted for a word in a phrase which is no longer (or never was) understood by its speakers.  Our word “bridegroom,” for instance, was originally “brydguma,” meaning literally “bride-man.”  But as the Old English “guma” (man) faded from the popular vocabulary, the more recent and thus familiar “groom” (meaning “male servant”) was substituted.   The fact that “parting shot” fit  so well with both the sound and the “while leaving” sense of “Parthian shot” made the process unusually seamless.

Oh look.  It clumps.  We’ll change our name to Arm & Leg.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m wondering how the word “litter” came to mean two things that are pretty much opposites: something tossed away (such as litter on the highway), and something you pick up and carry with you (as paramedics do for patients; as slaves do for kings).  My husband added a third meaning, lest we forget: “litter” can mean a whole bunch of baby animals born from the same pregnancy.  Any clue as to how one word came to mean so much, including its own opposite? — Rosemarie Eskes, Rochester, NY.

Speaking of “litter,” you folks forgot “kitty litter.”  Incidentally, people complain about how much money investment bankers, corporate CEOs, et al., make, and rightly so.  But for sheer brazen banditry, those muggs can’t hold a candle to the cat litter cartel. They take a truckload of clay, douse it in perfume, stick it in boxes sporting a picture of a cute (and apparently ecstatically continent) cat, and sell each box for what dinner in a decent restaurant used to cost you before you spent all your money on cat litter.

Onward.  Whenever you run across a word with as many different meanings as “litter” seems to have, there are two possibilities.  The first is that it’s actually all the same word, with one (usually very long) history, and that over the years it has sprouted all sorts of disparate (and even contradictory) meanings.  The other possibility is that all (or at least some) of those meanings of “litter” actually belong to separate words, with separate histories, that just all happen to be spelled “litter.”  That may sound unlikely, but it’s not uncommon.  There are, for instance, five entirely unrelated “docks” in the English language.

If “litter” were, in fact, five different words, all those meanings would be a bit simpler to explain.  But all those kinds of “litter” are actually one very versatile little word.

In the beginning was the Latin noun “lectus,” which meant “bed.”  Filtered through the Old French “litiere,” it arrived in English as “litter” around 1300, still with the basic meaning of “bed.”  One of its earliest derivative meanings was “litter” in the sense of “a couch for the transport of the nobility carried by servants” as well as a similar, but more humble, version for the transport of the sick or wounded.

In the 15th century, “litter” came to mean “straw or similar material gathered for bedding” for humans or scattered on the floor as bedding for animals. This sense of “stuff thrown on the floor” eventually, in the 18th century, gave us “litter” meaning “rubbish or odds and ends scattered or strewn about,” but didn’t produce the noun “littering” until 1960.  “Litterbug,” meaning a chronic litterer, first appeared in 1947 and was enormously popular when I was young, but now seems to have almost completely faded away.

The “bedding for animals” sense of “litter” also gave us “litter” meaning “number of animals born together,” the original sense being that they were born “in one litter,” i.e., in the same bed at the same time.  “Cat litter,” a term which appeared in the 1950s, is an extension of “litter” meaning “a jumble of odds and ends used as accommodation for animals.”  Of course, in recent years it has also come to mean “gold mine.”

The ring of hooey.

Dear Word Detective:  Why is something bogus referred to as being “phony”?  I hope this  has a more fascinating history than being the mispronunciation of an old Gaelic malt beverage or something.  Is it hilarious? — Brian Hennessey.

Hilarious?  No, but parts of it are amusing.  By the way, and this is on an entirely unrelated topic, something dawned on me last week.  There is a persistent etymological legend that the word “posh” (meaning “fancy and expensive”) was originally an acronym for “Port Out, Starboard Home,” supposedly specifying which side of the steamship had the shadier, cooler and thus preferred (and pricier) cabins on the voyage between England and India in the 1800s.  The story is bunk, and “posh” actually derives from a Romany (Gypsy) word for “money.”  But I suddenly remembered that when I was studying seamanship in my youth, we learned the phrase “Red, Right, Return” as a reminder to keep the red channel markers on your starboard (right) side when entering a harbor (and of course, the green on your left, or port side).  I suspect that the “Port Out, Starboard Home” business started as a similar mnemonic reminder to keep the red channel markers on your left (port) side leaving the harbor, and on your starboard coming home.  At some point, someone noticed that the resulting acronym “posh” also meant “ritzy,” and dreamed up a story to explain that coincidence.  I think this is almost certainly the “missing link” between “posh” meaning “fancy” and the whole topic of ocean travel.  After all, if you were sitting at your desk trying to concoct a faux etymology for “posh” meaning “fancy,” steamships would probably not be your first choice of subject.  It’s more likely you’d choose something like “Persons Owed Subservience and Humility.”

Onward.  There are a number of similarly silly stories floating around purporting to explain “phony” (or, as the Brits prefer, “phoney”) meaning, since the mid-19th century, “fake, sham, counterfeit” or “insincere” (“They had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life,” J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 1951).  My favorite is the theory that it originally referred to a widespread fear in the 1880s that the newly invented telephone would be used to deceive people.  Conversations over the new-fangled gadget were, in this tale, considered automatically untrustworthy and disparaged as “phony,” which was later applied to  anything not real or sincere.  This theory would be, perhaps, a bit more believable if “phony” had not appeared in print more than ten years before the first telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell and decades before the infernal device became common in homes.

To cut to the chase, most authorities now agree that the source of “phony” is the old English slang word “fawney,” drawn from the Irish word “fainne,” meaning “ring.”  In the 19th century, English “fawney men” (con artists) practiced a scam called the “fawney rig” (“rig” being slang for “trick”).  The trickster would make a great show of  “finding” a gold ring on the street and then agreeing to sell it to a passerby for a fraction of its worth. The ring was actually worthless brass, of course, and had been dropped on the street by the “finder” himself.  When this racket inevitably migrated to the US, “fawney” became “phony,” and we gained a very useful synonym for “fake or false.”

This way to the Egress.

Dear Word Detective:  While watching the weather forecast, my wife and I saw a tagline that said “Heavy rains lower fair prices.” As we had the TV muted, we couldn’t be sure what the statement meant.  Then we began wondering if the various fairs (pleasing, unbiased, and a country gathering) and fares (fee for travel and subject of dinner) were related. Can you shed some light on this? — Ray.

That’s a good question.  Now you’ve got me wondering what they meant.  I guess the local cow-fest gotten so soggy that candy apples were going two for a dime.  Speaking of county fairs, someone at the Associated Press was clearly having fun last week when they penned the  Hollywood-esque headline “Insane Killer Escapes on Field Trip to County Fair.”  They loved it so much, in fact, that they used the phrase “insane killer” in follow up stories for several days until someone in management apparently ordered them to stop.  Maybe they were angling for a job at the New York Post, purveyor of such legendary headlines as “Headless Corpse in Topless Bar.”

The short answer to your rather complex question is that two of the three “fairs” you mention are related to each other, but one is not, and both kinds of “fare” are actually the same word.  In no case, however, is there any connection between “fair” and “fare.”  Clear as mud, right?

The “county fair” kind of “fair,” meaning “a periodic public gathering,” usually with a unifying theme or rationale, is the simplest of the bunch to explain.  In English, the noun “fair” in this sense dates back to the 14th century and came to us via Old French from the Latin “feria,” meaning “holiday.”  That “feria” was a close relative of the Latin “festus,” meaning “joyful,” which gave us the modern English words “festival” and “feast.”

The adjective “fair” (“fair price,” “fair weather,” etc.) is a different word entirely.  Derived from ancient Germanic roots, it appeared in Old English with the general meaning of “pleasing or beautiful.”  It’s this original meaning we find in such phrases as “fair weather.”

“Fair” went on, however, to develop a dizzying array of related but distinct meanings.  From “beautiful” it took on overtones of “elegant in speech and deportment” (as in “My Fair Lady”), as well as, regarding personal appearance, “without blemish” (“fair skin”) and “light” (particularly hair).  “Fair” gradually acquired connotations of “clean and pure” in matters of social conduct and character as well, and came to mean “equitable, not taking unfair advantage” (thus “fair deal,” “fair price,” etc.), as well as “unbiased” in matters of judgment (“fair trial”).

“Fare” is derived from a Germanic root meaning “to go or travel,” which gave us a verb “to fare” meaning “to travel” as well as a noun “fare” meaning “journey.”  The use of “fare” to mean “money charged to travel” appeared in the 15th century , and “fare” meaning “food served” is even older, dating back to the 1200s.  “Fare” meaning “food” probably originally referred to the meals encountered on one’s journey, which later broadened to include any meal.  Similarly, the sense of “fare” meaning “journey” or “mission” gave us compounds such as “seafaring” and “warfare.”  In the somewhat vaguer sense of “state of being,” it also gave us “welfare” meaning “well-being” or “condition of living.”

Stop that this instant.

Dear Word Detective:  My husband’s grandmother, who lived to be 99-1/2, always used the phrase “just nip it in the bud.”  We were wondering where this originated.  I know I can look it up elsewhere; however, I love the way you tell a story! — Meredith.

Well, I do my best.  But I’m wondering whether you mean the stories about the development of words and phrases, or the stories about the cats, the dogs, and our decrepit house. Maybe I should try harder to merge the two narratives.  Anybody know how many cats Julius Caesar had?  Shakespeare was pet-friendly, after a fashion (“The cat will mew and dog will have his day,” Hamlet, Act V), although he certainly wouldn’t have won any awards from the ASPCA (“Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing…,” Macbeth, Act IV).  Note to self: pick up some wool of bat on the way home.

To “nip something in the bud” means to stop it in an early stage of its development, before it can mature.  The phrase first appeared in print, as far as we know, in the late 16th century (with “bloom” standing in for “bud”), and it’s still going strong.  A search of Google News at the moment produces 457 hits for “nipped in the bud,” ranging from coverage of our so-called economy (“But the emerging recovery among nine Midwestern states … was nipped in the bud,” Kansas City Star) to the drearily inevitable punning headline on a news story about a pot bust (“Large marijuana garden nipped in the bud,” KTVL, Oregon).

The roots of “to nip in the bud” are, as it happens, horticultural.  Growers frequently “nip” (pinch or snip off) new buds on plants and trees to stop them from developing for one reason or another, often to force the plant to put its energies to more productive uses.  (I have, as you may have guessed, just exhausted my knowledge of horticulture.)  In any case, this gardening practice made such a good metaphor for stopping something before it really got going that it’s been in constant use in that sense since the 1600s.

Interestingly, something being “nipped in the bud” back then was sometimes considered a bad thing (“Dost thou approach to censure our delights, And nip them in the bud?”, 1658), but for the past few centuries “to nip it in the bud” has been seen as most often necessary and desirable (“This was a very dangerous thing and should be nipped in the bud immediately, he felt,” 1998).

The “nip” in the phrase, incidentally, is the common verb “to nip,” meaning “to pinch or bite” or “to seize, separate, remove,” and comes from Germanic roots.  When Grandpa called children “little nippers,” he was using a term that originally meant “pickpocket” (from “nipping,” or seizing the victim’s wallet).  A “nip in the air” is the pinch or bite of the cold, and the “nip” of brandy one takes to ward off a chill comes from “nipperkin,” originally a measure equal to a very small amount (just a “pinch”) of liquor, which itself is almost certainly related to “nip.”