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.”

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.”