OK, let a smile be your umbrella. I’ll be in the cellar.

Dear Word Detective: I recently read the phrase “happy-go-lucky.” I was wondering if you could tell us the roots and what it means. — Emily Colby.

I’ll give it a shot, even though the prospect fills me with anxiety. Then again, almost everything fills me with anxiety, because I am definitely not a “happy-go-lucky” guy. Even just sitting here at my desk in my second-floor office, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I’m suspended in mid-air by wooden beams put in place when Lincoln was president. I’d go for a drive, but I worry about the wheels falling off the car. (That actually happened to a guy I know. On the New Jersey Turnpike, no less.) So I’ll just sit here quietly and try not to think about killer asteroids.

“Happy-go-lucky” is an adverb, an adjective and a noun, although the noun is rarely used today. A person who is described as “happy-go-lucky” is a generally carefree, laid-back and relaxed soul, taking life as it comes, gazing on the world through  a rosy pink Panglossian haze and blithely unconcerned about the inevitable heart-rending horrors the future holds. The happy-go-lucky person’s motto is “Everything will work out and we’ll all be fine,” an attitude often resulting from seeing way too many Disney movies as a child.

Decoding the phrase “happy-go-lucky” seems, at first glance, easy. Here comes a simple-minded chap, skipping happily along on life’s journey, trusting that he’ll be lucky. And that is, in fact, the current sense of the term “happy-go-lucky.” But when the phrase first appeared in print in 1672, it meant simply “as luck will have it,” “whatever happens” or “haphazard,” not implying either a happy disposition or a lucky ending (“You have your twenty guineas in your pocket for helping me into my service; and, if I get into Mrs. Martha’s quarters, you have a hundred more — if into the widow’s, fifty: — happy go lucky!”). “Happy go lucky” amounted to “que sera, sera,” “whatever will be will be.”

The reason for the difference in meaning is the change in the meaning of “happy.” The root of “happy” is “hap,” an archaic English word (from the Old Norse “happ”) meaning “chance, fortune, luck,” whether good or bad. This “hap” also gave us “happen” and “happenstance,” so the sense of an essentially random occurrence was hard-coded into “happy,” and when “happy” appeared in English in the 16th century, it meant simply “happening by chance.” This is the original meaning of the “happy” in “happy-go-lucky,” making the phrase mean essentially  “haphazard; depending on chance and luck.”

Fairly soon, however, “happy” went from meaning simply “by fortune or chance” to “by good fortune,” i.e., “fortunate, lucky, prosperous and favorable.” This is the sense of “happy” used in older phrases such as “happy day” (a wedding) or “happy event” (the birth of a child). The people present aren’t necessarily giggling with joy, but these are, nonetheless, very positive occasions. By the early 16th century, “happy” had followed its natural evolution (people who are fortunate tend to be cheerful, after all), and had arrived at its modern meaning of “feeling great contentment and emotional pleasure,” or simply “glad or pleased.”

The phrase “happy-go-lucky,” however, didn’t get the memo and went on meaning “haphazard” up until the early 19th century (“Messrs. Hubbards resisted [the action] on the plea of having sold him ‘happy go lucky’ (meaning the purchaser was to take him with all faults, for better for worse.)” 1802). But by the mid-1800s, under the influence of the new, cheerier sense of “happy,” “happy-go-lucky” as an adjective developed its modern sense of “carefree, easy-going” in reference to a person’s personality or behavior (“The first thing was to make Carter think and talk, which he did in the happy-go-lucky way of his class,” 1856).

Your potayto|potahto is leaking.

Dear Word Detective: In 2006 you gave an answer regarding the different meanings of “staunch” as a verb and as an adjective.  I have a different question regarding why words that have similar meanings, e.g., to stop the flow of a liquid, get associated with a particular liquid.  Thus “staunch the blood” and “stem the tide” are common associations. I have found many sites that define “staunch” (the verb) as stopping the flow of a liquid, “especially blood,” but nowhere have I found why “especially blood”?  There is nothing in the etymology that gives a clue. I don’t have a term paper riding on this, just a 16-year old patient with Asperger’s Syndrome who hates words. Can you help? — Michael Kalm.

Hates words? I’m gonna venture a guess that he or she is primarily annoyed by the inconsistency of words, especially the way they wander away their literal meanings when they become part of established idioms or figures of speech. If I say that I’m going to “take the bull by the horns,” you just have to accept that English-speakers have agreed that the phrase means “to confront a problem directly,” even though grabbing a bull by the horns in real life would probably produce more problems than it solved. There’s also the question you mention, of why certain words seem to “go with” others (such as “stem” and “tide”), when perfectly nice synonyms of one of them (“staunch” or “stanch”) sound odd and even wrong.

I used the forms “stanch” and “staunch” above because they are actually the same word, drawn from the Old French “estanchier,” meaning to stop the flow of some liquid or stop up a leak. In modern use the verb is almost always spelled “stanch,” and the adjective “staunch.” That adjective “staunch” originally meant “watertight,” and has since acquired the meanings of “sticking to one’s principles” (“Bob was a staunch defender of free speech”) or “strong, determined.”

“Stem” as a verb meaning “to stop” is unrelated to the noun “stem” as in “stem of a flower,” which comes from the same Germanic roots meaning “upright” that gave us the verb “to stand.” The verb “to stem,” on the other hand, comes from the Old Norse “stemma,” based on a Germanic root meaning “stop” which also produced “stammer” and “stumble.”

The verbs “to stem” and “to stanch” both first appeared in the 14th century, and both initially meant to stop the flow of some liquid or, figuratively, something else that was ongoing (“They were able to stem the proceedings of the Crown when they pleased,” 1713). Both were also used specifically in reference to stopping the flow of blood from a wound, etc. (“So that the bleeding wound should be stemmed and bound up,” 1817). So why is “stanch” now so associated with blood, and “stem” with water?

The answer seems to be simply the precedent set by early users of the two words. As of about 1400, “stanch” was the word of choice to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “To stop the flow of (blood or other issue from the body); to stop the flow of blood from (a wound).” It was used in other senses, but most of those are now obsolete, and for most people “stanch” conjures up either literal blood or the loss of something nearly as important (“Petrobras plans to cut costs … to stanch the impact of falling output and rising debt,” Chicago Tribune, 12/19/12). “Stem,” on the other hand, has always been more broadly used to mean simply “decrease” or “stop” (“What can be done to stem gun violence?” San Francisco Chronicle).