Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Spring is here, Spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer… Well, at least it seems to have stopped raining for the moment.

The vultures are back! I love the vultures. They nest every year in our old semi-dead hollow tree down by the road and spend their days soaring above the yard and the field across the road.  I counted nine of them wheeling above our side yard the other afternoon. They are truly awesome birds. You can go stand in the yard and they’ll swoop low over your head to say hi. At least I hope they’re saying hi and not just checking my pulse.

We acquired a flock of crows in our trees last year for the first time. That sounds like we paid for them, but they actually just appeared. I grew up with crows, and I didn’t realize until these showed up how much I had missed their caws. And in the early evening, I sit on the front porch and watch the bats zoom back and forth catching bugs. Bats are cool.

The downside of spring around here is the clouds of agricultural chemicals that envelop the house. We’re sandwiched between two enormous fields, each spanning hundreds of acres, where soybeans and corn are grown in alternate years. Because of the rain, the farmers are way behind schedule in their planting, and they’ve been spraying late into the night. Not fun. It’s a huge argument against country living.

Many thanks to our readers who have subscribed or otherwise contributed to our well-being lately. As I may have mentioned a few times, your support literally keeps this leaky little boat afloat. I know money is tight for most people, but, if you can swing four cents a day ($15/yr), you’ll be ensuring that we’re here when you run into someone who firmly maintains that the proper spelling of the phrase is “all tolled.” Think of us as an insurance policy on a small but important bit of your sanity. So please consider subscribing if you can, because (as I have lately discovered the hard way) there are many people out there who would like to but can’t.

Many thanks also to the kind person who sent me Dragon voice-recognition software. I actually do have a computer that can be booted into Windows 7, so that’ll work. My shoulder is healing slowly, but I’m  going to use this software even after it’s working again. One of the things that ms has done is undermine my ability to make my fingers type the proper letters. I worked as a legal proofreader for several years at a large NYC firm and I was very good at it (good enough that I quit wearing a tie to work and got away with it), and until a few years ago I almost never made a mistake typing. Now? Fuhgeddaboudit. Word salad. It’s mostly my left hand that’s the culprit, but that’s half of every word up for grabs. But I still compose complete sentences in my mind before I type them, so speaking them aloud instead ought to work. It’ll be like having an amanuensis. My father worked as an assistant to H.L. Mencken in the 1930s, and he said the high point of that gig was when Mencken got into the habit of introducing him to people as “my amanuensis.”

Speaking of computery things, my primary computer just went kablooey, which isn’t surprising, since it’s a low-end desktop Dell from 2003. I bought it NIB on eBay for less than $400 and gave it a real graphics card, a decent power supply, a cheap sound card and four gigs of cheap memory, and it hummed along happily for eight years. Now the graphics card has died rather dramatically (strobing orange screen!), but I’m not sure I’ll replace it since (a) I don’t have the money at the moment, and (b) the whole machine has been acting strangely for a few weeks, and Dell never built anything to last this long. Kathy’s final Dell (before she jumped ship to a Mac years ago) died of a fried motherboard one day after the one-year warranty expired. What a coinkydink, eh?

I’m thinking I’ll just build my own next time. After all, I pretty much built this one. And I can buy the parts over time, like building an airplane in your garage. And I can use the disk drives, sound card, etc. I already have.

By the way, the failure of this computer freaked me out less than it would have last year, when there was a good chance I’d have lost the last few changes to whatever column I had been writing. But since I now use the Dropbox online backup service, my documents folder online gets updated literally as soon as I save the file on my computer (where it continues to exist in case the internet isn’t working, etc.). If you sign up through that link, you get 2 gigabytes of free storage, and I get an additional 250 mb. You should still run weekly backups of everything to an external drive, but Dropbox really is insanely convenient.

Elsewhere in computerville, one of our neighbors called me the other day. He lives about a half-mile down the road and, like most people who didn’t grow up with computers, he regards his as a temperamental mystery. He was wondering why his DSL connection keeps going dead, so I explained that last year Verizon unloaded its rural lines to a bunch of feckless gits from out west called Frontier, who apparently haven’t quite grasped the complexities of running a business with actual customers. The solution, which I learned last year and relayed to him, is simply to turn off the DSL modem, wait ten, twenty or twenty thousand minutes, and fire it up again. Works about 50% of the time. It doesn’t work when it’s raining, but, then again, neither do the phones around here.

By the way, DSL out here, sold as being between 3 and 5 mbps, actually tops out, on a good day, at around 370 kbps, or about one-tenth of the low end of the advertised range. It’s really just glorified dial-up. But you people in the big city with your true broadband don’t have vultures, so we win.

Lastly, as always, please consider subscribing. C’mon, gang — it’s four cents a day.

And now, on with the show….

Yubba Dubba Duck!

Dear Word Detective: My wife was reading an ad and noticed that there was going to be a “Blow Out Sale,” which got her thinking, what is a “Blow Out Sale”? When did “blow out” become a term to mean “big” or “extravagant”? I, of course, pondered the question and thought of you. Do you have any clues? Should we go to the “Blow Out Light Bulb Sale”? — Rich Harrington.

Good question. I’d have answered it sooner, but I was recovering after the ruckus at MondoMegaStuff on Black Friday. I felt sorry for the poor schmucks guarding the doors when that crowd stepped on them, of course, but you don’t get … whatever it was I bought … by hanging back like a wuss. What did I buy, anyway? I must have bought something, right? Anyway, I’ll bet it’s awesome, and I just know it’s making me happy. And I’ll bet you don’t have one. Wuss.

I have no doubt that somewhere out there in Consumption Nation there’s a Blow Out Light Bulb Sale in progress, probably just a few feet from the big “Roll Back!” sign above the bowling balls. Personally, I can’t help thinking about the tires on our car when I hear “blow out,” which is not surprising because I’ve gone through life convinced that someday all four wheels would fall off while we’re tooling down the freeway. Hey, it happened to Fred Flintstone almost every week.

“Blow out” in the sense you noticed is a use of the noun “blow out” (also “blow-out” and “blowout”) as an adjective. The noun “blow-out” (the form preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)) is based on the verb “to blow,” which came to us from Germanic roots via the Old English “blawan,” meaning generally “to move air, to kindle, to breathe.”

As you can imagine, a verb having to do with everything from starting a fire to simply breathing subsequently spawned dozens of subsidiary meanings, but the one that underlies the various senses of “blow-out” is that of “to expel air forcefully or explosively.” Thus the use of “blow-out” to mean “a catastrophic burst in a rubber tire,” the most notable corollary of which (if you’re lucky) is that your tire no longer holds air and you have to call the AAA. This sense of “blow-out” first appeared in print in 1908 and shows, sadly, no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon. The same sense of “explosive escape and failure” is found in “blow-out” in a number of mechanical contexts, lately most notably meaning “A rapid, uncontrolled uprush of fluid from an oil well.” This sense first appeared in 1916. When we say that a light bulb “blows out,” we’re figuratively using a sense of “to blow” dating back to the 14th century meaning “to extinguish (a flame) by a current of air.”

Interestingly, one of the earliest printed examples of “blow-out” comes from 1825, when it was used to mean “quarrel, disturbance, fight,” a sense now mostly obsolete, having been replaced by “blow up.”

At about the same time (1823), however, “blow-out” appeared with the far more congenial meaning of “A dinner, supper, or other entertainment for which an abundant supply of food and drink is provided or at which it is consumed” (OED) (“They had a grand blow-out, and … drank in the forecastle, a barrel of gin,” Two Years Before the Mast, Dana, 1840). The logic behind this use of “blow-out” is that of excess without limits, as if a richly-stocked pantry had been completely (and, metaphorically, explosively) emptied for one feast. This “blow-out” is very much still in use today, and appears to be the sense behind “blow-out sale,” an “event” offering a wealth of goodies at insanely low prices.

Two other, more modern, uses of “blow-out” are worth mentioning because the second may feed into “blow-out sale” a bit. In the 1920s, blow-out” appeared as US slang meaning “a total failure; a fiasco or debacle” (“I walk over … knowing full well what it’s like to be in his shoes, facing a financial blowout, gobsmacked by your own bovine stupidity,” 2004). But for every loser there is a winner, and by the 1930s, this “failure” sense had produced its opposite, the use of “blow-out” to mean a sweeping and dramatic victory, especially in sports or politics (“The Tigers … lost a total of seven games — four by blowouts and three by slim margins,” 1991). In a sports-obsessed nation like the US, I suspect that this “stunning victory” sense also lurks behind “blow-out sale.”

I made it myself.

Dear Word Detective: I was recently at a party where a snarky guest remarked that our hostess “raised tacky to an art form.” I’m guessing that it is more correctly “a form of art,” but how did this expression come to mean something not very special? It seems like it should be exactly the opposite. (By the way, the snarky guest was bumped by someone with a full glass of red wine and left early, presumably to contemplate the consequences of trashing the hostess’s taste.) Now that I think about it, is there any history attached to “snarky”? — Lori Bates.

Ah yes, the loyal guest with the full wine glass, the polite alternative to the bouncer. And so much more civilized than those vulgar stun guns. On the other hand, the wine “accident” doesn’t have the salutary effect on the other guests that shouting “Guards, seize that man!” does. I’ve found that nothing boosts your guests’ opinion of your cooking and home decor like muffled screams from the cellar. Assuming they don’t all just bolt for their cars, they’ll be begging you for your deep-fried Twinkies recipe and praising your Beanie Babies diorama with gratifying alacrity and an almost religious fervor.

The use of “to raise [something] to art form” you describe is remarkably common but devilishly difficult to trace. A search of Google produces more than 16 million hits at the moment, and it seems that nearly anything can be lifted to the status of an art, at least rhetorically. So we have “video games,” “narcissism,” “complaining,” “power strips” (for a computer), “sausage,” “terrarium making,” “hypocrisy,” “window shopping” and simply “apartment living” all apparently boosted to parity with Mozart and Michaelangelo within the first two pages of Google hits.

“Art form” as a fixed phrase meaning, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, “An established form taken by a work of art, as a novel, concerto, portrait, film, etc.” or “A medium of artistic expression,” dates back at least to the mid-19th century, and was probably an adaptation of the German “Kunstform,” meaning “skillful artistic form.” Most uses of the term at that time were simply literal; to call ballet or sculpture an “art form” is non-controversial. But as early as 1895 we can see the phrase used in its more modern sense of “something which is not thought of as art but is done so well in this instance that it approaches that status.” In this sense such non-artistic pursuits as diplomacy, neurosurgery, and skateboarding can be praised as having been “raised to an art form” by a talented individual. In nine cases out of ten such hyperbole is simply silly, but at least sincere.

The use of “raise to an art form” you describe the soon-to-be-sodden party guest using, however, is an entirely different phenomenon. It’s a sarcastic jibe not only condemning the object of ridicule but mocking the amount of skill, effort and elaboration implicitly involved in lofting a banal lapse in taste, judgment or competence into the stratosphere of epic awfulness. No one would ever mistake “Bob has raised inappropriate comments at dinner to an art form” or “Sally has raised eye shadow to an art form” for sincere compliments. Ironically, this sarcastic use of “raised to an art form” is itself many years past being a tired and “tacky” cliche.

“Snarky,” oddly enough, has nothing to do with the imaginary animal invented by Lewis Carroll in his 1876 “The Hunting of the Snark.” The verb “to snark” originally, in the late 19th century, meant “to snore or snort,” but soon took on the meaning of “to find fault with, to nag,” probably because snorting at something is rarely considered complimentary. Thus “snarky” appeared in the early 20th century with the meaning “irritable, short-tempered” or, in the common usage today, “impertinently or irreverently sarcastic and critical.”

And I think we should eliminate all words with “ie” and “ei” because they annoy me

Dear Word Detective: I came across a word I had never seen before while reading a colleague’s father’s obituary: “inurnment.” I guess as he was cremated, he would not be interred, but “inurned” — put in a lovely jar. I thought it was a bad typo, being an editor for 24 years, mainly in Ontario government communications for employees. Have you seen this one before? Did we really need it? — Irene Stewart.

Oh heck, do we really need any of these gazillions of words? I’ve found that I can get by quite well on a typical day simply by pointing and grunting. Granted, this method may not work as well outside Ohio, but I suspect that most things worth saying can be said with about twenty words. Seriously, doesn’t “Go food car” cover great swaths of modern life? “Money me” also seems pretty clear, as does “pizza now.” Throw in “bad cat” and you’re good to go. Trust me on this; a simpler life beckons. Our dog Brownie has a vocabulary of exactly six terms (“food,” “walk,” “cat,” “ride,” “ball” and “green bean” (don’t ask)), and she seems perfectly content.

Oh right, your question. “Inurnment” was a new one to me as well and initially I found the word a bit jarring. Sorry. That could probably be developed into a much more tasteless joke. Anyway, I’m afraid that in this case both you and I are victims of what etymologists call “the recency illusion,” the belief that an unfamiliar word or usage must be new (and often thus suspect) when, in reality, it’s been around since Hector was a pup.

So it is with “inurnment,” which means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “the process of placing the ashes of a cremated body into an urn.” The original sense of “urn” was specifically “vessel used to preserve the ashes of the dead,” and the word, derived from the Latin “urna,” seems to have been rooted in the Latin verb “urere,” meaning “to burn.” “Urn” first appeared in English in this “Aunt in a Can” sense in the 14th century, but the Pottery Barn sense of “urn” as a general-purpose receptacle for your car keys and the like didn’t develop until the early 17th century.

Of course, we would expect “urn” itself to be an ancient word; it’s “inurnment” that sounds like the modern spawn of an especially oleaginous funeral director. But “inurnment” first appeared in print, as far as we know, way back in 1602. And wait, it gets better. “Inurnment” didn’t first appear in some obscure 1602 treatise on bat taxidermy. William Shakespeare bestowed it on us in Act One, Scene IV of Hamlet, when Hammy first encounters, and addresses, his father’s ghost: “Why the Sepulcher Wherein we saw thee quietly enurn’d, Hath op’d his ponderous and Marble iawes [jaws], To cast thee up againe?” (i.e., “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead. In a tomb. In a jar.”).

Interestingly, some versions of this scene I have found online render “inurnment” as “interment,” but that’s an entirely different word. “Inter,” meaning “to deposit the body of a deceased person in the ground,” first appeared in English in the 14th century based on the Latin “interrare,” a verb combining “in” with “terra,” earth. A synonymous term, rarely heard today, is “inhume,” from “in” plus “humus,” Latin for “ground.” Of course, every devotee of the innumerable autopsy shows on American television is familiar with the converse of “inhume,” which is “exhume,” meaning “to dig the poor sap up.”

Incidentally, “jar” as I used it in the silly joke a few paragraphs north of here has no connection to “jar” in the raspberry jam sense, which comes from the Arabic “jarrah,” meaning “earthenware vessel.” The verb “to jar” originally meant “to make an unpleasant grating sound” (and may be of “echoic” or imitative origin). Our modern senses of “to jar,” ranging from “to bump or shock sharply” to “to conflict or cause disquiet or discord” are all later figurative uses of the word.

Rewind.

Dear Word Detective: What is known about the history or origin of the statement “that cat cannot be walked back”? — James.

That’s an interesting question. When I say that, I usually mean either that it interests me personally (and I plan to drag the rest of you along for the ride), or that I think the answer is neat, cool, or surprising enough to actually interest most readers. In this case, however, I can confidently assert that this question is objectively interesting, because at least half the internet seems to be looking for the answer. (That’s an exaggeration, of course. Ninety percent of the people on the internet are spending all day every day futzing with their Facebook pages.)

The proximate cause for the sudden uptick in interest in cats walking backwards can be found in a recent article, widely excerpted online, by the conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan. Noting that US corporate leaders “championed investing in China and trade with China” but now find China’s economic power threatening, he declares, “Sorry, but that cat cannot be walked back.”
Buchanan was apparently using the term “to walk back the cat” to mean “to reverse” or “to undo” something already done, what might also be called “putting the genie back in the bottle” or, perhaps more evocative of the impossibility involved, “putting the toothpaste back in the tube.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd used the phrase in the same sense earlier this year, as did Bonnie Goldstein in Slate last year (“Now Cornyn wants the attorney general nominee to walk back the cat by agreeing to not prosecute”).

This “undo” or “take it back” sense of “to walk back the cat” seems to be gaining currency lately, but the phrase originally had a different, more intriguing meaning that deserves to be preserved. “To walk back the cat” comes from the world of spooks, spy masters and double agents explored by writers such as the great John LeCarre. The late William Safire, a Washington insider with excellent sources in the intelligence community, explained the term in his New York Times column back in 2002: “Intelligence analysts have a technique to reveal a foreign government’s internal dissension called ‘walking back the cat.’ They apply what they now know as fact against what their agents said to expect. In that way, walkers-back learn who ‘disinformed’ or whose mistake may reveal a split in a seemingly monolithic hierarchy.”

So “to walk back the cat” in this original sense means to conduct a detailed review and analysis of who said what to whom in light of subsequent events to glean some useful knowledge about whom to trust and, perhaps, a bit about how an opponent works. A slightly different, but clearly related, use of the phrase is to mean “to trace the development of a crisis backwards in order to determine responsibility or to identify errors made or warnings missed.”

If you’ve ever watched a cat wander around a large house or even a small yard, you’ll probably instantly understand the logic behind “walk back the cat.” Cats rarely seem to march from one place to another with a clear purpose in mind, as dogs often do. A cat forges its own labyrinthine path, often doubling back on its route and making what seems like a thousand little side trips in the course of a short stroll. A graphic representation of the typical cat’s journey of just a few minutes’ duration would resemble nothing so much as a tangle of string, but it might provide some interesting glimpses into the cat’s psyche. (OK, probably not, but bear with me.)

So “walking back the cat” is a perfect metaphor for retracing the complex development of an event and examining the “run up” to it for useful insights. The use of “walk back the cat” to simply mean “undo” or “repair” thus mangles a compelling metaphor and misses the point, since the occurrence of the event is itself an important data point in such an investigation. After all, as any fortune-teller will tell you, you can’t read tea leaves until you’ve emptied the cup.

Or possibly a bear in a tutu.

Dear Word Detective: In the Awakening, by Kate Chopin, the main character’s young children are described as wearing “befurbelowed” clothing. Now, to me that sounded like they were wearing fur undergarments. But that sounded like a distinctly unsanitary and uncomfortable proposition. And since the children were well cared for and also lived in a hot, humid climate, it seemed an unlikely mode of dress. Checking my dictionary, I see that it refers to clothing that has frills on it. So shouldn’t we say “befrilledbelowed”? — J. Landis.

Hey, don’t knock fur underwear until you’ve tried it. As Head Berserker of our local Viking re-enactors group, I can assure you that nothing beats BVDs knitted from genuine Norwegian wolf fur when you’re pillaging an abandoned strip mall. Sure, you sweat like an elk in August, but that’s half the fun. Incidentally, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to the nice folks at the Wapokeneta Ramada Inn about the recent fracas at their breakfast buffet. Lyle is really a nice guy, but he has a mead problem.

Oops. I just discovered that there really are Viking re-enactor groups here in the US. Who knew? I think it would be awesome if they took on those Civil War Bores. I’d buy a ticket to that, especially if we could somehow work dinosaurs into the mix.

Meanwhile, back at “befurbelowed,” that is a seriously strange word. Just for starters, it seems to be missing from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), from which not very many words, even very strange ones, are missing. To track down the word in the OED we have to first lop off the prefix “be” and then the suffix “ed.” Bingo, we now have “furbelow,” which the OED recognizes and helpfully defines as “A piece of stuff pleated and puckered on a gown or petticoat; a flounce; the pleated border of a petticoat or gown.” There are subsidiary definitions having to do with things, such as a certain seaweed, that resemble a furbelow, but the only interesting additional point to be made is that multiple furbelows are sometimes considered evidence that the wearer is flighty and unserious. A true fashion disaster for a Viking, obviously.

“Furbelow” first cropped up in English at the beginning of the 18th century (“Lady Revel … Discovers a purse in the Furbeloes of her Apron,” 1706), and the word still gets more than 136,000 hits on Google today, although at least the first few hundred are people asking what the heck it means. The first step in tracing the roots of “furbelow” is easy: it’s simply a modified form of “falbala,” adopted from the French, where it means “frill or flounce.” Unfortunately, that’s the end of easy street, because no one has a plausible theory of where “falbala” came from, although there are forms of the word in several European languages (e.g., the Spanish “farfala”).

If we can’t go forward from this point, we can still retrace our steps and take a closer gander at “befurbelow.” That “be” is an interesting prefix. We adapted it from the Old English preposition and adverb “bi,” which originally carried the sense of “about,” but later weakened to mean simply “near” or “at,” as is found in several modern words such as “below” or “between.” This “be,” when attached to a transitive verb, acts as an intensifier (e.g., “bespatter” means “to spatter all over”). But when stuck to an intransitive verb, an adjective or a noun, “be” has the magical power to transform it into a transitive verb. Thus “befurbelow” means “to furnish or decorate with a furbelow,” and “befurbelowed” means “decorated with furbelows.”

Incidentally, “befurbelowed” is sometimes used in non-clothing contexts to mean “overly elaborate or ornate,” as in The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald’s classic 1945 humorous memoir of her days raising chickens in the Pacific Northwest, in which she refers to inhabitants of a nearby town “tatting themselves up large, befurbelowed Victorian houses.”

Ding-a-ling! It’s the clue phone, Goldie!

Dear Word Detective: The writer of an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Sunday, November 14, 2010, mentioned in passing that “money was ‘sound’ if it rang when dropped on a counter.” This didn’t quite ring (sorry) true to me. I had always thought that ound in this sense meant “solid, trustworthy,” and the like. What do you say? — Harold Pinkley.

What do I say? Well, to quote the classic 1928 New Yorker cartoon (with caption by E.B. White), I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. Furthermore, I am shocked, shocked, to discover that the Gray Lady apparently no longer employs fact-checkers who know how to run that new-fangled Google thing. Lastly, James Grant, the dude who penned that piece, evidently also retails a sheet called “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer,” the accuracy of which I’m sure his readers pray is a bit higher than that on display in this writing sample. Oh well, as we say around here, forget it, Jake, it’s the Times.

Mr. Grant’s op-ed is an extended paean to the gold standard and an argument for restoring it in order to conjure some magical rationality into national monetary policy. Pining for the halcyon days when Goldie was queen, he declares, “It was simplicity itself. National currencies were backed by gold. If you didn’t like the currency you could exchange it for shiny coins (money was ‘sound’ if it rang when dropped on a counter). Borders were open and money was footloose.” Perhaps. My own money seems plenty footloose already. Many a sleepless night here at Chez de le Chat has been danced lately to the pitter-patter of dollars scampering out of my wallet like mice on meth. But the problem of the moment is that Mr. Grant has confused two entirely different sorts of “sound.”

There are actually four completely separate kinds of “sound” in English. The oldest is “sound” meaning “channel of water” (as in Long Island Sound), which comes from the same Germanic root that gave us “swim.” The verb “sound” meaning “to measure the depth of water” probably comes from the Vulgar Latin verb “subundare,” combining “sub,” under, with “unda,” wave.

“Sound” in the sense of “noise; that which can be heard, etc.” comes from the Latin “sonus,” the same root that gave us “consonant,” “sonata,” “sonnet” and several other modern English words. “Sound” in the sense of “solid, reliable, undamaged” is actually a clipped form of the Old English “gesund,” drawn from Germanic roots (from which we also got the post-sneeze interjection “Gesundheit!”, meaning “Health!”).

So Mr. Grant has repeated a story he apparently heard somewhere that confuses “sound” meaning “reliable” with “sound” meaning “noise.” If this column had sound effects, you’d hear a loud buzzer at this point. But wait, is that the cavalry coming that I hear? By golly, it is, and Mr. Grant may not be entirely crazy after all. His subscribers will be so pleased.

It’s quite possible that what Mr. Grant was thinking of was not money being “sound” if it “rang” when dropped on a table, but the expression “ring of truth” (or, as you said in your question, “to ring true”), which did indeed come from the action of dropping a coin on a shop counter. Back in the 17th century, when counterfeit coins were as common as bogus derivatives are today, a sharp shopkeeper knew to drop a suspect coin on a hard surface as a test of its purity. True gold or silver would “ring,” while a coin adulterated with lead or the like would give a duller sound. The same “ring” test was applied (by light tapping with a finger, not dropping, of course) to gauge the purity of fine glass and pottery. Of course, the result of such tests is not always positive, and by 1850 we were using ” to have the ring of” to mean “having the characteristics of, being indicative of” in a less than laudatory sense (“The securities, supposedly based on rights to water reserves on Mars, struck some observers as having the ring of fraud”).

The third most terrifying word in English: “bagpipes.”

Dear Word Detective: Why do I say my morning coffee, when I’ve gotten engrossed in my newspaper and forgotten the cup on my table, is “lukewarm”? Who is Luke, and why is he warm (or not)? And other days, when I home in straight on my cuppa, why do I find my coffee “piping” hot? What pipe, where? As a non-native English speaker, I’m continually amazed at the endless variety of anomalies that this animal called idiomatic use throws up! — Partha Sen Sharma.

Good question. As a non-native speaker of English, you’re probably more likely to notice such odd terms as “lukewarm” and idioms like “piping hot,” but I’d bet that not one in ten native English speakers could explain where either of those terms came from. And I’ll bet at least five out of ten have never even considered the question.

I’m a big fan of eponyms (words formed from proper names), so I’m a bit disappointed that there is no person named “Luke” behind “lukewarm.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “lukewarm” as “moderately warm; tepid,” and notes that it first appeared in print in English in the late 14th century. “Lukewarm” has also been used in a figurative sense since the 16th century to mean “lacking enthusiasm; indifferent” (“The lukewarm advocate avails himself of any pretense to relapse into … indifference,” 1771).

“Lukewarm” is actually simply a combination of “warm” with the somewhat older English adjective “luke” (or “lew”), which itself meant “warm” (meaning that “lukewarm” etymologically amounts to a redundant “warm-warm”). That “luke” or “lew” came from the Old English word “hleowe,” which meant, you guessed it, “warm,” and which in turn was probably derived from an Indo-European root word that meant “weakly warm.” It’s not very exciting when the explanation for a word is simply “that’s what it’s always meant,” but there’s not much we can do about it now.

“Piping hot,” meaning “very hot,” also dates back to the 14th century and has nothing to do with pipes of either the smoking or plumbing sort. It is, however, connected to the kind of musical pipes one finds in bagpipes and church organs as well as “pipe” in the sense of a flute or recorder. The initial sense of “piping” was “emitting a high-pitched whistling sound” or “wheezing,” though the modern sense of “very hot” appeared almost immediately. The explanation is actually rather neat. Something, especially food, is “piping hot” if it actually emits a whistling or sizzling sound on your plate (think fajitas, for instance). In the case of a hot beverage, the “piping” might be the sound of the kettle. “Piping” today is used almost exclusively in reference to food, but back in the 19th century it was not uncommon to read of a “piping hot day” in the summer. “Piping” has also been used since the late 16th century to mean “new, novel, fresh and exciting” (“At the post-office such a scene-picture … the new play, piping hot!”, Robert Browning, 1855).

And the horse you rode in on.

Dear Word Detective: I have been intrigued by the song “Rawhide” (from the TV show of the same name) and the phrase “livin’ high and wide” that is used in the song. I have tried to research its meaning and can’t come with much more than that it might describe a wide open sky with clouds high above. Can you shed any light on the meaning of “living high and wide?” — Ginny Haddy.

Wow. As far as I know, I never actually watched Rawhide when it originally aired from 1959 through 1966, because I was never fond of westerns. But that theme song started playing in my head as soon as I read your question, and now I can’t get rid of it. (Time to break out my emergency tape of “My Sharona.” That kills anything.) “Rawhide” sure is a catchy tune, which isn’t surprising since it was written by Dimitri Tiomkin, winner of a slew of Oscars for his film scores, with lyrics by Ned Washington. I had not realized (Thanks, Wikipedia!) that the song has been recorded over the years by artists ranging from Frankie Laine (for the show) to Oingo Boingo. That’s what I call a tune with legs.

Set in the late 1860s, Rawhide followed “drovers” on a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri, with stops along the way to solve the problems of the locals, argue with Indians, etc. (which must be why the trip took seven years). The show was, in other words, basically “Route 66″ with cows (and a young Clint Eastwood). The first stanza of the theme song contains the phrase in question: “Keep movin’, movin’, movin’ / Though they’re disapprovin’ / Keep them doggies movin’ Rawhide! / Don’t try to understand ‘em / Just rope and throw and grab ‘em / Soon we’ll be living high and wide. / Boy my heart’s calculatin’ / My true love will be waitin’ / Be waiting at the end of my ride.”

Judging by the context, “living high and wide” is obviously a pleasant state of prosperity and ease, but the phrase “high and wide” in this sense is distressingly absent from all the dictionaries and collections of slang I’ve checked. “High,” of course, occurs in many phrases denoting well-being and wealth, such as “living high on the hog,” which comes from the fact that the best cuts of ham, bacon, etc., are found high on the flanks of pigs. The “high” in that phrase also connotes, beyond porcine anatomy, the sense of floating above everyday cares and woes, as “high and mighty” and similar phrases do. But “high and wide” was nowhere to be found among such figurative uses of “high.”

After a prolonged spell of staring at the cornfield across the road, however, a tiny light clicked on upstairs. I realized that Ned Washington, the lyricist, was almost certainly using a cropped form of the venerable US slang phrase “high, wide and handsome,” meaning, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “In a carefree manner, in good style” or, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), “Grandiloquent, stylish, successful.”

The earliest printed occurrence of “high, wide and handsome” found so far comes from 1907 (“Tim could talk high, wide, and handsome when he set out to.”), but the phrase was almost certainly in wide oral use by the mid-19th century. It also seems to be largely associated with the American West, making it a good choice for a cowboy song. A glossary of slang published in 1932 lists the phrase and notes: “Common shout at a rodeo: ‘Ride him, Cowboy, high, wide and handsome.’”

As is often the case with slang, the logic behind “high, wide and handsome” is a bit hard to trace. “High” and “wide” both carry the sense of pride, respect and ease, as if one were strolling confidently down the street while being admired by lesser folk, and “handsome” certainly conveys a sense of being well-groomed and prosperous. The general flavor of the phrase is that the person is feeling and acting on top of the world.

Interestingly, “high, wide and handsome” seems to have later given birth to a more general sense of “unambiguously” or “forcefully” (“The day was riding high, wide and handsome into the deeps of the incredible blue sky,” 1939), as well as serving as a template for turns of phrase that denote anything but well-being (“The cops’ll be high, wide and helpless. They won’t know what in hell’s hit ‘em,” 1971).

Nobody home.

Dear Word Detective: How old is the phrase “no man’s land,” and where did it first appear? I always associate it with the First World War, and that hellish dead zone between the opposing trench lines, but I am reading McMurtry’s “Telegraph Days” right now, and the characters use it to describe the area surrounding the town, which is presumably Texas badlands. The novel is set in 1876, and I have great respect for the author’s superb rendering of the dialect of the time, so it leads me to think the phrase is, then, much older. How far back does it go? — Chris.

That’s a good question. I’ve never actually read any of Larry McMurtry’s books (gasps of astonishment duly noted) because I am allergic to Westerns (cue scattered booing and flying vegetables). I’ve read enough about his books to know that they occupy an artistic rung well above the Louis L’Amour genre, but still. Maybe it’s the horses. Horses have always annoyed me. I am, on the other hand, a big fan of his son, singer-songwriter James McMurtry. About a year ago, Ron Rosenbaum sardonically suggested in Slate that Mr. McMurtry’s epic song “Choctaw Bingo” be made the new US national anthem. I wouldn’t go that far (things around here are depressing enough already), but it is a truly great song.

Your respect for Larry McMurtry’s attention to linguistic detail is well-placed, because it’s entirely plausible that characters in 1876 would have used “no man’s land” in the sense you mention.

The earliest occurrence of “no man’s land” found so far in print (in the form “nomanneslonde”) is from the middle of the 14th century, in the sense of “a piece of uninhabited (and unowned) land; a desolate place.” (The equivalent in Old English was “none man’s land” or “nanesmaneslande.”) According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “nomanneslonde” was often used as the name of a specific place, often just beyond some boundary or between two established boundaries, e.g., between two towns. For instance, it was, early on, used to mean a piece of ground just outside the north wall of the city of London, England, designated as a place for the execution of condemned criminals.

“No man’s land” is still very much in use in this sense of “vacant, uninhabited and desolate land” (“We … went out to the commercial strip in the no man’s land beyond the town boundary,” White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1985), and this would fit perfectly with the sense you describe in McMurtry’s novel.

The use of “no man’s land” to mean “the terrain between two opposing (usually entrenched) armies” (OED) was definitely popularized (if that’s the right word) during World War I, but this military sense dates back to at least 1864 (“The intermediate country is a sort of No-man’s-land, in which numerous warring small tribes are kept in an excited and barbarous state by an extensive importation of firearms.”). The phrase has also been used in a more general sense of “forbidden area” since at least 1926 (“One of the Sunday newspapers had given the bastards enough publicity to make Cheltenham a No Man’s Land area for his old fraternity,” 1972), and “no man’s land” also has been used since the 1930s to mean the area of a tennis court between the baseline and the service line, considered a bad place to hang out during a game one would like to win.

The “no man’s” part of “no man’s land” would seem to need no explanation (no man owns it, right?), but it’s a bit more interesting than it first appears. “No man” (or “nanne mon”) in Old English up through the 19th century was a fixed phrase, the equivalent of “nobody” or “no one.” So “no man’s land” originally meant “nobody’s land,” referring to ownership, and not “land where no man is safe,” as the military use of the phrase has often been interpreted.

Of course it’s a recovery. You people just need to clap harder.

Dear Word Detective: I was reading an interesting article yesterday that was questioning whether a college education was still worth it, due to skyrocketing education costs, horrendous associated student debt, and a dismal jobs market. The conclusion of the article was that it’s increasingly a judgment call. Cheerful stuff. I also started to ponder the word “degree.” It’s got a diverse catalog of uses: “degree” as in the old sheepskin, the college certification, “degree” as unit of temperature measurement, and “degree” as unit of geographical measurement. Can you shine a light on the derivations? And, while we’re on this topic, does “pedigree” have some distant cousin status to “degree”? I asked my cats, and they just rolled their eyes at me. — Chris Schultz, Kansas City.

Yeah, you’ll get that with cats. They march around all superior and snooty, like they graduated from some Cat Sorbonne somewhere with an advanced degree in string theory or something and haven’t got time to listen to your silly twaddle. But every so often they slip up, like a few weeks ago when I left the TV on in my office while I was working. I glanced up after a few minutes and noticed that Mister Boots was completely engrossed in a rerun of My Name Is Earl. Seriously. Oh well. Chacun son goût, I suppose. But I’m gonna draw the line at Two and a Half Men.

Wanna really depressing job? Claims taker at the Unemployment Office. Been there, done that. I lasted two months.

As it happens, there actually is an indirect connection between “degree” and “pedigree,” and it’s rather a neat one, but I’m going to let you folks speculate on what it might be while I wrestle with “degree.” I really ought to be taking bets, because you’re not likely to guess the explanation of “pedigree.”

“Degree” first appeared in English in the 13th century, from the Old French “degre,” which in turn came from the Vulgar Latin “degradus,” which was a combination of “de” (“down”) and “gradus,” meaning “step.” The same “gradus” also gave us “grade,” “gradual” and “degrade,” among other words.

The initial sense of “grade” in English was literally “one of a series of steps in a flight of stairs, or a rung of a ladder,” but it also carried over the figurative sense of “step or stage in a process” that it had acquired in Old French. One of the earliest uses of “degree” in this figurative sense was to mean the number of genealogical “steps” by which one person was separated from another, an important bit of information when deciding who was allowed to marry whom.

All our common uses of “degree” that have developed since the 13th century have centered on this metaphorical sense of “steps” to measure or indicate, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, “A … stage in intensity or amount; the relative intensity, extent, measure, or amount of a quality, attribute, or action” of a thing or process. Thus when your nephew finally gets his Master’s Degree in Skateboard Studies, he has climbed another important step towards his apparent goal of permanent unemployment. This sense of “step” also underlies our use of “degree” to mean an increment of measurement of temperature, longitude or latitude, or the relation of one line to another in geometry. (Incidentally, the division of a circle into 360 degrees, which underlies both the geographic and geometric use of the term, dates back to ancient times, when some calendars measured a year as 360 days.) While all these uses depend on a “degree” being a specified value, we also use “degree” in a somewhat vaguer sense to mean simply “extent” or “amount” (“The blame for the boat’s sinking lay to a large degree with the Captain, who had been drinking for three days”).

The connection of “pedigree” to “degree” is not direct, but “pedigree” is interesting in its own right. On Medieval genealogical charts the lines indicating descent (by “degree,” of course) were, unlike on our modern charts, not horizontal and vertical but usually slanting or curved. Such charts (and later the degrees of relation they depicted) were known as “pied de grue” in Old French, meaning literally “crane’s foot,” because the branching, slanting lines resembled the footprint of a large bird. Once “pedigree” had entered English in the 15th century as “pedagrew” or “pedigrue,” its close association with “degree” in the genealogical sense (as well as the similarity in sound of “digrue” to “degree”) led to “pedigrue” slowly changing its spelling to “pedigree.”

I’d watch shotgun golf if someone would show it.

Dear Word Detective: In writing to a friend today I included the phrase “cleared the boards,” meaning that I had finished all my appointments, so I was able to see her sooner than expected. Where did this phrase come from? I tried the prime source, the vast Word Detective Archive, and then the secondary source, Google. Most of what I found was basketball reports. I hate basketball. Where did this phrase come from really? — LM.

Wow. You really hate basketball? I didn’t know that was possible, and I’ll bet I hate sports you’ve never heard of. But basketball for some reason doesn’t annoy me at all, and if I’m trapped somewhere with people watching a basketball game, I’ll watch it simply because it requires real skill and grace (unlike football) and doesn’t reek of moronic violence (again unlike, well, never mind). Baseball is also nice. It’s my favorite of all the sports that I never watch.

Unfortunately, having a vaguely positive opinion of basketball doesn’t translate into understanding the game, and I must admit that the use of “clear the boards” in the vernacular of basketball strikes me as seriously odd. I had initially assumed that the “boards” referred to were the floorboards of the basketball court, and that “clearing” them would mean something like mounting a well-organized drive towards the opponents’ basket. Wrong-o-rama. It seems that the “board” in the phrase refers to the backboard (originally wood, but now often Plexiglas) mounted behind the basket, and “boards” plural is basketball slang for rebounds off this “board” of missed shots at the basket. Having players positioned to snag these rebounds and gain or retain control of the ball is key to the game, and players are said to “clear,” “bang,” or “crash the boards” if they have a high success rate in this task.

I may, of course, be slightly off in that explanation, but it seems unlikely that “clear the boards” as you used it to mean “get all your work done and free yourself up” comes from basketball. That leaves only the other nine zillion uses of “board” in English as possible sources. For a word that first appeared around in Old English meaning simply “a thin plank of wood,” our friend “board” has developed a lot of meanings and figurative uses.

One of the developments of “board” that has produced the most figures of speech is its use to mean “table,” particularly “dining table,” and, by extension, “meal” or “food.” Thus we speak of “bed and board” and “boarding house” meaning a lodging house where at least some meals are included in the price paid by “boarders.” In the days of sailing ships, the “board” was the side of the ship near the top of the hull, giving us “on board,” “going overboard” for the act off falling into the sea, and “by the board,” which originally was said of a mast falling into the sea alongside the ship but now means “abandoned” (“A class of grammatical distinctions which have gone by the board,” 1875).

“Board” in the sense of “table” also gave us expressions drawn from the world of gambling, the second most popular use of tables after eating. So we speak of an honest person or deal being “above board,” which originally meant that all the players kept their hands above the table, indicating a basic level of honesty. A player who won a game of cards decisively was said to “sweep the board,” referring to the action of gathering up the cards or pot of money with a sweeping motion, and the phrase is still used (often with the plural “boards”) to mean to take all the prizes or honors in a contest (“Rossendale butchers sweep the board at meat ‘Oscars’,” Lancashire (UK) Telegraph).

I have found “clear the boards” used a few times online in the sense that you describe, but I haven’t found it documented in any reference work. My guess is that this use is a blend of “clear the decks” (originally meaning to remove obstacles from the deck of a ship in preparation for battle) with, perhaps, “sweep the boards.” There’s also an established phrase “to clear one’s desk,” used in a sense very close to your “clear the boards.” There might be a bit of “clear the table” (as after a meal) or perhaps a notion of some kind of scoreboard that might be zeroed out in there too. The important thing is that when I read your question the phrase “clear the boards” seemed entirely logical and clear to me.