Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Hey, it’s still March.

So Big Love is over. It actually improved a bit in its final season. But, like most HBO productions, it suffered from weak writing and had an infuriating tendency to wander off into absurd subplots. And, like so many HBO shows, it killed off its most interesting characters early on, in this case Harry Dean Stanton, who was drop-dead perfect as polygamist patriarch Roman Grant. I think it’s interesting that the only two characters who came close to Stanton in depth (and acting ability) were Chloe Sevigny and Matt Ross playing, respectively, his daughter Nikki and psychopathic son Alby. I’d watch a spinoff set in the Juniper Creek compound if they’d bring Roman Grant back.

Awesomely evil.

Elsewhere in the news, giving the evildoers of the world a run for their money in the Machiavellian Scheming department, the clever gnomes at Facebook recently unleashed a “feature” whereby unaffiliated websites (such as this one) can replace their native commenting system with “Facebook comments.” Because, you know, everyone who really counts is already on FB and those who aren’t can quick like a bunny run off to join if they have a sudden urge to post a comment at, say, TechCrunch.

Predictably, the malcontents and anti-social elements who resist every step on the path to our great and glorious future under the wise leadership of Chairman Zuck have sprung forth, sabotaging our collective morale with defeatist whining, wailing about “privacy” and other quaint un-Web 2.0 relics.

There actually are advantages for websites adopting the Facebook commenting system. People are more well-behaved, at least in theory, because their comments are tied to their Facebook accounts and they are, therefore, unlikely to say anything in comments that would offend their mothers. The comments also bounce back to Facebook and may show up on the commenters’ friends’ stalkers’ pages, giving the host page a PR boost.

But when Facebook talks about “convenience,” they mean convenience of advertisers and identity brokers, who stand to reap bushels of demographic intel from this scheme. Bottom line, I don’t think requiring your readers to join Facebook and have their privacy compromised by multi-dimensional tracking goblins just in order to leave a five-word comment is either reasonable or desirable.

Besides, it’s not as though our comments here at TWD are overrun by trolls. I read all comments before they appear, which sometimes takes me a few days, depending on the weather, but that hardly strikes me as an onerous task. The only comments I haven’t approved so far are pathetic comment spam (of which we get quite a bit) and the few that have employed abusive language toward other commenters. You’re free to call me an idiot, but not your fellow readers. Anyway, please do comment!

Incidentally, you don’t have to be registered on this site to leave a comment. The form asks for your name and email address, but that’s hard-wired and I haven’t figured out how to change it. In the meantime, feel free to make up a nice name and email address. I’d actually advise against entering your actual email address.

And please do send in questions! Lotsa lotsa questions. It makes my job easier if I have lots of questions.

Onward. Recently, Frank Rich, in his last column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine before leaving for New York magazine, recounted a simile that William Safire used to explain what it felt like to write a regular newspaper column:

“Safire … was fond of likening column writing to standing under a windmill: No sooner did you feel relief that you had ducked a blade than you looked up and saw a new one coming down.”

After writing the newspaper column behind this website three times a week without a break since 1994, I can say that I’ve never seen a better metaphor for the relentless tyranny of a regular deadline. Producing a column essentially every two days means that I am frequently writing paragraphs in my head when I’m walking the dogs, and the relief I feel when I finish a column is like getting home from work at midnight and realizing that you have to be back there at 6 am.

Don’t worry, I’m not working up to announcing that I’m stopping. I can’t imagine not doing this. And writing this stuff used to be a lot more strenuous; when I first took over the column completely after my father died in 1994 (we had been collaborating for a few years at that point), I was suddenly faced with writing six columns per week, a schedule that had been set when my father was writing it for the old Bell Syndicate in the 1950s.  That quota had always struck me as a bit nuts when we were sharing the work, but I definitely wasn’t going to be able to do it on my own. So I bit the bullet and told the papers that carried the column that I’d be halving the product. It turned out that nobody was running all six columns anyway, so they really didn’t care.

My relief didn’t last long. Somehow I drifted into writing another, completely separate, weekly column for the New York Daily News, and then yet a third weekly feature for the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger. I was also working four days per week for a large Manhattan law firm. Hey, I drank a lot of coffee. We lived on the Upper West Side at the time, where the byzantine alternate-side parking rules meant that you had to spend at least an hour a couple of times every week sitting in your double-parked car while they swept the streets (if, that is, you wanted a parking space south of the Bronx for the next three days). So I’d grab a gallon of coffee and a legal pad and go sit in the car writing my columns longhand while garbage trucks and taxicabs crawled by inches away. It was actually weirdly restful.

When we first moved to East Possum, Ohio, I thought I’d have plenty of time to write other things, and I did manage to produce three more books in the first few years. Living in a house built in the 1860s on several acres of land, however, turned out to be nearly a full-time job in itself, much of which seemed to involve heavy lifting and obstreperous machinery. But even then I could often do two or three columns in a single day with no problem.

That changed in 2006 when, after at least twenty years of intermittent but gradually worsening symptoms, I was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. I’m still walking around, albeit often with a cane, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t affected my work. There are days I can’t see the screen very clearly, for instance. I make far more typos. And I write much more slowly. But as these things go, I rate myself as very lucky.

Unfortunately, the decline in my personal health has been mirrored by the collapse of the newspaper business, and I have lost several of my most remunerative print outlets as they sank beneath seas of red ink. Sic transit big chunks of my income. The publishing world is in similar straits, and, as I noted a while back, this stupid disease has put paid to my backup career, pole-dancing at the Denny’s up by the interstate.

The bottom line to all this is that reader subscriptions and contributions have become increasingly important to our survival over the past three or four years. So please consider subscribing.

One of the problems I’ve had with subscriptions is that I hate asking people for money. So people subscribe for a year, they forget to renew, and I am put in the position of either sending reminder notices (i.e., asking those people for money again) or simply letting the one-year sub turn into a five-year sub. I actually suspect that there are at least a few people going on ten years, but it’s hard to find them. There’s also the problem that, even if I could zero in on the “legacy” cases, I’ve never been able to cut off anyone’s subscription for non-payment. I just can’t do it. Every year or two I try to send out reminder notices to subscribers, but it all gets very confusing.

So in order to at least keep track of things more easily, I’m switching to the PayPal subscription program for all new subscriptions, which means that at the end of the year PayPal will send out a note asking you to re-up, which I hope folks will. If you can’t swing it then, don’t worry.

I’ve also created a TWD Sustainer Subscription, which deducts $5 per month from your PayPal account until you tell it to stop (either through your PayPal account page or via the “Unsubscribe” button you’ll find below and on our Subscribe page).

I hope (really, really hope) that readers who enjoy this site and have to wherewithal to do so will become Sustaining Subscribers. Hey, it’s only 17 cents per day!

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Lastly, as I say on our Subscribe page, fifteen bucks can be a lot of money if you’re retired, disabled, unemployed, or on a restricted income for whatever reason. If you are in such a situation and would like to subscribe but can’t swing it at the moment, please write to me via the question form. You won’t be the only one.

And now, on with the show….

Unrelated to Sham Wow.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m a student at St John’s College (the Great Books one, not the basketball one), and while reading the Odyssey a friend and I ran across a mention of a plant called “moly” which is sacred and harvested only by the gods. It occurred to us that that the phrase “Holy Moly” might be derived therefrom. As a regular reader of your column, I have some familiarity with the process of hunting up etymologies. Fortunately, we were in the library.  Our first stop was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which was sadly lacking in information on the subject. We tried the Dictionary of Regional English and The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. All we uncovered was a reference to a comic book character, our idea about the plant prefixed by a “perhaps with reference to,” and a theory that the phrase might be a shortened and reduplicated form of “Holy Moses.” Any ideas for the Johnnies? — Elizabeth Lightwood.

I dunno. Are you sure you want to ask someone who took about 90 seconds to realize what you meant by “Johnnies”? Time for more coffee. Talk among yourselves. OK, I’m back with the coffee, and I just discovered that I already had nearly a full cup sitting right here on my desk. Maybe I should just go back to bed.

You’ve certainly hit all the logical sources in your quest for the source of “holy moly,” and I’m sure you know that you’re lucky to have a library that carries all those reference sources. I’m actually rather shocked that the OED doesn’t even mention “holy moly.” I even looked under the alternate spelling “moley,” and came up with a British slang term meaning “A potato in which razor blades are embedded, used as a weapon.” I’m almost sorry I looked. One other reference source that is helpful in such cases, the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, does have an entry for “holy moley,” but doesn’t add much to what you found elsewhere.

The comic book character you found a reference to is Captain Marvel, the superhero subject of an enormously popular strip written by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck beginning in 1940.  “Holy moley!” (note the spelling) was Captain Marvel’s characteristic exclamation of surprise, and the strip popularized the saying among American youth, along with “Shazam!”, the magic word that mild-mannered radio reporter Billy Batson uttered to transform himself into Captain Marvel. (Yes, the publishers of Superman sued Parker and Beck for copyright infringement in 1953 and won. Captain Marvel returned to print, however, in 1972.

It is remotely possible that the “moly” plant played a role in the authors’ use of “Holy Moley” as Captain Marvel’s catch phrase. “Shazam,” Billy’s magic phrase, was actually the name of the sorcerer who gave him his powers to fight evil, and Shazam himself explained that his name was an acronym made from the names of ancient luminaries (S for the wisdom of Solomon, H for the strength of Hercules, A for the stamina of Atlas, Z for the power of Zeus, A for the courage of Achilles, and M for the speed of Mercury). So someone connected to the strip certainly had an eye for mythology.

But there is solid evidence that “holy moly” was already widely in use in the late 1920s as a jocular euphemism for “Holy Moses,” an oath that, at that time, might well have been offensive to some people. The writers of Captain Marvel simply picked it up and ran with it.

Interestingly, the spelling “moley,” which appeared in the very first issue of the Captain Marvel comic book, may have been influenced by the name of Professor Raymond Charles Moley, quite well-known in the 1930s as an important ally of President Franklin Roosevelt and organizer of his “Brain Trust” of advisors. Moley became even more famous after he turned against the New Deal and became a conservative Republican, and apparently there were political jingles and rhymes at the time coupling the name “Moley” with “holy.” Almost all modern uses I have found of the phrase, however, spell it “holy moly.”

A dedicated follower of mozzarella.

Dear Word Detective:  A steak dinner is riding on your answer, so no pressure, okay?  I have long heard the term “fashion pate” to describe a person who dresses in the height of current style.  Lately I hear this term as “fashion plate.”  I contend that “pate” is the older original term and “plate” is a modern (last twenty years or so) lazy corruption.  My friend says “plate” is correct, or at least both terms are equally used.  I’d rather buy you the steak than him, so who is correct? — Lloyd Formby.

OK, but can we make it pizza instead? I gave up eating beef almost 20 years ago. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice; even as a kid, I never actually liked the taste. Now I eat a much healthier diet, mostly pizza and doughnuts. And broccoli. I seem to be going through a broccoli phase at the moment. Broccoli pizza would be awesome.

Unfortunately, our hypothetical menu is moot, because your friend is correct: the idiom is “fashion plate.” But the good news is that the explanation for “plate” may prove sufficiently interesting to lure your friend into a second bet to reverse the first. Just challenge him to explain what the “plate” in “fashion plate” originally meant. Hint: it has nothing to do with dinner.

Incidentally, and here’s a bit of a consolation prize, your rendition of the phrase as “fashion pate” actually makes a lot of sense, speaking, as we are, of a person who devotes a great deal of attention to the cut of their clothes. “Pate” is a very old word meaning “head” or “top of the head,” or, by extension, “mind, intellect.” So a “fashion pate” might be a person whose mind is consumed by attention to current fashion, much as a “gear head” is devoted to things mechanical or technological. Making this even more of a close call is the fact that the origin of “pate” (which first appeared in the 14th century) is a mystery, but it may simply be a modified form of “plate,” referring in particular to the top of one’s head.

“Fashion plate” first appeared in print in the mid-19th century, but the word “plate” is, of course, much older. The original meaning of “plate” when it appeared in English in the mid-13th century (ultimately from the Greek “platus,” flat or broad, also the source of “place”) was simply “flat sheet,” as of metal or glass. The use of “plate” to mean “eating dish” was a later 15th century development.

“Plate” has since developed hundreds of meanings, but for our purposes here the most important is “plate” in the sense of “printing plate,” a sheet of flat metal etched or engraved for use in printing onto paper or another surface. From this use developed “plate” meaning the printed page itself, especially a high-quality, heavier sheet of paper used to print illustrations and then either framed or inserted as a separate page into a book.

Such high-quality printed “plates” were also used on advertising placards, in magazines, and wherever eye-catching quality was needed. This made such “plates” a natural for the fashion industry, allowing the latest clothes, etc., to be advertised in upscale magazines and store windows with fine detail and something close to color fidelity. Thus was born the 19th century “fashion plate.”

The extension of “fashion plate” to mean a person who takes great pains to always wear the latest fashions was natural (“You look just like a fashion plate!”), but the term has come to carry a connotation of superficiality and perhaps a implication of desperation in the “plate’s” attention to the latest designer gear. A few years ago, a reader asked me whether a similar phrase for someone obsessed with couture was “clothes horse” or, as she believed, “clothes whore.” It’s “clothes horse” (originally a wooden rack for drying clothes), but we agreed that “clothes whore” was probably more to the point and a lot more fun.

Good thing fish don’t have ears.

Dear Word Detective: Doing a crossword puzzle, I ran into the word “billingsgate” as the answer for the clue “abusive language.” Never having heard this use of “-gate” (as in “public scandal”) among Watergate, Billygate, etc., I looked it up at Merriam-Webster.com. Sure enough, there it was with origin: “Gate and fish market, London, England. First usage 1652.” I was under the impression that Watergate (as a scandal) got its name from Watergate hotel and the other “-gate” words followed the pattern. How does “billingsgate” relate to these other usages?  Was there some really wild fish-fight at this London market? — Gary.

Fish fight! Fish fight! Speaking of fish fights, I’m a fan of the Animal Planet network show “Whale Wars,” in which members of the Sea Shepherd conservation organization try to stop whalers from whaling on the whales. I mentioned the show to someone a few weeks ago, and it became apparent that they had never watched it at least in part because they assumed it was a sort of cetacean “Fight Club,” with whales fighting each other, or something. I suppose such a thing is possible. After all, Moby Dick is just the story of a whale nursing a grudge.

I had to look up “Billygate” to be certain I remembered what it was, and while I vaguely knew President Jimmy Carter’s brother had been accused of influence-peddling, I didn’t recall  that he had actually been paid pots of money by Libya. He should have stuck with Billy Beer. “Billygate” took place in 1978, which wasn’t that long after the Watergate scandal (named after a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the hotel in 1972) had led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, so the name made sense to most people. (“Watergate” is a venerable English term for something, such as a floodgate, that either controls the flow of a stream or river or controls access to it, and the hotel was so named because it overlooks the Potomac River.)

But in the decades since, “gate” has blossomed into quasi-journalistic shorthand for “possible scandal” or “someone says something’s fishy here” or “my dog barks at the TV when that guy’s name is mentioned.” So now we get “Troopergate,” “Travelgate,” “Memogate,” “Gatecrashergate,” “Poodlegate,” ad nauseam, and a new “gate” every week. (Originally I thought I had made up Poodlegate, but it turns out to exist, and involves Al Gore’s thighs. Eww.) William Safire, who was working in the Nixon White House when Watergate erupted, subsequently took great joy in coining “gate” terms in his newspaper columns, and in 1988 he noted that his favorite creation, referring to a minor accounting dustup, was “doublebillingsgate.”

None of this, however, has anything to do with “billingsgate” meaning “abusive language.” “Billingsgate” is the name of one of the gates that originally controlled access to the city of London (“Billing” being the proper name of the builder of the gate). The Billingsgate area lies on the North bank of the River Thames, and Billingsgate was originally a “watergate,” affording access from London to the river for cargo and passengers. The most notable feature of Billingsgate, however, was the fish market established there in the 17th century, known for its chaotic atmosphere and the loud and raucous cries and shouts of its fishmongers. Apparently the shouting went well beyond the norm for a sales pitch, and Billingsgate became famous for the vituperative profanity that filled the air on a typical day, giving us “billingsgate” as a colorful term for foul and abusive language.

Lest you be picturing this sort of swearing contest as a purely male pursuit, it’s worth noting that many of the fish merchants in markets such as Billingsgate were women known as “fishwives” (“wife” being used here in the then-common generic sense of “woman,” especially one of the lower classes). Their ability to match the men in volume and profanity lives on in the phrase “to swear like a fishwife.”

Ixnay on the azes-blay.

Dear Word Detective:  In doing research on lime kilns for our museum I spoke with an elderly man who told me about the “blue blazes.” In burning the kilns, one knew the process was nearing its end when blue flames were achieved. A kiln was heated for several days and the blue flames had to be maintained for many hours. It was a such a show that people would actually stop when passing to observe the “blue blazes,” as they were known. Our location is on the Niagara Escarpment of Ontario, Canada, an area where many farmers had lime kilns. I wonder if the term “blue blazes” might not have originated from the burning of lime kilns. — Debra R. Mann.

Hmm. It’s a slight departure from my usual policy, but I’m going to just say “no.” It didn’t. Next case. But wait, you get ten points, no, a gazillion points, for asking. Now (assuming you believe me) future generations of tourists won’t waddle into your museum, their grubby little  fingers sticky from whatever ghastly confection will be popular then (probably something mildly radioactive made from recycled cell phones) and encounter a placard misleading them about the origin of “blue blazes.” And then they won’t go home and post a garbled version of that placard to whatever replaces Facebook, confusing the “lime” you mentioned with the stuff in Grandma’s daiquiri drip. Come to think of it, would you like a medal? How about a free cat?

A “lime kiln,” for those not up on such things, is a type of high-intensity oven used to convert limestone into quicklime (calcium oxide), a handy substance which has been used for all sorts of purposes for thousands of years. When quicklime is heated sufficiently, for instance, it produces an intense light used for stage lighting in 19th century theaters, giving us the term “limelight” meaning “public attention and adulation.”

I’m sure the blue glow from a lime kiln operating at its peak must be very intense, but the only connection between the phrase “blue blazes” and those kilns is coincidence. There are actually three separate “blazes” in English. The “blaze” we’re dealing with here, meaning “fire or flames,” comes from the old Germanic word “blason,” meaning “torch.” The second sort of “blaze” comes from Dutch and means “to blow,” and today is heard mostly in reference to “a blaze of trumpets.” The third “blaze,” meaning “to mark a route by stripping patches of bark from trees along the path” (i.e., to “blaze a trail”) comes from an Old Norse word meaning “patch of white on an animal’s forehead.”

For most of its history, “blaze” in the “fire” sense meant either “a torch” (a meaning now considered obsolete) or “a bright flame or fire,” either literally (“A few withered dry sticks, with which they made a blaze,” 1725) or figuratively, in the sense of “glory” or “splendor” (“A most glorious Blaze of Poetical Images,” 1712).

Beginning in the 19th century, however, “blazes” began to be used to mean specifically “the fires of hell” and, by extension, things similarly intense and merciless. Thus were born such phrases as “like blazes” indicating great intensity or force (“The horse … went like blazes,” 1812), as well as the use of “blazes” as a euphemistic synonym for “hell” (“How the blazes you can stand the head-work you do, is a mystery to me,” Dickens, 1837) or “perdition” (“The moral of A party had gone to blazes,” 1924).

“Blue blazes” is simply another metaphorical use of “blazes” as a euphemistic oath (“What the Blue Blazes is he?”, Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861), in this case coupled with “blue” as an elaboration and an intensifier, giving “blazes” a bit more weight. The choice of “blue” is probably largely due to the alliterative charm of having two initial consonants in the phrase “blue blazes.” But the fact that it’s well-known that the hottest fires burn with a blue flame probably played a role as well. So “blue blazes” probably does, indeed, have some connection to a very intense fire, but not specifically the blue glow of a lime kiln.

One step ahead of the Sheriff.

Dear Word Detective:  It’s an old expression, but periodically we still see the expression “done a bunk,” a meaning generally attached to a low life who runs out on a spouse, girl friend, or employer, not infrequently with cash or other loot. We’ve seen “bunk” as it refers to trash, falsehoods, and beds, but where do we get the reference to fast-fading ne’er-do-wells? — Oldusedcop.

That’s a great question, evocative of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, The Maltese Falcon and the whole world of “noir” detective novels and films. Unfortunately, as soon as I wrote that sentence I began to worry about Hollywood’s penchant for ruining great films with tawdry and stupid remakes. I’m praying that the plots of those stories are simply too complicated and subtle to hold the studios’ attention, because I don’t think I could survive even hearing of Vince Vaughn playing Sam Spade (probably with Lady Gaga in Mary Astor’s role).

There are actually several “bunks” in English, the oldest of which is “bunk” meaning a sleeping berth aboard a ship or train or, more generally, any bed, especially when two or more are arranged in a tier. This “bunk” dates back to the mid-1700s and is of uncertain origin, but it may have Scandinavian roots and is probably related to “bunker.”

While the roots of that bed “bunk” are murky, the precise origin of “bunk” meaning “nonsense” or “falsehoods” is refreshingly certain. This “bunk” is short for “bunkum,” a simplified spelling of “Buncombe,” a county in North Carolina. Back in 1820, a certain Representative Felix Walker, whose district happened to include Buncombe County, rose on the floor of the US House of Representatives to address the debate of the day, the famous Missouri Compromise, which dealt with slavery in states wishing to join the Union. But as Walker began to speak, it became clear that what he was saying had nothing to do with the issue at hand and was, in fact, irrelevant nonsense. Worse yet, he refused to shut up. Challenged by his colleagues, Walker replied that his constituents expected him to “make a speech for Buncombe,” and started yammering again. Bingo, “buncombe,” later “bunkum” and simply “bunk,” became national shorthand for “nonsense.”

It’s probable that “to do a bunk,” meaning “to run away” since around 1870, comes at least in part from “bunk” in the sense of “nonsense,” especially in an extended use of “bunk” to mean “trickery, dishonesty.” It’s also probable, however, that “to bunk” meaning “to escape, elude,” was strongly influenced by “bunco,” which since the 1870s has been used to mean “a swindle or con, especially one done via dice or playing cards.” The term “bunco” comes from the Spanish “banca,” a card game similar to “monte,” best known in the form “three-card monte,” a swindle (similar to the “shell game”) still played on unsuspecting marks on the streets of New York and other large cities. While “bunco” originally referred to a card swindle, the term quickly came to cover any sort of confidence game or racket, and many urban police departments used to maintain a “bunco squad” whose target was swindlers and con men in general.

So “bunk” meaning “to escape, elude, run away” (“The keeper tried to catch him, but the bad boy did a bunk,” 1870) may well have had two sources, both embodying the sense of dishonesty that “bunk” in this sense implies.

And the cats want Fancy Feast to be much fancier.

Dear Word Detective:  Way back in elementary school, there was one creature abhorred more than any other–the “D-er.” This despicable person would cut in front of another in one of the many lines we always seemed to find ourselves in. This was called “ditching,” shortened often to “d-ing.” I have asked the Internets, but they remain stubbornly quiescent on the matter, as did several dictionaries. Perhaps the word is limited to Central Ohio school systems? You’re my last hope, O Mighty Word Detective! — Not a D-er in Ohio.

At last, my genius is acknowledged! By the way, you can call me Obi Word. OK, here’s the plan: abolish all organized sports and outlaw TV, movies, and internet video. Force people to read again. Then make teaching the highest-paid profession and college education free and mandatory. Conduct driver’s license exams in Latin and set a national speed limit of 40 mph. Make all cell phones coin-operated and text-messaging a felony. Make bottled-water companies say what’s in the stuff, and allow claiming cats as dependents for tax purposes. Have I left anything out?

OK, back to the real world. “Ditch” is based on the Old English “dic,” which also gave us “dike.” From the beginning, “ditch” meant “a long and narrow excavation in the ground, especially one designed to carry water, as for drainage,” but early on “ditch” also meant the long mound of dirt excavated to make that trench, i.e., a “dike.” So for most of the 16th and 17th centuries, “ditch” and “dike” were vaguely synonymous.

“Ditch” became a verb in the 14th century meaning “to dig a ditch, especially to surround with a ditch as a means of fortification or marking boundaries” (“The several parcels of land … shall be inclosed, hedged, ditched, or fenced,” 1788). In the early 19th century, “to ditch” began being used to mean “throw into or as into a ditch” (Oxford English Dictionary). “Ditch” in a figurative sense meaning “to discard, jilt, abandon or defeat” followed soon after, and by the time of World War II, “to ditch” had become Royal Air Force slang for “to attempt an emergency landing in the sea.” This use was no doubt influenced by the earlier use of “ditch” as a noun to mean the sea in general and the English Channel in particular.

People have probably been standing in lines since the first mastodon roast, but only with the advent of the industrial revolution and urban congestion did we start inventing terms for the practice of not waiting your fair turn. “Queue jumping,” “cutting in line,” and “butting/barging/budging in line” are all fairly well-know terms for the practice. “Ditch the line,” however, is rarely heard outside the US Midwest, and has occasioned several discussions in recent years on the American Dialect Society email list (ADS-L).

It turns out, and I was quite surprised by this, that “to ditch the line” is used almost exclusively in Central Ohio, particularly in Columbus and surrounding areas of Franklin County (which is where my wife Kathy grew up and quite close to where we live now). Steven H. Keiser of the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University in Columbus has been researching use of the phrase for several years, and has discovered several interesting angles to use of this “ditch,” including one that may help explain its origin.

The question, of course, is how “to ditch,” even in its slang sense of “jilt, abandon, discard,” could come to mean “butt into line.” It might be simply a greatly extended use of the “discard” sense to mean “blithely disregard the rights of other people in line,” but that seems a stretch. Some have suggested that a queue-jumper metaphorically “digs a ditch” in the middle of the line and steps in, but that seems even more elaborate and unlikely.

It has also been suggested that this “ditch” actually has no connection to the “trench” sort of ditch but is actually a modified form of the 18th century English slang term “to dish,” meaning “to ruin, defeat, circumvent” (from the sense of food being done and “dished,” i.e., put on plates). The same “dish” is found in the slang phrase “dish it out” and its modern relative, “dish the dirt” meaning “tell gossip.” Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, Steven Keiser at OSU spent some time asking people in and around Columbus about “ditch,” and discovered that people over the age of 40 (in 2001) tended to remember using the term “dish” to mean “cut in line,” while young children used, as you note, simply “D.” While not conclusive, the use of “dish” in this sense by the older generation may well indicate that “dish” is indeed the source of this sense of “ditch.”

You’re a bigger one.

Dear Word Detective:  This being silly season (come to think of it, haven’t the entire last ten years been silly season?), there has been an awful lot of media attention on wingnuts. Can you tell us anything about when the term “wingnut” started to refer to … well … what else could I call them? … wingnuts? — Dawn.

This is an interesting question. Unfortunately, what makes it particularly interesting are some areas of uncertainty, but we’ll do our best to make it all make sense. Just keep in mind that this is a topic in which “making sense” itself does not play a large role.

“Wingnut” is a pejorative term commonly used by political bloggers of a left bent to describe fervid exponents of right-wing (often extreme right-wing) political opinions and causes. (I’m going to avoid the use of terms such as “conservative,” “liberal,” “libertarian” and “progressive” here because I have no interest in debating political theology at the moment. “Left” and right” will have to do.) This current sense of “wingnut” dates back to the late 1990s, but it only really became popular with the rise of political blogging in the early years of the 21st century.

In a literal sense, “wingnut,” which first appeared as “wing nut” around 1900, means a kind of mechanical “nut” (paired with a bolt) having “wings,” or flat projections, allowing it to be easily tightened using only one’s fingers. Handy things, those wing nuts. The existence of that sense of “wingnut” contributed to, but is not directly connected to, the modern political “wingnut,” which is simply a shortened form of “right-wing nut,” a phrase dating to the early 1960s (“‘You one of these right-wing nut outfits?’ inquired the diplomatic Metzger,” The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon, 1966). “Nut” here is, of course a slang term meaning “crazy person,” derived from the very old use of “nut” to mean “head.”

Interestingly, however, “wingnut” had a low-key presence in the culture back in the 1980s as a simple, non-political synonym for “eccentric person” or “crackpot,” a use clearly not derived from a shortening of “right-wing nut.” It seems to have been especially popular in Canada, applied to everything from bad drivers (“Our most vociferous broadside against wingnut drivers,” Toronto Star, 1987) to the late Michael Jackson (“Moonwalk is less an autobiography than a printed response. [Michael Jackson] feels we have got him wrong. That we have misunderstood his idiosyncrasies and unfairly branded him a celebrity wingnut,” The Gazette, Montreal, 1988). My guess is that this use of “wingnut” is a simple elaboration of “nut” in the “crackpot” sense, perhaps invoking the “wings” of a mechanical wingnut to suggest flights of fantasy or the like. This non-political “wingnut” surely contributed to the current political “nutcase” use of the word.

“Wingnut” was also used to mean a fan of the NBC show The West Wing (1999-2007) about a fictional Democratic president and his administration.

Speaking of wings, the equivalent epithet commonly applied by right-wing bloggers and commentators to “wingnuts” of the left is “moonbat,” introduced (according to the late William Safire, a masterful chronicler of such things) in 1999 by Perry de Haviland, proprietor of the “Samizdata” blog. De Haviland has said that when he coined the term (as “barking moonbat”) he meant it to apply to crazies of both the Right and Left, but today it is deployed exclusively by the Right at the Left. Safire theorized that the existing epithet “Loony Left” (“loony” being rooted in “luna,” moon) may have bolstered the appeal of “moonbat” to the Right. The source of “moonbat” is uncertain, but the term does occur in two stories from the 1940s by science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.

Or possibly from the French for “Remember me.”

Dear Word Detective:  A coworker suggested that another, who was showing signs of a cold, go home so that he didn’t “give us all his cooties.” More commonly, of course, even in this era of fear of bedbugs, we all know that “cooties” are that thing the opposite sex has when you’re a kid. But why? I was surprised not to find this in the archives of your website; perhaps the answer is unprintable? — A in Berkeley.

Eek, bedbugs! Actually I think I’ve discovered another benefit of living in the middle of nowhere. Our old farmhouse may have mice in the walls, possums in the cellar, squirrels in the attic, and venomous spiders in every nook and cranny (not to mention coyotes that come right up on the front porch looking for lunch), but so far (knock wood) no bedbugs.

A discussion of “cootie” is definitely not unprintable today, although it probably would have been back in the 1950s. In the literal sense, a “cootie” is a body louse, a nasty little biting creature that afflicts people who don’t have access, for whatever reason, to clean laundry and facilities for maintaining proper personal hygiene. The term “cootie” apparently entered the mainstream US lexicon in the wake of World War I, in which months spent in the trenches of Europe gave soldiers a regrettable familiarity with lice (“‘Does the straw bother you, mate? It’s worked through my uniform and I can’t sleep.’ In a sleepy voice he answered, ‘That ain’t straw, them’s cooties,’” 1917).

The origins of “cootie” are a bit murky. The most likely source is the Malay word for louse, “kutu,” but how the word made the leap to soldiers in Europe is unclear. Michael Quinion of World Wide Words (www.worldwidewords.org) suggests that a related word may exist in Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) and was picked up by US soldiers stationed there, which seems very reasonable to me. Quinion also notes that the word “cootie” has remained US-centric and is virtually unknown in Britain.

Interestingly, “cootie” is rarely used in this literal sense today; perhaps the intractable problem of head lice in US schoolchildren has taken the sting of scandal out of the word “lice.” But the use of “cooties” is alive and well, especially among children, in the sense of, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it, “an imaginary germ with which a socially undesirable person, or one of the opposite sex, is said to be infected.” The first citation for this use in the OED is from 1967, but since it’s from a Beverly Cleary young adult novel (“Quit breathing on it… We don’t want any of your cooties in the pudding,” Mitch and Amy), we can assume the term was in use among children for at least a few years before that appearance.

The use of “cooties” to mean “real germs or microbes of an unidentified sort,” as in your example, is interesting for two reasons. First, it seems pretty clearly to be a simple extension of the child-vernacular “cooties” into the adult world, where it is used in a new literal, if usually jocular, sense, usually among friends. (I have it on good authority that the CDC does not, for instance, issue directives employing the term “cooties.”) So there may be some evidence of the creeping infantilization of US culture there (as if we needed more). Secondly, the perpetuation of a concern about undifferentiated “cooties” dovetails nicely with accelerating germophobia in the US, as evidenced by anti-microbial wipes at the entrance of nearly every store and the impregnation of nearly every product with germ-killing agents. As someone who discovered last week that he had unwittingly bought a kitty-litter pan infused with an anti-microbial agent, I think we’ve gone a bit over the edge. A few cooties are good for you, boys and girls.

And if you’re not in New York City, that’s not a real bagel. Sorry.

Dear Word Detective:  Recently the term “egg cream” was mentioned on a newsgroup I frequent, and this led to the question of why a concoction that contains neither eggs nor cream should have that name. (And when I searched your website, I was surprised to find no listing for “egg cream.” Did I miss it? I can’t believe an ex-pat New Yorker such as yourself would have missed it. I also moved away from New York many years ago, but, as a friend of my puts it, “I still have my passport.”) One of the members said that her husband raised the question of ingredients whenever anyone mentioned “egg creams” and said he just couldn’t let it go. I wrote back to ask if she had broken the news about “baby oil” to him. This led to a total digression into posts about what exactly goes into “Girl Scout cookies,” “moth balls,” etc., not to mention oxymorons like “Holy Roman Empire” (which wasn’t Holy, Roman or an Empire) and the “German Democratic Republic” (the former East Germany). And this leads to our two questions: (1) What is is the origin of the term “egg cream,” and did some early version of the beverage actually contain eggs, cream or both? (2)  Is there a word for ambiguous constructions like “Girl Scout cookies” and the like? It seems that someone ought to have coined one by now. (If not, I may have to take a stab at it. One of my coinages – “webmosis” – as in “I picked up my knowledge of 18th century salad forks by sheer webmosis” – has actually come back to me in a note from a total stranger since I’ve released it into the wild. — Joe.

Well, to answer your second question first (after shortening the whole shebang a bit, sorry), I don’t know of any term for such ambiguous terms as “moth balls,” but if you can think of one, go for it. “Webmosis” is great. Incidentally, I loved the smell of moth balls as a kid, which may explain my lack of coordination in gym class and all sorts of other things later on.

I actually did write a column on “egg cream” many years ago, but that was back when I wrote for the New York Daily News, so it’s not on my website. The “egg cream” is the quintessential New York City drink, made with seltzer, whole milk and chocolate syrup, stirred with a long-handled spoon and served in a small glass. For connoisseurs, the only proper chocolate syrup to use in an egg cream is Fox’s U-bet, made, of course, in Brooklyn.

By now attentive readers will have noticed that neither eggs nor cream appear in that recipe, and there’s some debate as to whether they ever did. The egg cream is generally agreed to have been introduced in the early 1900s at a candy store owned by Louis Auster on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Inexpensive fountain drinks were popular in those days (including the classic “two cents plain” glass of seltzer), so it’s entirely possible that Auster simply perfected and popularized an existing concoction rather than actually inventing the egg cream, but he gets the credit anyway. As for the ingredients, some accounts say the original drink was made from syrup containing eggs and cream, others say that “egg” in the name is just an Anglicized form of the Yiddish “echt,”meaning “genuine” or “real,” and still others say that the name “egg cream” was never meant to be taken literally and simply referred to the taste of the drink. Hey, we’re talking New York here — you expected just one opinion?

By the early 20th century, the egg cream was being dispensed by the millions in every drugstore, soda fountain, candy store and delicatessen in the five boroughs of New York City. The great thing about egg creams is that they don’t last — they should be consumed as soon as they’re made or the milk and seltzer separate and the whole thing goes flat — so no one has ever been able to bottle a real egg cream. I assume that there are still plenty of places in NYC to find a decent egg cream, but if all else fails, try outer Brooklyn. And it’s possible that you can find something called an “egg cream” in Pittsburgh or Des Moines if you really search, but don’t bother. Like pizza, if you’re not in New York City, it’s gonna be a bad joke.

Ministry of Un-silly Walks.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m listening to Tom Waits’ song “Walking Spanish” and wondering: what is the etymology of this macabre phrase? — Topi.

Tom Waits? The strangest things turn up in this column. Not that there’s anything wrong with Tom Waits. I recognize that he’s a very talented singer-songwriter. My only problem is his voice, which, according to Wikipedia, was once described by a critic as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” Remember that business back in the 1990s when The New England Journal of Medicine documented the case of a 45 year-old woman who had seizures whenever she heard Mary Hart’s voice? Tom Waits is my Mary Hart. A Tom Waits duet with Van Morrison would probably do me in for good.

The song “Walking Spanish” is, at least on the surface, about a condemned prisoner walking to his execution, and the phrase in question concludes each verse (e.g., “Tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry, But he’ll be somewhere else to hear the call, Don’t say goodbye, he’s just leaving early, He’s walking Spanish down the hall”). From this we can conclude that “walking Spanish” is not something done voluntarily, and indeed the Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase as “to (cause to) walk under compulsion, properly with someone holding the collar and the seat of the trousers.”

The phrase dates to the early 19th century, and has been used both literally (with the subject being under the sort of physical restraint described above) and figuratively, where the person is compelled to leave a job, the premises or the country, etc., unwillingly. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894) provides an example of the figurative “dismiss” or “fire” sense from 1885: “If I had to deal with the fellow, I would soon make him walk Spanish, I warrant you.”

The question, of course, is what makes a “Spanish walk” Spanish in any sense. The simplest (and probably most likely) explanation is that the phrase is just another example of the use of “Spanish” as a derogatory modifier in a wide range of English idioms. This would put “Spanish walk” in the same category as “Spanish castle” (a daydream unlikely to be realized), “Spanish disease” (syphilis) and “Spanish padlock” (a chastity belt). Many of these phrases reflect the national rivalry between Spain and England in the 16th and 17th centuries, just as such phrases as “French leave” (desertion) and “Dutch act” (suicide) echo England’s periods of enmity towards France and the Netherlands.

There is, however, a possibility that “Spanish walk” has a somewhat less derogatory origin. In dressage, the art of training horses to move in precise, sometimes elaborate fashions, “Spanish walking” (presumably named after a style of dressage fashionable at one time in Spain) is a style of walking in which the horse swings its forelegs forcefully straight forward with each step. The effect is roughly similar to soldiers marching in “goosestep,” and a person being involuntarily marched in a “Spanish walk” might approach such a stiff-legged gait.

There’s food on your forehead.

Dear Word Detective: A common word I always found peculiar is “napkin.” Is there an English derivation for this? Any relation to “bodkin” or “pumpkin”? — Jim McGovern.

I actually answered a question about “napkin” many years ago, and the explanation of the word that my correspondent had heard from her mother was so bizarrely creative that I think it’s worth quoting her email to me: “My mother maintains that a ‘napkin’ used to be a kind of blanket that one would sleep (‘nap’) under, and that when the napkin was worn out people would cut it up into smaller pieces to use at the dinner table.” Eventually, I suppose, these “napkins” were cut into even smaller pieces and used by Mrs. Housemouse to cover her little mouse-children in their tiny matchbox beds. And baby bedbugs need bankies too, so I’ll bet it’s napkins all the way down.

As I explained at the time, the “nap” in “napkin” has nothing to do with the pleasant snooze you sneak at your desk after lunch. That “nap” comes from the Old English word “hnappian,” meaning “to doze or sleep lightly.” There’s also no connection between the “nap” in “napkin” and “nap” meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it, “the rough layer of projecting threads or fibers on the surface of a woolen or other textile fabric,” which comes from an Old English word meaning “to pluck.”

The root of our English word “napkin,” which first appeared in the 16th century meaning, as it does today, “A usually square piece of cloth, paper, etc., used at a meal to wipe the fingers and lips and to protect the clothes” (OED), lies in Latin. The Latin word “mappa” means “cloth,” and the same “mappa” also gave us our word “map.” When “mappa” was carried into Old French, the “m” became an “n,” producing “nappe,” which entered English as “nape,” a now obsolete word meaning “cloth.”

That same “nappe,” by the way, gave us the English “apron,” which was, in English, originally “napron.” Through a linguistic process known as metanalysis, the initial “n” of “napron” in the phrase “a napron” drifted over and fused to the article, producing “an apron.” Such metanalysis also transformed “a nadder” into “an adder” and the 14th century “noumpere” (from the French, literally “not a peer”) into our modern “umpire.”

Meanwhile, back at “nape” meaning “cloth,” back in the 13th and 14th centuries it was common to add the suffix “kin” to words, at first mostly proper names, in order to create a diminutive form. Beginning in the 15th century, this “kin” (which has roots in Dutch and is unrelated to “kin” in the sense of “family”) was appended to a fairly small number of nouns to add the sense of “small,” and “napkin” was such a case, giving it the logical sense of “small cloth.”

It’s actually unclear whether the diminutive “kin” in “napkin,” signifying “small,” carries the same meaning in either “pumpkin” or “bodkin” (meaning a dagger, needle or other sharp implement). The original form of “pumpkin” in English was “pumpion” (from the Latin “peponem,” melon), and the origin of “bodkin” is a complete mystery. Both words were apparently modified to end in “kin” as was common at the time, but neither word really carries that sense of “small.” Pumpkins are actually rather large for melons.

Incidentally, that “bodkin” has nothing to do with “Odd’s bodkins,” an emphatic oath meaning literally “God’s dear body!” common in 16th and 17th century English literature and a favorite of Shakespeare. The “bodkin” in the oath is actually a variant of “bodikin,” a diminutive (or, by extension, familiar or affectionate) form of “body.”