Unblinking.

Dear Word Detective: When I was growing up in rural Nova Scotia, my mother often used a word to describe my sister or myself when we were in irritable moods. I have never known how to spell this word, but it sounds like “owly,” as in “Your sister’s in an owly mood” or “Why are you so owly?” Anything you could tell me about this word would be gratefully appreciated! — Lady G.

That’s a good question. Incidentally, of all the possible introductory biographical clauses one could encounter in such a question, “when I was growing up in Nova Scotia” ranks as one of the most evocative and romantic. It’s right up there with “growing up in the Cotswolds” and “as a child on the moors of Cornwall,” and certainly beats my “when I was growing up in suburban Connecticut.” Technically, I suppose I can claim to have grown up in New England, but that’s only sightly better, and whatever faint cachet it confers collapses completely when folks discover that I don’t like seafood.

Speaking of preconceptions, it’s interesting how many people write me about an odd word or phrase their parents or grandparents used, while themselves clearly harboring the suspicion that Granny might have simply invented the term. Yet this is almost never the case. Even the strangest figures of speech heard dimly in one’s long-lost childhood usually turn out to have a reasonable explanation.

Such is the case with “owly,” which is indeed how it’s spelled. Since at least the mid-19th century, “owly” has been a colloquial term meaning “cranky, cross, angry or fretful.” It’s considered a regional usage, found largely in eastern Canada and the Upper Midwest of the US.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists “owly” first as a synonym of “owlish,” meaning, literally, “resembling an owl,” but usually applied to people who exhibit an unblinking, calm (but often critical) gaze, similar to that of a wide-eyed owl (“The little man with his most owlish air of wisdom,” I. Zangwill, 1895).

“Owly” as a synonym for “cranky” or “irritable” appears to draw on another aspect of the owl’s appearance. Many species of owl have tufts of feathers above their eyes, making the bird resemble a little man with his brow furrowed in disapproval and annoyance. Coupled with the owl’s intense, piercing stare, you have a perfect visual metaphor for someone in a persistently implacable bad mood.

Time out.

Dear Word Detective: What does the phrase “light somewhere” come from? My mom used to say it when she wanted someone to sit down and quit moving around. — Taylor Leigh.

I’m going to play psychic here for a moment and hazard a guess (which is what professional psychics do, after all) that you grew up in the American South or southern Midwest. I’m not really psychic, of course, but those are the regions of the US where you’re most likely to hear “light” used to mean “sit down,” according to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE).

The first thing to note about “light” is that there are two entirely separate verbs “to light” in English, words which, although spelled the same, have absolutely no connection to each other. The one we needn’t worry about at the moment is “light” meaning, generally, “to give or shed light” or “to set burning.” This “light” (and the noun form meaning “illumination”) comes from the same Indo-European root that produced the Latin “lux” (light), which gave us “luminous,” “lucid,” “illuminate” and other common English words, including “Lucifer,” which means literally “bearer of light.”

The other “light,” the relevant one, comes from a Germanic root with the general sense of “not heavy,” which is how we use the adjective today (as in “many hands make light the load”). As a verb, “light” followed an odd course. In Old English, “to light” meant simply “to lessen the weight of something,” a sense carried over to modern English and elaborated into meanings ranging from “make cheerful” to “give birth,” all of which are obsolete today. One variant of the “make less heavy” use of “to light” did survive in the phrase “to light out” meaning “to quickly leave,” which came from seamen “lighting,” or working together (“making light the load”), to hoist sails. This is also the source of “to light into,” meaning “to begin quickly” or “to attack fiercely.”

The other general sense of “to light” is “to descend, to step down” (essentially the same word as “alight”). The original meaning of this “to light” was “to dismount from a horse or descend from a carriage,” which seems very odd until you realize that dismounting from a horse lightens the load on the horse. This “to light” developed a number of senses based on the general notion of descending, from “to light upon” (“to chance or stumble upon” an idea, for instance) to “light” meaning “to fall or settle on a surface” as a bird or a snowflake might. This last sense, to alight and sit still as a bird might, is the one your mother was using.