Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

For reasons that elude me but probably amount to nothing more than an early onset of cabin fever this year, we finally went to see the Facebook movie. What a strange, unpleasant little movie. If it turns out that we brought bedbugs back from the theater on account of this snooze-fest, I’m gonna be very ticked. You know you’re in a for a long slog when you find yourself rooting for Larry Summers. I left the theater wishing that the intelligent young woman who dumps Zuckerberg in the film’s opening scenes had just clobbered him with a brass spittoon and saved us all a lot of bother.

For want of a spittoon....

She appears again briefly later in the film, as the oafish Mr. Z is becoming absurdly wealthy, just long enough to make it clear that she wishes nothing more than for him to permanently disappear. You and me both, lady. If this woman exists in real life, I’d like the opportunity to vote for her.

[Update: Here is a truly excellent article by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books about Facebook (both the movie and the thing) and Jaron Lanier's latest book (You Are Not A Gadget). Lanier used to annoy me no end, but he's absolutely right about Facebook.]

Elsewhere in Facebookia, our TWD-FB page, linked to in the right column over there, has attracted more than 400 “likes” so far, a fact which fills me with apprehension and anxiety. Just sending holiday cards to all those people is going to be ruinously expensive, and they, their children and their pets presumably all have birthdays as well. Thanks again, Zuckerberg. As for all of you who haven’t yet bitten the bullet and clicked the button, feel free. The more the merrier.

Speaking of financial exigencies, if I didn’t know better I’d suspect that the evil gnomes at Facebook have found a way to siphon off my precious reader support. In the past two months, the previously steady trickle of subscriptions keeping the kitties in Friskies has dwindled to a dribble. So if you were planning to subscribe soon, please make soon now.

Subscriptions make lovely holiday gifts, of course. And it’s the gift that keeps on giving, due to my chronic inattention to when folks’ subscriptions are supposed to run out. Let’s just say that we have spanned generations of readers simply from sloth.

And now, our monthly quiz. The National Weather Service has just announced that an incredibly violent line of storms, boasting winds of 70 mph, is heading your way, and it’s due to hit in about two hours. Since this in the middle of an unusually hot October day, there is the distinct possibility of tornadoes. Do you (a) run to the store (a 20-mile round trip) for batteries and water, since the lights are nearly certain to go out; (b) begin the tedious process of herding your two dogs and multitudinous cats into your tiny Civil War-vintage cellar, keeping in mind that it took well over an hour to find and apprehend Gus the Cat the last time he noticed that you were looking for him, or (c) wash the dishes?

The correct answer is (c) wash the dishes. You will also want to vacuum the whole house, do all the laundry, take one last shower and cook any perishables you have in the fridge that require either the microwave or the oven. If you have any frozen pies, cook all of them.

You will do all this because there is nothing worse than spending two or three days without power (and thus no well pump) in a dark, dirty house with a sink full of dishes, eating peanut butter sandwiches and wishing you could wash your face. Now at least the rugs will look nice, you’ll be fairly clean and you’ll have lots of lukewarm food to eat. Assuming that you have thoroughly vacuumed the bedroom, you may actually be able to sleep in the pitch blackness without worrying too much about the humongous venomous spider you saw in the upstairs hall last week.

None of this, however, will make up for not being able to watch TV or surf the net, which is exactly what you’d want to do if you had power but for some mysterious reason couldn’t read a book or do real work. So when you absolutely can’t stand it anymore, drive to the Big Box store in the upscale suburbs 25 miles away. Important: If you will be returning after dark, make sure when you leave to turn on a light that can be seen from the road.

At the store, spend a few hours picking a new dish-washing sponge and reading the plot summaries on the offerings in the two-for-five-bucks DVD bin. Browse the power tool aisle and try to imagine actively wanting to own a power tool. Amble over to the TV section and see if they’re showing anything interesting on the wall of 35 flat-screen TVs. (I once watched nearly half of the Simpsons Movie this way.) On your way out, zip over to the gun department and buy three 50-pound bags of deer corn for the bunnies and chipmunks to eat this winter. (Be sure to explain to the cashier that you’re not using it to lure Bambi’s mom into an ambush.)

Swing by Barnes & Noble, buy a coffee in the cafe and spend twenty minutes kicking yourself for not bringing your notebook with you. Console yourself with a cupcake. Stroll past the bargain books racks to see if your publisher has remaindered any of your own books lately. Wander down the strip mall and check out the Gigaplex on the off chance that they’re showing a movie not aimed at dim, angry children of all ages.

Go to Target and look at cat beds. Buy half-price Halloween candy. Look at the computerized wedding registries of people you will never meet. Wander around the store and pretend you’re doing your Christmas shopping really, really early, but don’t actually buy anything because you are stressed out, to put it mildly, and your judgment is impaired. Read the label on the spray cheese to see if it has to be refrigerated. If not, buy two cans and several kinds of crackers.

Take your time, but be sure to buy a few new cat toys before you head home. If the aforementioned light isn’t burning when you reach your driveway, it means your power is still out. Keep driving and head for the nearest all-night mega-supermarket. It’s time to see what they have in the way of carpet remnants and desk lamps.

Repeat every day until the power company gets its act together. And when you can finally relax and fire up your computer in a clean and well-lighted place, please subscribe.

p.s. – - Cats love spray cheese.

Tilt.

Dear Word Detective: The other day I happened to use a word which popped into my mind and I said, “It’s all out of kilter.” I had heard that expression used all my life and I think I understand what it means, “out of order,” in the sense I used it. But where did this word come from? The more I think about it, the more it seems strange to me. Can you clarify it for me? — John Sellars.

“Kilter” is a strange little word. By itself it means “good form, order, spirits or condition,” so, strictly speaking, it doesn’t need a qualifying adjective such as “good,” “bad,” “fine,” “satisfactory,” etc. If the marina manager says that a rental boat is “in kilter,” one does not expect to have to swim home. On the other hand, I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw “kilter” used in a positive, everything’s fine sense, even in an elaborated form such as “in good kilter.” In fact, the more than 800 uses of “kilter” found in a search of Google News at the moment seem equally divided between “out of kilter” and “off kilter.” I gave up looking for something “in kilter” or “in fine kilter” after the third page of results.

You might conclude, from that survey, that it’s just the world today that’s on the blink, but the whole history of “kilter” paints a portrait of a universe that doesn’t look or work quite right. “Kilter” first appeared in print in the early 17th century, but the term seems to have been used in English and Scottish dialects, in the form “kelter,” since the early 16th century. And the very first citation for “kelter” in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1643, speaks of selling armaments that are out of “kelter” to unsuspecting customers (“Their Gunnes they … often sell many a score to the English, when they are a little out of frame or Kelter.”).

Unfortunately, no one has ever come up with an even vaguely plausible explanation for the origin of “kelter” or “kilter.” There are, as it happens, other “kelters” in English dialects. One means “rubbish or nonsense,” another is used to mean “money or cash,” and a third is a term for a very rough sort of cloth used at one time in coats in Northern England. But there appears to be no connection between any of those “kelters” and our “kilter.”

There’s also no connection, in case you were wondering, between “kilter” and “kilt,” the pleated tartan skirt worn as part of traditional Scottish dress. “Kilt” comes from Scandinavian roots carrying the general notion of “to tuck up” or “to gird up one’s skirts around the waist,” as if in preparation for battle.

Good for the goose, but the gander has to drive.

Dear Word Detective: I’m wondering what the origin of the word “flight” is when used in connection with sampling wines. Why do we say “wine flight” instead of something simpler like “samples?” When did this all start? So far my theory has been that it will become obvious once I have enough hands-on experience with wine flights themselves, so I’m am drinking myself smarter and waiting for my epiphany. But just in case this line of inquiry doesn’t pan out, would you be able to shine any light on the subject? — Wayne Walker.

Sounds like a great plan. Incidentally, it occurs to me, having been involved in publishing for longer than was good for me, that you’ve stumbled on a sure-fire bestselling book title. I guarantee that “Drink Yourself Smarter” would be an instant hit with both the self-improvement bores and the Duff Beer couch-dwelling crowd. You’d probably have to use larger type and shorter sentences towards the end of the book, but the good news is that you could fill the last hundred pages or so with long, rambling, pointless stories and no one would complain.

As usual when dealing with the general topic of alcohol, I should note that I missed school the day they explained the importance of booze, so I never developed a taste for the stuff. Thus I am neither an oenophile (wine lover or “wino,” from the Greek “oinos,” wine) nor an oenophobe, and you mustn’t be surprised if I flub some esoteric winey point in the course of this expedition. Wait, you folks don’t call yourselves “winos”? I’m dreadfully sorry.

There are actually two different “flight” nouns in English, with separate, unrelated origins. The older “flight,” meaning “the action or manner of flying through the air” (either literally or in myriad metaphorical senses), appeared in Old English as “flyht,” derived from the Germanic root “flukhtiz,” which was related to the same root that gave us the verb “to fly.”

You’d be justified in assuming that one of the derivatives of “flight” in this “up in the air” sense was “flight” meaning “the act of running away” (as in “flight to evade prosecution”), but that’s actually a completely different word. That “flight,” first found in print around 1200, came from the same root that gave us “flee.”

“Flight” meaning “sample of wine” is a specialized use of the first “flight,” the “fly through the air” one. This use of “flight” seems to be a relatively recent arrival, first appearing in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in 1978 (“There were four flights of wines, as they say in the trade, four spätleses, four ausleses,..[etc.], N.Y. Times). The OED defines this “flight” as “A selection of small portions of a particular type of food or drink, especially wine, intended to be tasted together for the purpose of comparison,” and most uses of the term I have found online speak of “tasting flights,” consisting of at least three (and sometimes many more) small samples of various wines offered to participants in a wine tasting.

The OED is, unfortunately, silent on the logic of using “flight” for a range of wine samples, but there are some precedents in usage of the word that may provide a clue. “Flight” has been, since the 13th century, used to mean “a group of things or beings flying through the air together,” whether birds, airplanes or angels (“Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest..,” Shakespeare, 1602). My guess is that “flight” in the wine tasting world was adopted to convey the sense of a gathering of varied small samples, like a flock of little birds, invoking a feeling of lightness and grace. From a public relations perspective, “flight” is probably better than “flock” and certainly beats “herd.” Flights sip lightly and gracefully, like sparrows at a fountain. Herds guzzle like yaks at a trough. But I’ll bet the yaks have more fun.

Big Boing theory

Dear Word Detective:  Several times while reading Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880), I noticed that he “pressed a spring” to activate some function of his space ship. Then I noticed that E.C. Bentley made a similar usage in his detective story, Trent’s Own Case (1936)  (“Perhaps,” Trent hazarded, “from your special knowledge of our friend’s character you may be able to lay your hand on the spring of such unaccountable behavior.”). After only 55 years, the meaning seems to have become metaphorical. So what’s the history of using “spring” to mean a lever or knob with a spring in its mechanism? — Ken Landaiche.

I’ve never read “Across the Zodiac,” a story about a trip to Mars, but I may, since it’s available online at Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org, e-text number 10165). I do remember, as a child, reading many stories written during the same period that involved a character “pressing a spring” that would activate some hidden mechanism in a way that bespoke an enormously complex and clever bit of engineering behind the scenes. Whether it set into motion a diabolical engine like the ones in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” or merely opened the trap door upon which the hero of a tale happened to be standing, I found such purely mechanical devices far more fascinating than the electronic and computerized gizmos of today. I’d definitely be more interested in modern robots if you wound them up with a big key.

Both the noun “spring” and the verb “to spring” come from Germanic roots with the general sense of “rapid movement.” The noun “spring” (which is our focus here) was used in Old English to mean the pace where water “springs,” or rises forth (often quite rapidly) from the ground. By the mid-13th century, “spring” (sometimes “wellspring”) was being used in a figurative sense to mean “the source or origin of things or persons” (“Language reveals the deepest springs of thought,” 1892).

“Spring” went on to acquire a vast array of meanings, some clearly related to the idea of a “spring” in the ground, others embodying the “rapid movement” sense of the word’s roots. A bit of both ended up giving us “spring” (originally “spring of the year”) as the name of the season of new growth in the 16th century.

Meanwhile, back at the “rapid movement” sense of “spring,” we began to use the word to mean “a leap or bound” or, by extension, “liveliness,” as in “a spring in your step.” This “quick, lively movement” gave us, in the 15th century, “spring” as a name for, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it, “An elastic contrivance or mechanical device, usually consisting of a strip or plate of steel (or a number of these) suitably shaped or adjusted, which, when compressed, bent, coiled, or otherwise forced out of its normal shape, possesses the property of returning to it.” The wide use of such “springs” in machinery of the day then led to the use of “spring” to mean “that by which an action is instigated or actuated,” which brings us to the “spring” (or switch attached to a spring) that Percy Greg pressed in his spaceship.

It is, however, as the OED itself notes, sometimes impossible to determine whether it’s “spring” in this “something that starts a process” sense being used or whether we are seeing the separate sense of “point or origin; source” mentioned earlier. I’d say the spaceship use is definitely the “push here” sense because it’s so clearly referring to an actual mechanical device. But the quotation from E.C. Bentley (“… you may be able to lay your hand on the spring of such unaccountable behavior”) sounds to me to be using “spring” in the “source or origin” sense of the word. In any case, it’s not often that the literal and the metaphorical  senses of a word circle around and converge so neatly that you can’t tell them apart.

Down boy.

Dear Word Detective: Here is an expression I have heard all my life in my family and, perhaps, the Ozarks of Missouri. When someone is upset and making a fuss, they are said to “faunch and rear.” Not sure of the spelling on “faunch,” but it seems horse-related. Any ideas on its origin and meaning? — John.

Oh boy, a horse-related question. (Memo to the computer industry: please develop a reliable method of conveying sarcasm in print.) Has anyone ever noticed that most of the words we associate with horses depict uncooperative, dangerous and frequently homicidal behavior on the part of our equine “friends”? Horses “rear,” they “bolt,” they “stampede,” they “balk” at inconvenient moments and “throw” their riders, and, in their down-time, they kick and bite. Seriously. Mention our wedding to my wife and she will invariably bring up the fact that, shortly after the ceremony, an NYPD police horse tried to bite her. (You folks didn’t have police horses at your wedding? You missed all the fun.)

“Faunch” is a new one on me, and, to judge by the number of people asking about the term on the internet, I am far from alone. You’ve hit the accepted spelling on the nose, although the forms “fauch” and “fawnch” apparently show up occasionally. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), “faunch” is common in the South Midlands (which would include Missouri) and in the West of the US.

“Faunch and rear” is definitely a horse-related idiom, if for no other reason than the “rear,” a verb meaning, in this case, “to rise up on the hind legs,” an alarming but not uncommon mode of expression among really teed-off or frightened horses. Incidentally, if a horse ever rears up at you, the safest course is to move, as quickly and calmly as possible, back to the city.

Applied to people, according to DARE, “faunch” has been used since at least 1911 (the earliest it has been found in print) to mean “to rant, rave or rage” (“It’s jest once in a great while that George gits to foamin’ an’ faunchin’, but law! When he does he’s a reg’lar springtime flood,” 1933). DARE also lists a milder form of “faunch,” meaning simply “to fret; to show irritation or impatience,” which has been found since around 1970. This would make “faunching” a near synonym of “champing,” as in “champing at the bit,” meaning a horse chewing on the “bit,” or mouthpiece of its bridle, in anticipation or annoyance. (“Champ” in this sense is thought to have arisen in imitation of the sound of the horse’s chewing.) “Champing at the bit” is, of course, widely applied as a metaphor to people who are visibly impatient to begin something.

So the original sense of “faunch” may simply have been the same as “champ,” the action of an annoyed, excited or angry horse, making the combination of “faunch and rear” an apt metaphor for a person “pitching a fit,” as we say in Ohio. Unfortunately, the origin of the word “faunch” itself is a complete mystery. There have been suggestions that it was derived from the obsolete English word “faunt,” meaning “infant or child” (from the Old French “enfaunt,” infant), but, apart from the fact that infants are often irritable, there is no apparent connection between the words.

In all likelihood, “faunch” arose, like “champ,” as an imitation of the sound of a horse chewing on its bit. If so, “faunch” sounds a bit like the critter is foaming at the mouth as well, so I’d strongly advise heading for the airport.

Just give me something so I can refuse to pay it.

Dear Word Detective: Can you locate the origin of the usage of the term “check” to actually mean “bill,” as in “Check, please”? This has bugged me for years! It is a bill, paid by a check perhaps (though this is becoming more and more rare), and yet we refer to it as a check. Why, oh why? — Larame in CO.

My heavens. You folks get riled up about the strangest things. I’m usually less annoyed by the “check” in a restaurant than by what precedes it. For instance, whatever happened to food being served hot? It’s hot at my house, but in nine out of ten restaurants I wander into, it’s not even really warm. Am I really supposed to bring my own microwave?

“Check” is a very interesting word, and I actually touched on its origin in the course of explaining “rain check” last year. English acquired “check” in the early 14th century from the Old French “eschequier,” meaning “to threaten the king in a chess game,” a situation known in chess as “check.” A chess game ends when one player’s king is put “in check” and cannot escape capture, a predicament called “checkmate.” The term “check” comes ultimately from the Persian word “shah,” meaning “king” (as in the Shah of Iran) and “checkmate” comes from the related and very appropriate Arabic phrase for this grim situation, “shah mata” (“the king is dead”).

“Check” in English has acquired a wide range of non-chess meanings, mostly involving the senses of “impede or block” (as the king is blocked in chess) or “control.” We use this “control” sense when we speak of “checking” someone’s work, or “checking” financial accounts. Thus the “check” you may write to pay for your dinner was originally called that because it furnishes all parties with a “checkable” record of the transaction.

One of the meanings that “check” picked up in the 19th century was that of “token, proof of claim” (as in “hat check,” or “rain check,” originally guaranteeing admission to the re-staging of a sporting event that had been rained out). In practice, such “checks” were almost always small sheets of paper or cardboard, and in the mid-19th century people in the US began to call the summary of charges in a restaurant a “check,” probably because it was usually of similar size. In other words, we’ve been calling those things “checks” for more than 150 years.

So why not call that tally the waiter hands you a “bill”? Technically, it is. “Bill” has been used to mean “statement of account owed” since around 1400. Derived from the Medieval Latin “bulla,” meaning “seal” of the sort found on official documents, “bill” also has many meanings (including those enormous things they shove through Congress), but the sense of “official list” has been in use since Old English. And most of us get an “official list” of charges from the electric and gas companies every month, so “bill” in the “you owe us” sense is very much alive today.

My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that some restaurateur decided at some point that the word “bill” was a bit too blunt and vulgar a term to inflict on diners and that somewhat more subtle “check” sounded more refined. It was probably the same guy who decided we’d rather be called “guests” than “customers.” Personally, you can call me Elroy the Wonder Horse as long as the food is even remotely hot.

Paging Doctor Photoshop…

Dear Word Detective:  Any idea of the origin of the phrase, “doctor blade,” denoting a dull scraper used to remove ink from the non-printing surfaces of an intaglio printing plate? — James Lampert.

That’s an interesting question. The word “intaglio” rang a small, dim bell in the recesses of my mind, so I immediately began to thumb through my dusty mental Rolodex. (If you don’t know what a Rolodex is (or was), feel free to go play outside. And take that stupid telephone with you.) Anyway, I’m zipping past “impeachment,” “impetigo,” “inertial guidance” and “Inigo Montoya,” and suddenly I realize that I don’t need my memory at all. By golly, I have the internet! So I look up “intaglio.” And then I’m all like, yeah, I knew that. And I actually did, though I’m not sure why.

The short explanation of “intaglio” is that it is a method of printing in which the desired design is carved, engraved or etched into the printing plate, to which ink is then applied. The ink on the surface of the plate is then removed, leaving ink only in the grooves of the design, so that when the plate is pressed against paper or another medium, the design is transferred. Often used for documents, stamps, etc., intaglio printing gives a slightly raised or “embossed” feel to the design. The word “intaglio” is Italian, meaning “engraving” or “engraved work,” from the verb “intagliare,” meaning “to cut into or engrave.”

The name “doctor blade” for the implement used in intaglio printing and similar technologies is fairly recent, the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for the term in print being only from 1961, though we can assume it’s actually somewhat older. The word “doctor” itself is, of course, much, much older, first appearing in English around 1300. The root of “doctor” is the Latin verb “docere,” meaning “to teach,” and in English it initially meant simply one who, by experience or training, was qualified to teach others. Originally applied to senior religious authorities, by the late 14th century “doctor” had acquired an association with the highest degrees of learning, and thus the qualification to teach, at a university.

But also in the late 14th century, “doctor” came to be associated with a highly-learned practitioner of medicine, and now we’re getting close to the logic of “doctor blade.” As a verb, “to doctor” originally meant “to treat medically,” but gradually acquired the broader figurative senses of “to repair or patch up” (“Wasted most of the morning in doctoring a clock,” 1829), as well as, to quote the OED, “To treat so as to alter the appearance, flavor, or character of; to disguise, falsify, tamper with, adulterate, sophisticate, ‘cook’” (“By a few touches of a file on the milled edge, a coin can be so ‘doctored’ as to fall almost invariably heads or tails at will,” 1884).

“Doctor blade” employs the “repair or patch up” sense of “doctor,” and there are apparently all sorts of gizmos in various fields bearing the name “doctor.” The OED defines this special sense as “A name given to various mechanical appliances, usually for curing or removing defects, regulating, adjusting, or feeding.” Calico fabric printing, for instance, at one time required the use of a “cleaning doctor,” a “lint doctor,” and a “color doctor” (“The superfluous color is … wiped off by the color doctors… These doctors are thin blades of steel or brass, which are mounted in doctor-shears, or plates of metal screwed together with bolts,” 1875).

So a “doctor” in this mechanical or tool sense is a device which either removes defects or prevents them from being created in the first place, which certainly fits with your description of a “doctor blade” used in intaglio printing. In fact, the same term is also used in offset printing (“Doctor blade, a ‘knife’ of rigid plastic or thin sheet-metal which presses against the gravure press cylinder, and which wipes away ink from the surface of the cylinder,” 1967).

Shocked, shocked…

Dear Word Detective:  I am easily amazed. So it is nice to know that there are so many ways to express this bewildered state. I can choose, for example, to be “flummoxed,” “flabbergasted” or “gobsmacked,” depending on my state of stupefaction. Is it is a coincidence that all of these are such amazing words? Where did they come from? — Janis Landis.

Easily amazed, eh? I envy you. It must be nice to derive surprise from everyday life. Of course, it probably helps not to live in the middle of nowhere, as I do. There are only so many times “Look! A groundhog!” carries the thrill it first did. On the bright side, I remain, as my relatives will tell you, as easily amused as a small child, which comes in handy, given the current state of US culture. And although I’m not often “amazed” these days, I am frequently  appalled, but that may be simply because reality keeps upping the ante.

The terms you mention are all fine words denoting various degrees of amazement, but before we get too far into the tall grass with them, it’s worth considering the word “amaze” itself. It comes from the Old English word “amasian,” which meant “to stupefy, to stun, to confuse,” and which may have been rooted in Old Norse. Our modern positive sense of “overcome with wonder, astonish” dates back only to the 16th century. The older “confuse, befuddle” sense of “amaze,” incidentally, gave us “maze” in the 15th century meaning “a structure designed as a puzzle, with a complex network of paths leading through it, only one of which actually leads out.”

“Flummox” is a very useful word, meaning not only “to confuse” but also “to confound,” i.e., to frustrate so much that the only course is to give up and abandon the task or goal. Unfortunately, the origins of “flummox,” which first appeared in print in the early 19th century, are a mystery. There is some evidence that it comes from an English country dialect, and it may originally have been “echoic,” imitating the sound of something thrown down in disgust and  disorder on the ground.

“Flabbergast” is another useful word, meaning “to astonish; to render someone speechless with surprise” (“Bob was flabbergasted when the pizza he had ordered actually arrived hot”). “Flabbergast,” which first appeared (and was noted as then-fashionable slang in a magazine) in the late 18th century, is another mystery, but was most likely concocted as a combination of “flabby” or “flap” and “aghast” (which itself harks back to the Old English “gaest,” ghost). The original sense thus may have been of someone’s flab flapping or shaking with fear upon seeing an apparition. The proper term for the state of being “flabbergasted” is, incidentally, “flabbergastation,” which should come in handy next time oil prices go up.

There are two interesting things about “gobsmacked,” meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “Flabbergasted, astounded; speechless or incoherent with amazement.” The first is that “gobsmacked” is, thank heavens, not a mystery. It’s simply a combination of “gob,” very old English slang for the mouth or face, with “smack,” meaning “to strike with a slap or a blow.” (The roots of “gob” are, alas, slightly vague, but it probably comes from the Gaelic “gob,” meaning “beak or mouth.”) So to be “gobsmacked” is to be as surprised and amazed as if you had been struck in the mouth (“Won’t they be gobsmacked when you tell them that you wrote to me?”, 1989). The other noteworthy thing about “gobsmacked” is that, while it wouldn’t sound out of place in one of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s actually a very new word, first appearing in print in 1985. I won’t claim to have been “amazed” by that date, but it was a bit surprising.

Bang a gong.

Dear Word Detective:  Can you shine your light on the many sides of “forge”? It seems that the various usages (creating something by a process of applying heat and pressure, or the very tool kit that is used to do the same, versus the illegal duplication or replication of something for illicit gain) seem to be rather at odds. Is the third usage that implies motion (to “forge ahead”) derived from yet another source, or is it related to one of the other two? Hoping you’ll go at it with hammer and tongs, (ha!). — Chris Schultz.

Funny you should mention “going at it with hammer and tongs,” which originally, back in the 18th century, referred to a blacksmith working hard to shape metal in a forge using those tools. Coincidentally, I just spent five full days attempting to fix the mowing deck on My Little Tractor (a period now known among neighbors up to a half-mile away as “the Week of Him Swearing at Inanimate Objects”), and my best friend turned out to be my trusty rubber mallet. I truly believe that there are very few problems in life that can’t be solved with a rubber mallet. And lots of WD-40, of course.

There are actually two verbs “to forge” in English, which are considered separate words although they may actually be the same word. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

The first sense of “forge” that you mention, that of “to shape metal by the use of heat and pressure,” appeared in English at the end of the 13th century. The root of this “forge,” which we adopted from Old French, was the Latin “fabricare,” meaning “to make,” which also gave us “fabricate,” another word that, like “forge,” can carry connotations of fraud. When “to forge” first appeared in English, however, it simply meant “to make or build,” so one could be said to “forge” a house or a pair of shoes. “Forge” soon, however, came to be associated primarily with the work of blacksmiths, whose ovens (and shops) became known as “forges.” (A “blacksmith,” incidentally, is one who works in heavy metals such as iron, versus a “whitesmith,” who works in more ornamental mediums such as gold or tin.)

“Forge” rapidly acquired figurative senses centered on the general meaning of “create or fashion,” as in “forging a career.” The use of “forge” to mean “create a fraudulent imitation of something and pass it off as genuine” arose in the early 14th century, derived from a slightly  less nefarious use of “forge” to mean “to invent a tale, make up a story.” It’s a tribute to the importance of context in our speech and writing that today we can use “forge” in both the positive “create” sense (e.g., “forging an alliance”) and the very negative “forge a passport” sense. (There is, however, no modern positive use of the noun “forgery.”)

The use of “forge” to mean “push on through resistance or difficulty” (“The store was a crowded madhouse of Christmas shoppers, but Leonard forged ahead, his eye fixed on the perfume counter twenty yards ahead.”) arose in the early 17th century, and was originally a naval term describing a ship making difficult headway. There are two possible sources for this “forge.” It may have arisen as a mutation of “force,” perhaps via simple mispronunciation. Or, as I think is more likely, this “forge” is a metaphorical invocation of the repeated, powerful blows of a blacksmith’s hammer. If so, then these two “forges” are actually the same word.

Hello, I must be going.

Dear Word Detective: I just told my daughter to “get on the stick,” meaning get her application completed to finish her degree. I am stumped. Where does the phrase “get on the stick” originate? — Barbara, Bristol, CT.

That’s a good question. And it was a good question when you sent it to me quite a while ago, which is to say that your daughter must not only have finished her degree by now but might actually be nearing retirement. Gee, time flies, doesn’t it? That’s probably because, and you heard it here first, time itself is shrinking. Seriously. I did some tests recently, and my weeks have shrunk to just parts of two days: Monday afternoon and between two and three a.m. on Saturday. No wonder I never get anything done. I make all these great plans for the week on Monday, and next thing I know I’m walking the dogs at 2:30 a.m. Saturday.

To “get on the stick” means, of course, to “get working” or to “get going,” especially to begin doing something that you should have started doing long ago but have been putting off. Some sources I have found date the appearance of the phrase to the 1950s, but others assert that it arose at the beginning of the 20th century. I suspect that it may actually be much older, as I’ll explain in a moment.

“Stick” is, of course, a very old word, derived from a Germanic root that carried the sense of “pierce or prick,” a sense still find in the verb “to stick” when we speak of “sticking” someone with a needle. (The “adhere, fasten firmly” sense of “to stick” comes from the idea of something sharp being embedded or something fastened to something with nails.)

In addition to its basic meaning of “staff or rod of wood” or “branch or twig from a tree,” the noun “stick” has acquired a dizzying array of specialized, figurative and, predictably, slang meanings. For example, we speak of “grabbing the wrong (or dirty) end of the stick” meaning to be given a bad break, “to beat someone with a stick,” meaning to berate them on a particular topic, and, my personal fave, “the sticks” meaning rural areas, which do indeed seem to have more than their fair share of vegetation. Interestingly, when we call a person who is hidebound, unadventurous and just generally no fun a “stick-in-the-mud,” we’re using the “adhere” sense of the verb “to stick” to compare them to someone literally immovably stuck in deep mud.

The accepted explanation of “get on the stick” in dictionaries of slang ties the “stick” to either the gearshift of an automobile or the control stick (aka “joystick”) of a small airplane, the logic being that both devices confer control, and thus that an exhortation to “get on the stick” means “get going.” That strikes me as a fairly large leap of logic, but, in any case, both the airplane and auto theories would necessitate the phrase appearing no earlier than the beginning of the 20th century.

But I strongly suspect that “get on the stick” is a derivative of the much older phrase “to cut one’s stick,” meaning “to leave,” which appeared in print in the early 19th century and was probably in colloquial use long before then. The “stick” in the phrase is a walking stick, commonly used on long journeys by foot in those days, and finding, cutting and smoothing a suitable stick in preparation for such a trip was as sure a sign the person was truly leaving as packing a carry-on bag would be today. Thus to say “get your stick and get on it,” or just “get on the stick,” would have been a way to say “get going.” It also would have carried exactly the same “get up and get moving” sense in figurative use (“Get on the stick and get that job done”) that the phrase does today, which the “joystick” and “gearshift” explanations don’t really convey.

Don’t look down

Dear Word Detective:  There is one word in the English language that never ceases to amaze and amuse me: “up.” There is the direction “up,” and then a million or so other phrases using the word: “free up,” “clam up,” “start up,” “shut up,” “send up,” “hurry up,” “put up” and so on, ad nauseam. How did this simple two-letter word get so many uses, and is there another definition of “up” that sets all those phrases apart from the direction “up”? — Gary.

Thanks for asking that question. Not only is it interesting in its own right, but it also, in a roundabout way, renewed my faith in my own memory. As soon as I read your query about “up,” I had a faint feeling of deja vu, not about “up,” but its opposite, “down.” I couldn’t remember writing a column specifically about the direction “down,” but, after I took the dogs for a walk, I realized that I had recently done one on “downs” in the names of racetracks (e.g., Churchill Downs). That “downs” comes from the Old English “dun,” meaning “hill,” and our modern word “down,” the direction, came from the derivative “adown,” meaning “from a hill,” i.e., in a descending direction.

I wish I could say that “up,” the direction, had as catchy an origin as “down” does, but ’twas not to be. Our modern English word “up” comes, as the words for “up” in many other European languages do, pretty directly from the Indo-European root “up,” signifying “up from below.” Snooze city, I know. The only truly interesting thing about that ancient “up” is that it also ultimately produced the words “open” and “over,” as well as the prefixes “hyper” and “super.”

But whatever excitement “up” may lack in its lineage, it has more than made up for in its wildly popular career in the English language. The phrases you have highlighted in your question, employing uses of “up” that are seemingly unrelated to either the direction or each other, are only the tip of the “up” iceberg. It’s like the linguistic version of the classic Monty Python “Spam” skit, where everything on the menu has at least some Spam in it. Over the centuries, we have apparently bolted “up” onto almost every verb in the English language. If you were to print out the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for the adverb “up,” it would run to thirty-eight pages, and the Oxford editors’ note on “figurative and transferred” (i.e., not literally directional) uses of “up” sounds, not surprisingly, a bit testy and exhausted: “Some uncertainty attaches to the origin and development of many of these uses, the variety of which is so great that the adverb comes to present a number of highly divergent and even directly opposite senses, e.g., ‘to bind up’ in contrast with ‘to break up’….” In other words, many of the uses of “up” in common phrases really doesn’t make sense.

There are, of course, some broad senses found in the use of “up” in idioms that can be detected. There is the sense of “to a state of greater cheerfulness or resolution” as in “buck up” and “cheer up” or that of “to a higher speed or amount,” as in “grow up” or “speed up.” There are the contradictory senses of “bring into the open” (as in “open up” and “dig up”) and that of “to close” (“shut up,” “clam up”) or “to finish” (“sew up” or “wind up,” etc.). But for every usage that you nail down, there are ten more with slightly different overtones, and soon you’re rummaging in your desk drawer for the aspirin. Furthermore, enumerating the dozens of uses to which “up” has been put doesn’t really explain most of them. What, after all, could the “up” in “break up” possibly mean that would logically have anything to do with the direction “up”? There is no logic to these idiomatic uses of “up,” so it’s probably best to stop looking too closely at this annoying little word and simply, dare I say it, give up.

And, in the distance, the baying of creditors grows louder.

Dear Word Detective: I was remembering a sermon a friend of mine delivered which described a certain biblical royal procession. Building to a glorious climax, he accidentally referred to the event as being full of “pomp and circumcision.” I don’t think he achieved the intended effect. This remembrance does have me wondering, though, what the origin is of the phrase correctly, albeit less humorously, rendered, “pomp and circumstance”? Would you be so kind as to inform us? — Father Paul Edgerton.

Well, that’s one way to see who’s paying attention. There’s probably a case to be made for slipping that sort of zinger into, say, every third sermon, enough to keep the flock on its toes but not so much as to spawn rumors of enfeeblement. After all, publishers of encyclopedias and dictionaries use a similar tactic to detect plagiarism, usually including at least one fictitious entry, commonly known as a “Mountweazel,” in their reference works. If the bogus entry later turns up in another publisher’s product, it’s lawyer time. The term “Mountweazel” (you know you want to know) comes from just such a “gotcha” entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia for a certain “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel” (supposedly born in Bangs, Ohio, a master photographer of rural mailboxes, and tragically killed in an explosion while on assignment for “Combustibles Magazine”).

“Pomp and circumstance” as it is usually used means, of course, a great display of ceremonial grandeur and ornate formality of the sort commonly seen at coronations, the funerals of heads of state and, usually (but not always) on a somewhat smaller scale, high school graduations. For most people, the phrase “pomp and circumstance” invokes the musical piece of the same name, a staple of graduation ceremonies in the US and more properly known as March Number One of Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches, Op.39.” The phrase “pomp and circumstance” was popularized (and thus preserved) by Shakespeare in his play Othello, Act III, scene iii: “Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!”

The “pomp” in “pomp and circumstance” is familiar to most of us, and means “a display of magnificence and splendor.” The root of “pomp” is the Latin “pompa,” meaning “procession,” based on a Greek root meaning “to send.” “Pomp” can be used in a negative sense as well, meaning “an ostentatious display of wealth or ceremony,” which gave us the useful adjective “pompous,” which originally meant simply “characterized by pomp” but now means “self-important or arrogant.”

The puzzle in “pomp and circumstance” is “circumstance.” We use “circumstance” today, usually in the plural form “circumstances,” to mean the context or conditions surrounding something, the place, time, causes and effects, etc., of an action or state of being. That makes perfect sense, since the Latin root of the word, “circumstare,” meant literally “to stand around.” But a dull noun like “circumstance” seems a weird companion for glamorous “pomp.” However, beginning in the 14th century, “circumstance” was also used to mean specifically “the ceremony or fuss made about an important event,” in the sense that such things happened “around” the event. This sense is now considered archaic, although, thanks to Shakespeare, we still have “pomp and circumstance.”

You’ve probably noticed that, given the above explanation, “pomp and circumstance” is more than just a little redundant, amounting to something close to “pomp and pomp.” But as the parent of any graduating college senior can attest, when the bank account is drained and the third mortgage looms, there had better be plenty of “pomp” at the finish line.