readme:

Yow. November already? As Groucho Marx once noted, Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Fortunately, here at The Word Detective, we like to dwell on the past.  As you may know, subscribers to TWD-by-Email (who pony up a measly $15 per year) receive each biweekly batch of columns long before they are published, for free, here on the website.  How long?  In the case of this November issue, these columns were first seen by subscribers back in February and March of this year.  If you notice reader comments on some of these columns, that’s because they’ve been sitting in the special Subscribers’ Content section since last February and March where readers can comment on, add to and sometimes correct what I write.  Every month I roll a big batch of columns out of the Subscribers’ section, down the hall and past the coffee machine, into the public area where the whole freeloadin’ world can read them.  Everything on this website eventually appears here for anyone to read, absolutely free. That’s important to me, and this is the best way I can think of to keep this site free and still buy food for the cats (and resident people).

The problem, from a non-subscriber’s standpoint, is that some of the most pertinent columns I write (often torn, as the TV shows say, from today’s headlines) remain hidden from the free view until months later, long after “Darn tootin’” (the subject of a recent column) has lost its resonance.  The solution, obviously, is for you (yes, you) to quit dawdling and subscribe.  You’ll not only receive the columns immediately from now on, but you’ll also be able to read those still parked in the Subscribers’ section right now (i.e., everything written between late March and mid-November).  That’s like a 21-month subscription for the price of a one-year sub.

[Note:  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.]

Onward. Speaking of the past, if you are a subscriber to The New Yorker, you may have missed the fact (I stumbled on it by accident) that the magazine has put its entire archive online, all the way back to the first issue from 1925.  This is a good thing for me, as it obviates the need to maintain a Windows (eewww…) partition on my computer in order to use The Complete New Yorker on DVD, a creation that, for all its wonders, may be the single worst piece of software ever written in terms of usability.  OK, I exaggerate, but not by much.  Just the need to keep switching among the eight DVDs to read articles is a major disincentive to actually using the thing.

[more grumbling after the jump]

The bad news is that the New Yorker’s online archive isn’t all that much better.  It uses the same DRM-encumbered .djvu format files as the DVD version (must prevent copying, you know), delivered in a reader application that, for sheer dorkiness, makes the old AOL software look sophisticated.  If you run your monitor at a decently high resolution (above 1024 x 768, it seems), you’re going to need a magnifying glass to see if a page is worth clicking and magnifying to readable size.  To then get from a magnified page to the next page, you must click out of it and go back to the two-tiny-page view, equivalent in convenience to throwing a paper magazine across the room and then fetching it before turning every page. And no bathroom breaks allowed; if you walk away from your computer for more than about ten minutes, you have to go through the cumbersome login process all over again.  And you’d better be sure that you’re really logged out before you try to log back in, lest you get the dreaded “too many concurrent connections” message.

Obviously, putting such extensive archives online is a daunting project, but I must point out that Harper’s Magazine has done a far more reader-friendly job with their archives (going all the way back to 1850).  The page images are in .pdf format, which can be read within most browsers or downloaded for more leisurely viewing or printing. The New Yorker Archive won’t even let you print more than one page at a time. And saving an article to your computer?  Fuhgeddaboudit.  At least with the Complete New Yorker DVDs you can print a range of pages to a .pdf file and mail it to your co-conspirators (or just save it to read in your dotage).

On the other hand, with the online archive you do get to read, albeit awkwardly, the entire run, more than 80 years, of The New Yorker for just the price of a print subscription.  And they claim the whole shebang is still in beta, so I suppose we can hope for a sudden attack of common sense.

And now, on with the show….

Next stop, Moody Blue hair.

Dear Word Detective: I was listening to a Huey Lewis and the News song “Hip to be Square” and that got me to wondering where the word “square,” meaning nerdy or not with it, comes from. What say ye, oh Emperor of Etymology? — Harry.

Huey Lewis? Oh my. You should be careful with that sort of thing, you know? One minute you’re innocently listening to your car radio in traffic, reliving the carefree 1980s, “Back to the Future” and all that. But the next thing you know you’re waving your Bic at one of those Geezer Rock Reunion concerts public TV runs during pledge drives. Then you start ordering all your old James Taylor LPs on CD. Then you move to some development called “Silver Waves” in Florida where you drive your golf cart to dinner at 4:30. But it’s never too late to rage, rage, against the pastel horror. Personally, I recommend homebrew absinthe and lots of really loud zydeco.

Just kidding, of course. I’m more the black coffee and Bach type (which might strike some people as “square,” but those people probably drink Folgers and simply don’t get Bach). “Square” is, of course, a highly subjective label, and even the generally-accepted terms for the opposite of “square” have their own constantly-changing fashions (“hip”? “cool”? “hot”?). You know you’re dancing on the razor’s edge of high culture when saying “hip” makes you “square.”

Some fields of human endeavor are, however, apparently exempt from this Manichaean “cool” vs. “square” debate and are considered permanently “cool.” One of these blessed realms is jazz, so it’s appropriate that “square” meaning “boring, conventional, conservative, out of touch” began as slang among jazz musicians in the late 1920s. The criterion at the time for seeming “square” to jazz musicians was, not surprisingly, simply not properly appreciating jazz. But by the end of World War II, “square” had spread into teen slang and broadened in meaning to include anything and anyone that bored American teenagers.

In adopting the term “square” to their own use, the jazz musicians were, ironically, simply employing a very old sense of “square” meaning “fair, honest, reliable or in proper order” (still heard in phrases such as “square deal”). This “square,” which dates back to at least the 16th century, rests in turn on the use of “square” to mean “equal” (as are the sides of a geometric square) or “solid, steady” (as a structure with properly square joints). The use of “square” in “square meal” conveys the same sense of “proper and substantial” (and, despite the popular legend, has nothing to do with square plates). As slang for the conservative types of music jazz marked a radical departure from, “square” was a perfect fit.

BTW, Windows 95 is alive and well around here.

Dear Word Detective: We were talking words with our friends and came up with two puzzlers. “Stogie” — is it related to Conestoga, and, if so, how? The other is “slue (slew) foot.” I feel it has a bit of a negative connotation, but I’d like your take on both these. — Charlie.

It must be nice to live where people talk about words. Our neighbors, having determined years ago that I apparently just don’t care about sports, hunting, home renovation or the mating habits of all the other neighbors, now simply nod and smile when we meet in the Post Office. But they do call me when their computers malfunction, so I guess I belong here after all.

Your hunch about “stogie” (or “stogy”) being related to Conestoga is right on the mark. Conestoga is the name of a township in central Pennsylvania, taken from the name of a local Indian tribe, and the Conestoga wagon, originally built in that region and also called a “covered wagon,” was widely used for westward migration in the 18th and 19th centuries. If you’ve ever seen a wagon train crossing the prairie in a Hollywood western, you’ve seen replicas of Conestoga wagons.

A large wagon capable of carrying several tons of cargo, the Conestoga was also the mainstay of commercial transport across the Appalachians until the advent of the railroads, and “stoga” drivers were the truckers of their day. Along with “Conestoga” becoming a colloquial term for the large breed of horse used to pull the wagons, “stoga” came, by the late 19th century, to mean the kind of heavy boots worn by the drivers. By the early 20th century, “stogy” was being used for the long, thin cigars apparently favored by the “stoga” drivers. Today, however, we use “stogy” to mean any sort of inexpensive cigar.

A person who is “slew-footed” walks with their feet turned outward. The source of the word “slew” is, unfortunately, a complete mystery. We do know that “slew” first appeared in English as a nautical term in the 18th century, in the spelling “slue” (which is still common), meaning “to swing an object around on its axis without shifting its position,” as a cannon might be “slewed” to track a target. Over the years, “slew” has also become slang, primarily in Australia and New Zealand, for becoming disoriented in the wilderness (“We separated, followin’ tracks, and I managed to get slewed,” 1929) as well as for “to trick or deceive.” “Slewed” has also been, since the 18th century, slang for “drunk.”

Since a “slewfoot” posture is generally considered a bit unstable, “slewfoot” carries the secondary connotation of “a clumsy person,” usually with overtones of slow-wittedness and fecklessness (“She is hoping that her galloping, slue-foot, light-brown, lazy husband … will soon find a job,” 1945).

Put him on a treadmill and cut your utility bills in half.

Dear Word Detective: A few days ago my youngest son was in his playroom throwing toys, kicking them around and falling into piles of them. Joyfully! When I asked him to explain this behavior he said simply, “Just causing a ruckus.” Like I should have known, duh. He said he learned the term from his teacher in school that day and thought it was ok to cause one at home since he and his partners in crime couldn’t do it at school. I’m still dizzy from that logic. So where does “ruckus” come from? Does the word “ruck” have anything to do with it? From the dictionary meanings of either word I didn’t get a real connection. — Michael.

Well, there you go. Your son is still in the guileless phase when children see no reason to prevaricate. Enjoy it while it lasts, and just be glad he doesn’t come home and announce, “My teacher says I’m in-cor-rig-ible. What does that mean?” Anyway, eventually you’ll be lucky to get him to admit to anything, no matter how obvious it is (“Did you shave the dog?” “What dog?”).

A “ruckus” is, as your son knows, a disturbance, fuss, uproar or commotion. On the spectrum of, shall we say, “unstructured activities,” a “ruckus” is at the mild end, perhaps a bit more unruly than a “kerfuffle,” but less dramatic than a “brouhaha” and certainly less serious than a “melee.” A “ruckus” is a minor disturbance, full of sound and a little fury, but rarely resulting in serious consequences.

Considering that human beings have been acting up since Friday night cave brawls, “ruckus” is a surprisingly recent arrival, first appearing in the late 19th century. Interestingly, “ruckus” seems to have arisen as a blending of two earlier words, “rumpus” and “ruction.”

“Rumpus” will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the US in the 1950s, because what you call your son’s “playroom” would back then have been called a “rumpus room.” This was a place, often in the basement of a suburban house, where children and teenagers were left more or less to their own devices. The word “rumpus” dates back to the 18th century, and may have arisen as an alteration of “robustious,” meaning “boisterous” (and related to “robust”). Or “rumpus” may have been just someone’s fanciful invention that took hold and spread.

“Ruction” is a bit more recent than “rumpus,” first appearing in the early 19th century, but its origin is even more of a mystery. “Ruction,” meaning a disorderly tumult, may have started out simply as a clipped form of “insurrection.”

Your hunch to look at “ruck” as a root of “ruckus” was sound, but a dead end. There are five separate “rucks” in English, only one of which, a shortened form of “ruckus,” has anything to do with disorderly conduct. The word “rucksack,” meaning a bag or pack carried on one’s back, is taken directly from the German word “rucksack,” based on “rucken” meaning “back.”

Picky, picky.

Dear Word Detective: I’m being accused of overanalyzing this, but the idea that anything can “fall between the cracks” just doesn’t make sense to me. I picture two parallel cracks. Wouldn’t the space between them be the surface? Please help me make sense of this. — Jane Francis.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when literally idioms we perceive, or something. I’d turn back if I were you. Deconstructing English idioms is right up there with squaring the circle and explaining Ben Stiller’s career as lose-lose endeavors. That way madness lies. Google “Unabomber” and “Eat your cake and have it too” for an example of how wrong this sort of thing can go.

As the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, an “idiom” is “a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements.” In other words, hang it up. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s a figure of speech.

Some idioms mean just what they say (“to take it in stride,” for instance, meaning to endure something and keep going). But some mean nearly the opposite of what they seem to say. For instance, we speak of falling “head over heels” in love with someone, meaning that our life is profoundly transformed by the experience. But most of us, having mastered bipedal locomotion at an early age, already spend our days with our heads above our heels, don’t we? It’s true that the phrase was originally, back in the 14th century, “heels over head,” which better conveys the sense of being “turned upside down” by love. But when a few popular writers (including Davy Crockett) accidentally reversed the phrase in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rest of us just decided to go along with “head over heels.” No sense? No problem.

It’s hard to say just where and when “fall between the cracks” jumped the rails of literal sense, but you’re right that it lacks logic. My guess is that the current illogical form came from a blending of the established metaphors “fall through the cracks” (as small objects might fall through the gaps between floorboards) and “fall between the stools” (to not fit in either of two categories, by analogy to bar stools).

In any case, “fall between the cracks” seems to have graduated to being an accepted idiom, and recently popped up in the august Christian Science Monitor (“News reports flash a daily barrage of stories about children who fall between the cracks, abused by parents or neglected by social welfare agencies,” March 11, 2008). If the Monitor’s copy editors don’t have a problem with it, I guess “fall between the cracks” is here to stay.

Not to mention the landlord who insisted on calling me “Morris Evans.”

Dear Word Detective: I have a British friend who refers to me as “old bean.” Where does “old bean” come from? — Chris.

Hmm. How long has this been going on? I ask only because if someone were routinely addressing me with a term I didn’t understand, I’d be pawing through a dictionary toot sweet. Then again, I understand the tendency to let this sort of thing slide. Back when I was a child and the name “Evan” was exceedingly rare in the US, teachers and other grownups had serious problems getting my name right. They either pronounced it weirdly (usually “Eee-von”) or, on at least one occasion, insisted that I must have misheard my parents and that my name was actually “Kevin.” I gave up arguing after that. Now I answer to anything short of “Lassie.”

“Old bean” is a classic British familiar form of address, roughly equivalent to an American’s greeting of “buddy,” “pal” “friend,” or, at least lately, “dude.” It doesn’t actually mean anything, although to American ears it certainly sounds slightly odd.

Part of what probably strikes Americans as weird about “old bean” is that it doesn’t fit with any of the uses of “bean” with which we are familiar. A “bean” in the literal sense is, of course, the seed of a leguminous plant (or another plant product that resembles one, such as a coffee bean). Beans being perhaps our most humble but infinitely useful food, it’s also not surprising that “bean” has been used in a wide variety of figurative senses for hundreds of years.

One of the earliest instances of bean-as-metaphor, dating back to the 13th century, was “bean” used to mean an item of little value, a sense which lives on in such expressions as “a hill of beans,” “not to know beans” (knowing nothing useful) and “bean counter,” meaning one consumed by meaningless details and thus ignorant of the truly important things.

But beans also served as a symbol of hardship and humiliation. “To give a person beans,” in the early 19th century US, was to punish or deal with them severely, probably as a reference to the unpleasantness of punishment with a diet consisting of only beans. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the use of “old bean” as a form of address seems to have sprung from this sense in the early 20th century. My guess is that it began as a term of mock-commiseration, as if the one addressed were routinely “given beans” or constantly put upon. It is also possible that “old bean” partly invokes the use of “bean” as slang for the human head (and, by extension, a person), which appeared at about the same time in baseball jargon (e.g., “bean ball,” a pitch thrown at the batter’s head) but quickly percolated into general usage.

In any case, “old bean” was actually a common friendly form of address in the US in the 1920s, which is slightly surprising since it is now throughly obsolete over here and regarded as a quintessential (if somewhat corny and affected) Britishism.

Ombra mai foosball?

Dear Word Detective: I was wondering what the history of the word “adumbrate” is. It’s such an interesting word that I was hoping that it would have a good history too. — Talia.

Well, that’s certainly understandable. It’s like looking forward to the first Thanksgiving get-together after your marriage and hoping your new in-laws don’t eat with their feet. A cool word should have cool ancestors, or at least a nifty story about how its parents met (“I was raised Middle English, but one day a charming Romany verb came into our tavern…”). But sometimes knowing a word’s history can dim one’s enjoyment. “Nice,” for instance, is a “nice” word meaning “pleasant or agreeable.” Too bad it originally meant “stupid” (from the Latin “nescius,” not knowing), eh? And if I say that I’m “sanguine” about my favorite team’s prospects for the next season, I mean I’m cheerful and optimistic, which is quite a departure from the one of the word’s meanings in the 18th century, “causing or delighting in bloodshed.”

In the case of “adumbrate,” we have a lexical history that progresses from the literal to figurative uses, as many words do, and fortunately lacks any evidence of either idiocy or homicidal fury in its past. Today we use “adumbrate” most often to mean “to sketch out, to outline (or perceive) the general contours of a thing,” as a presidential candidate might “adumbrate” his or her proposed health care programs in a debate, or a social critic might warn of possible threats in the future (“It is not impossible to adumbrate the general nature of the catastrophe which threatens mankind if war-making goes on,” H.G. Wells, 1919). “Adumbrate” can also be used to mean “to foreshadow, to foretell, to predict in a vague way,” as competition between nations over scarce resources often “adumbrates” an eventual war. Somewhat paradoxically, “adumbrate” can also mean “to overshadow, to obscure or hide,” as one sibling’s financial success might “adumbrate” the accomplishments of another.

The key to the history of “adumbrate” is the Latin “umbra,” which means “shadow” (and also underlies “umbrella,” literally meaning “little shadow”). Coupling “umbra” with the preposition “ad” (meaning “to”) gave us “adumbrare,” which meant “to give shade to,” specifically in the sense of adding shading to a artist’s sketch in order to give some indication of the ultimate product. When “adumbrate” first appeared in English in the 16th century, it carried this meaning of “fill out,” but soon came to mean simply “faintly sketch.” This meaning gave us the figurative “sketch out or predict in general terms” sense we use today. The “foretell” sense of “adumbrate,” like the word “foreshadow” itself, invokes the image of future events casting shadows back into the current day. The “obscure or hide” usage rests on the metaphor of something casting a dark shadow over another thing.

And why is gas so cheap now that all the stores have closed?

Dear Word Detective: What is the true origin of the word “towrag” or “toerag,” meaning a rascally type of person? Has it any connection to the nomadic Berber Touareg tribe? Could there be a connection to the towing rag, suspended from a long load in a car or truck? I have even heard it might be related to a strip of cloth used for wrapping around the feet, in place of socks. I would appreciate a definitive explanation. — Irene Brackenridge.

Ah yes, wouldn’t we all? So many questions in life, so few answers. Why do cats invariably climb to the highest point in the room when they feel nauseated? Why does the bank charge so much for bounced checks when, by definition, you have no money? Why does the TiVo always decide not to record the season finale of your favorite show? And if life is such an awesome mystery, how come I’ve never been in a car chase?

You seem to have come up with a variety of interesting possibilities for the source of “toerag” (as it’s usually spelled), but the one tying the word to the Touareg (or Tuareg) people of North Africa has, perhaps surprisingly, more than a glimmer of plausibility. The Touareg, an ancient Saharan tribe, operated the great trade routes across the Sahara desert for more than two millennia until the French colonized the area in the 19th century (an incursion the Touareg fiercely resisted). The European colonization of the region had already given us the British slang term “street Arab” for a homeless, wandering child (“The hero and heroine began life as street Arabs of Glasgow,” 1883), so it wouldn’t be too surprising if colonial encounters with the Touareg had spawned another derogatory term in the streets of London.

Unfortunately, the actual origin of “toerag,” which dates back to the 19th century, is considerably less interesting and more depressing. As a slang term for, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “A tramp or vagrant; a despicable or worthless person,” the epithet “toerag” simply refers to a poor person who wraps rags around his or her feet in lieu of socks. The term initially appeared in the literal sense of a rag wrapped around the foot inside a shoe in about 1864, but by 1875 it had become the synonym for “tramp” it remains today (“All them toe-rags, mate, got the manners of pigs,” Harold Pinter, 1960).

The equation of poverty and low moral character is, of course, sadly common in the English language, but the state of one’s feet seems especially prominent in the vocabulary of derision. “Down at the heels” has been a metaphor for “destitute” or “failure” since the early 18th century, referring to worn shoes the owner lacks the funds to fix. Similarly, “to be on one’s uppers” is a 19th century phrase meaning “to be broke,” invoking the image of one so poor that the heels of his shoes have worn away entirely, leaving only the upper part of the shoe remaining. To call someone a “heel,” however, simply means that the person (usually an untrustworthy, unscrupulous man) has demonstrated that, as the heel is the lowest, rearmost portion of the foot, he is the lowest form of human being. One can be a “heel” and wear very nice shoes.

Now that’s a segue.

Dear Word Detective: Do you know the etymology of the word “beguile”? — Matt.

I sure do. Next question. Wait, don’t go. You get ten points for spelling “etymology” correctly. It drives me slightly nuts to be referred to as an “entomologist,” which is a scientist who studies insects (from the Greek “entomon,” insect). The study of word origins is “etymology,” from the Greek “etymon” (true sense) plus “logos” (word). The word “etymology” actually reflects the assumption, fairly widespread at one time, that the “original” or earliest meaning of a word is its “true” meaning. That theory is itself quite old but, ironically, not even close to being true. Words change their meanings over time, sometimes radically, and that “oldest equals truest” theory is now known as “the etymological fallacy.”

“Beguile” is a good example of how a word can change over time, dropping older meanings from common use and adding new senses so different from the original meaning that we are often surprised when we delve into the word’s origins. Today we most often use “beguile” as a loose synonym of “charm,” either describing personal attributes (as in “She had a beguiling smile”) or other things we find, for one reason or another, very appealing (“Many first-time home buyers were beguiled by what seemed like impossibly low mortgage rates”). If there’s a semantic difference between “charm” and “beguile,” it’s the faint premonition that what we find “beguiling” may not turn out as well as we’d hoped.

That premonition turns out to be justified by the roots and original meaning of “beguile.” When it first appeared in the 13th century, “beguile” meant “to delude, deceive or trick” with “guile,” which meant (and still does) “deceitful cunning, clever dishonesty.” The roots of “guile,” interestingly, lie in the Old French word “guile,” which also seems to have given us “wile,” most often used in the plural form “wiles,” originally meaning “trickery or deceitful schemes.” In modern usage, however, “wiles” are usually simply innocent artifice, often in the service of romance (“Lady Tippins’s winning wiles are contagious,” Charles Dickens, 1865).

A similar softening of tone has been evident in “beguile” over the centuries, as the raw “cheat and deceive” sense of the word took a back seat to “beguile” being used to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “To win the attention or interest of (any one) by wiling means; to charm, divert, amuse.” By the late 16th century, in fact, “beguile” was being used to mean “to pleasantly divert or amuse so as to make something disagreeable less unpleasant” (“Took a book to beguile the tedious hours,” Washington Irving, 1820). So a word which originally meant “to trick or cheat” came to mean “charm and amuse.”

Interestingly, “amuse” itself followed a similar course, first meaning “to bewilder or puzzle,” then “to deceive or delude,” then “to divert or entertain,” and finally “to entertain with humor and good cheer.”

Later.

Dear Word Detective: When needing a quick exit, I might bolt for freedom, hightail it out of there, skedaddle, or just book it out of there. I conjecture that “bolt” comes from a bolt of lightning, and “skedaddle” sounds like it means, but why have “book” and “hightail” come to mean “leave quickly?” — Michael Duggan.

Leaving so soon? I must say that yours is one of the better jobs I’ve seen of shoehorning multiple questions into one email. At least the words are related in meaning. More often the question runs something like “Where did ‘cat o’ nine tails’ come from? Is the Mississippi named for somebody? And, by the way, is ‘snuck’ a real word?”

Onward. As you’ve noticed, the lexicon of leaving is a rich and varied one, a tribute to the usual wisdom of choosing “flight” over “fight.” The verb “to bolt,” meaning “to dart or rush suddenly away” is one of the oldest on your list, but to explain the verb “to bolt” we must first explain the noun form. When “bolt” first appeared in Old English, derived from Germanic roots, it meant “projectile,” particularly the sort of short arrow fired from a crossbow. By the early 16th century, we were also using “bolt” to mean a discharge of lightning (“thunderbolt”) and, shortly thereafter, as a metaphor for something dramatic and unanticipated (“bolt from the blue”). The use of “bolt” to mean “arrow” also led to it meaning “stout pin used to hold things together” and even “a roll of fabric” (from its shape). “Bolt” as a verb meaning “leave suddenly and quickly” also harks back to this original “arrow” meaning, the sense being that the person leaves as if shot like an arrow.

“Skedaddle” is a much shorter story, simply because nothing is known of its origins. The best guess I’ve seen is that “skedaddle,” which first appeared as military slang meaning “to flee” during the American Civil War, is related in some way to the Irish word “sgedadol,” meaning “scattered.”

“Hightail” is easier to explain. Many animals, including deer and horses, raise their tails when they flee, making the action a good metaphor for a panicked retreat.

“Book,” meaning “to leave,” apparently has nothing to do with the usual senses of “book” as a noun or verb (as in “Book ‘em, Danno”). It comes, rather, from “boogie,” US slang from the early 20th century originally meaning a style of blues music and later adopted in a more general form to mean “to dance energetically.” An even broader use of “boogie” to mean “move quickly” or “get going” appeared in the 1970s, and “to book,” meaning “to leave; to move quickly and purposefully,” appears to be simply a modified form of “boogie” used in that sense.

Hush your pups, boy.

Dear Word Detective: My grandmother, who was born in a small Tennessee town that doesn’t even warrant a dot on maps, once used the word “goozle” in a sentence. It was hilarious! She took a bite of a spicy piece of Popeye’s fried chicken, and exclaimed, “Whoa! That nearly burnt off mah goozle!” My brother and I obviously busted out laughing, but once we regained our composure, we asked what a “goozle” is. She motioned towards her throat, and advised that a “goozle” is a throat. Is this a real word? My grandmother never went to school, and grew up very poor, so one can’t help but wonder if she fabricated this word. — Mark Haney.

Well, what if she did? “Goozle” strikes me (to borrow from The Simpsons) as a perfectly cromulent word. Given that somebody, somewhere, had to cook up all the words we use every day, “goozle” is one of the better inventions I’ve seen. It certainly beats “infotainment.”

Wonderful. My spellchecker finds “infotainment” perfectly acceptable. Shoot me now.

In any case, your grandmother did not, in fact, invent “goozle.” According to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), “goozle” is well-established as a dialect term in the southern US meaning “throat” in general, or specifically the windpipe, gullet or Adam’s apple. The citations in DARE go back to the late 19th century, but “goozle” was almost certainly in use long before it made it into print, so it may be much older. Marjorie Rawlings used the term in her 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling (” If he [a hog] didn’t have no goozle, he couldn’t squeal.”). Other forms commonly used include “gozzle,” “gozzle pipe,” “goozem pipe” and “goozler.”

Interestingly, DARE also lists, as a synonym of “goozle” dating back to at least 1865, the word “google,” also meaning “throat.” The founders of the search engine Google have always claimed, of course, that they chose the name as a variation on “googol,” a math term meaning one followed by 100 zeros. But perhaps there was a meta-joke in there somewhere about people swallowing that “googol” story.

If we follow “goozle” back a bit further, we come to an interesting intersection with a far more common word, “guzzle.” Although we use “guzzle” today primarily as a verb meaning “to drink liquor rapidly or greedily,” as a noun it has been used since the mid-17th century to mean “throat” (and the word “guzzle” comes, in fact, from the Old French “gosier,” throat). So it’s evident that your grandmother’s “goozle” is simply a modified form of this fine Old French word for “throat.” Not bad for a small town in Tennessee.

Daunting tasks “r” us.

Dear Word Detective: In reading The Poe Shadow, a historical novel concerning an investigation of the mysterious death of Edgar Poe, the author Matthew Pearl uses the expression “poor as Job’s turkey.” The setting of the novel is 1851 Baltimore. Is Pearl using an expression of the time? Although I’ve read some of the Bible, the Book of Job is overly long; therefore I have not read it. Can you date and explain the reference? — Clete Delvaux, De Pere, Wisconsin.

Good question. Incidentally, why is it that you never run into people with the same last names as truly famous writers? Have you ever met a Poe? A Thackeray? Even a Mailer or a Vidal? Anyone out there know a Tiffany Yeats, a Larry Keats or a Billy Bob Longfellow? Am I the only one who finds this odd?

Onward. In answer to your first question, yes, “poor as Job’s turkey” was indeed a common expression in the mid-19th century, indicating that Mr. Pearl took his research seriously, which is nice to see. There’s nothing worse than shelling out twenty-five dollars for a historical novel and being rewarded with Thomas Jefferson declaring, “As IF, dude.”

Summarizing the Book of Job in one paragraph is a daunting task, but here goes. A righteous and prosperous man, Job has his faith tested by Satan (with God’s permission) and endures all manner of torment, including the loss of his children, his livelihood and his physical health. But Job keeps the faith, and eventually his humility and perseverance in the face of terrible adversity is rewarded.

Whether past centuries were more intrinsically religious than modern times is debatable (somewhere else), but it is indisputable that in 19th century America the Bible played a much more central role in popular culture than it does today. Thus common figures of speech frequently referenced Biblical figures, as in “Adam’s ale” (water) and “Adam’s occupation” (gardening). Since the notable characteristics of the story of Job were his suffering, poverty and endurance, it was common to hear references to “the patience of Job” (“You would provoke the patience of Job,” 1749) or of someone being “poor as Job” (“He’s poor as Job, and not so patient,” 1822).

But human nature can’t resist the urge to embellish, and by the 19th century Americans (especially in the Midwest) were jocularly enhancing these sayings. If Job was poor, his cat (not mentioned in the Bible, of course) must have been even poorer (“I should rather be as poor as Job’s cat all the days of my life,” 1854), and that cat must have been rich as Croesus compared to Job’s poor turkey (“But laws! Don’t I remember when he was poorer nor Job’s turkey!”, 1871).

Job, of course, not only never owned a turkey, but would never have known they existed, since the bird we call a “turkey” is actually native to Mexico. But as a figure of speech that adds a smidgen of silliness to a venerable Bible reference, “poor as Job’s turkey” does the job.