Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Well, summer has at long last loosened its sweaty grip upon the simple folk here in Flyover, Ohio, home of TWD’s Go Figure Farm and Deranged Animal Preserve.  Good riddance.  Soon it will be time to decorate the Christmas tree in our front yard, which was bought at a nursery in Connecticut about 15 years ago, lived on our terrace on the Upper West side of Manhattan for a few years, and then followed us to Ohio and found itself planted smack dab in front of the front porch in what has since become apparent was an epic failure to observe even the most obvious tenets of feng shui.  Oops.  Too late to move it.  Among other things, I discovered a few months ago that there’s a very large snake living under that tree.  Moi doesn’t mind snakes, but moi has no intention of even thinking about trying to catch one that big.

Here be serpents.

Fifty words into this and already I’m connecting snakes and Christmas. Must say something nice.

Hey, lookie there! This month’s batch of columns are illustrated with the odd little pictures that I had to drop when I stopped hand-coding this circus as static web pages and switched to WordPress.  Part of this artistic resurgence is due to the wider center column of our new theme, but  part is due to my belated realization that I no longer have to take the extra six steps necessary to make each illustration transparent, because the background of the page is now white, not the weird beige of the site of yore.  No more creating an alpha channel, selecting by color, deleting by color, realizing you’ve deleted the whole image, starting over….

Ancient FM is cool.  I do miss the Middle Ages, don’t you?   But they seem to be coming back, don’t they?

Memo to Amazon.com:  Nook (Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader) is a much better name than your “Kindle,” which has always, it seems to me, implied that the gizmo is (a) flimsy, and (b) likely to burst into flames.  “Nook,” however, evokes a cozy place to read.  Just sayin’.

This brings back memories.  I think I still have some out in the garage.

Elsewhere in the news, it dawned on me just this morning that this month marks the third anniversary of my diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis (although the doctors seem to believe I’ve actually had it at least since the early 90s, if not earlier).  I must admit that when I was first diagnosed the whole thing struck me as strange and faintly ludicrous, and I spent considerable time pooh-poohing the diagnosis to friends and family.  Over the past three years, and especially the last six months, however, the “progressive” aspect of the disease has gone to town and it ain’t funny anymore.  There are days when I can’t focus my eyes to read and I seem to be losing the ability to walk convincingly.  For the past week I have been unable to stand for more than about fifteen minutes at a time simply from the pain in my legs, which one would think would be offset by the numbness in those very same legs that makes it difficult to tell precisely where they are at any particular moment, but apparently not.  There are, obviously, many worse diseases to have, but I’d avoid this one if they give you a choice.

This is all relevant because all this tedious foofaraw, along with the disintegration of our so-called economy here in the US, has reduced my income by at least two-thirds over the past three years, and it wasn’t much above the starving artist level to begin with.  Add the collapse of the newspaper industry, the implosion of book publishing, and the inconvenient shortage of rich widows, toss lightly with the vinaigrette of gloom settling over my otherwise sunny disposition, and things start to look pretty grim.

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There, wasn’t that easy?

And now, on with the show….

Hell is for horsies.

Dear Word Detective: “Hell bent for leather.” Now there’s got to be a story there! And it just happens to be one of my favorite expressions. — Tabitha, Bath, UK.

Man making his hand talk like a duck, circa 1912.

Leather? Well, whatever floats your boat. Personally, I could see going “hell bent for pizza” or “hell bent for doughnuts.” Speaking of doughnuts, I have an outrage to report, albeit a bit belatedly. When I lived in New York City, the stores sold blue and white boxes of Dutch Mill All-Natural Doughnuts. They were wonderful (picture that word in italics and bold-face). But, sometime around 2001, an evil competitor bought Dutch Mill and put them out of business. That’s bad, but the worst part is that if you ask for Dutch Mill doughnuts in a NYC deli today, nobody remembers them. Incredible. It’s like forgetting Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, or the first Tremors movie. It’s an outrage.

Oh well, back to work. There are three elements to “hell bent for leather,” an American invention that first appeared in print at the end of the 19th century meaning “at breakneck speed; recklessly determined.” “Hell,” of course, is the Bad Place, considered throughout human history to be located in either the Underworld or Paramus, New Jersey. “Hell” has also long been used as an intensifier, lending force to a proclamation, question or insult (e.g., “What the hell are you doing?” doesn’t really have anything to do with Hell.)

“Bent,” an adjective formed from the verb “to bend,” is here used in the sense of “directed on a course” with implications of “determined, resolute.” Put together, “hell bent” (sometimes spelled as one word, “hellbent”) has, since the early 18th century, meant “recklessly determined to do something at any cost; doggedly determined.” It’s a bit unclear whether the original sense was “willing (and possibly likely) to go to hell to achieve one’s goal” or just “really, really determined,” but the bottom line is that it’s best not to interfere with someone “hell bent” on anything (“I know your kind — hell-bent to spend what you cash in,” 1910).

The truly odd thing about “hell bent for leather” is that it appears to be a combination of two other phrases: “hell bent” and “hell for leather,” which also dates to the late 19th century. “Hell for leather” specifically referred to riding a horse very fast, the “leather” in question being either the saddle or, more likely, the leather crop used to “incentivize” the poor horse. Rudyard Kipling seemed especially fond of the phrase (“Here, Gaddy, take the note to Bingle and ride hell-for-leather,” Story of the Gadsbys, 1889), and probably contributed to its popularity. “Hell bent for leather” doesn’t make any more literal sense than “hell for leather” did, but the fact that “hell bent” is more widely understood undoubtedly led to the fusion of the two phrases.

Hold still

Dear Word Detective: I’m interested in the origin of “bones” referring to a doctor. I see the reference to dice, but where did the term “bones” referring to a doctor come from? — Dr. Dave.

That’s a good question. The timing of your query is also interesting, because the most well-known modern use of “bones” in this sense was probably in the old “Star Trek” TV series and subsequent movies, where the character of Dr. Leonard McCoy went by the nickname “Bones.” As it happens (and I’m still not sure how it happened, something to do with Mothers Day), I recently went to see the latest product of the Star Trek movie franchise. Cleverly titled “Star Trek” (huh?), it’s a “prequel” to the TV series, with the twist that all the familiar characters are played by suburban teenagers. Like “Bugsy Malone” with phasers. On the bright side, you do get to hear a character ask, with a perfectly straight face, the classic Seinfeldian question, “Are you from the future?” Oh dear, if the poor thing actually had a plot, I’d probably have just spoiled it.

Good heavens, man. You've swallowed the premise!

It’s true that “bones” has been used a slang for “dice” since at least the 14th century (“Thou won’st my money too, with a pair of base bones,” 1624) because dice were originally made from the bones of animals (including ivory and whalebone). “Bones” has also long been used to mean pieces of bone (again presumably from some non-human animal) rattled as accompaniment to other musical instruments (“Wilt thou heare some musicke… Let us have the tongs and the bones,” Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

“Bones” referring to a doctor apparently originated in the US military in the 19th century, where it was often used as a nickname or form of direct address for a surgeon (“Bones, our surgeon — Dr. Sawin outside the service — broke into the room,” 1893). This “bones” is actually a shortened form of the somewhat older slang term “sawbones,” again usually applied specifically to a surgeon, which was in use in Great Britain at least by the early 19th century and possibly much earlier (“‘What, don’t you know what a Sawbones is, Sir’, enquired Mr. Weller; ‘I thought every body know’d as a Sawbones was a Surgeon,’” Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 1837).

“Bones” and “sawbones” as slang for a surgeon come, of course, from the surgical technique of actually sawing through bones in the human body for various purposes, today often to reach otherwise inaccessible regions of the body in order to fix them. In Dickens’ day, however, sawing bones was almost always done for purposes of amputating an arm or leg. While surgeons no doubt performed less draconian procedures every day, it was the lopping off of large bits of the anatomy that understandably caught the public’s eye, thus giving us “sawbones” as a common slang term for the profession.

At the hop

Dear Word Detective: I’m troubled by the phrase “sukey (or sukie) jump.” (The “sukey” part is pronounced like the beginning of “soup”). I’ve come across it in scattered places referring to a party held by enslaved people in the South, away from the white folks. But it also appears in Leadbelly’s version of “Frankie and Albert,” where Frankie and Mrs. Johnson were in the graveyard after Albert’s funeral, “just pulling a sukey jump; they didn’t want to go home.” That reference seems to imply that there’s more shades of meaning to the phrase than I had thought. So can you give any insight into the phrase, where it comes from, etc? I can’t seem to find any authoritative reference to it anywhere. — John Roby.

That’s a darn good question. I must admit that until you asked I had never, as far as I recall, heard the expression “sukey jump.”

No relation.

You mention a song by Leadbelly in your question, and while he didn’t invent the term “sukey jump,” his fame seems to have assured the continued existence of (and interest in) “sukey jump.” Born Huddie William Ledbetter in Louisiana in 1888 to parents who had been born into slavery, Leadbelly was an enormously creative and influential folk blues musician in the first half of the 20th century. Leadbelly used “sukey jump” in songs and interviews in a number of senses: the kind of impromptu party among slaves you mention, a roadhouse or house party featuring live music, or a kind of quick, lively dance tune.

In “The Life and Legend of Leadbelly” by Charles K. Wolfe and Kip Lornell (Da Capo Press, 1999), the man himself is quoted explaining the origins of the term: “Most of the parties and dances … were held in rural houses miles from the nearest town and often miles from the nearest white homestead. ‘They call them sukey jumps,’ Huddie recollected many years later. Sukey or sookie was apparently a Deep South slang term dating from the 1820′s and referring to a servant or slave. A sukey jump, therefore, was once a dance or party in slave quarters. Huddie himself once explained the term by saying, ‘Because they dance so fast, the music was so fast, and the people had to jump, so they called them sooky (sic) jumps.’ Sookie, Huddie thought, was derived from the field term for a cow, and was used to call a cow. Whatever the case, these late nineteenth century country dances gave Leadbelly the first public platform for his music.”

Leadbelly was absolutely right about the roots of “sukey.” The word “sook” has long been used in rural dialects in England and Scotland to mean livestock, specifically young animals (the word itself is a form of “suck,” as in nursing). In the US, “sook” is applied to mature cows as well, and “sook” or “sookie” is commonly used to call cows, pigs, etc. It’s certainly not difficult to imagine the term being applied in a demeaning sense to servants and slaves in the early 19th century US.

Look out below

Dear Word Detective: My friends at college comprise a fairly diverse group, U.S. region-wise, and so we’ve had the requisite “soda vs. pop” arguments, and commented on the strange speaking habits of those of our number from the West Coast (“Hella”? Really?). But probably the most bizarre thing we’ve come across is that the guy from West Virginia calls a knit hat worn in the wintertime a “toboggan.” The rest of us agree that a “toboggan” is a sled. So we were wondering if you could enlighten us: where in the world did this other use of the word come from? — Andrea.

Not amused.

Perhaps from certain people sliding downhill on their heads? Honestly, I don’t know why it’s so hard for some places to get simple terminology right. I definitely need to note this “toboggan” nonsense in my next book on regional linguistic confusion, provisionally titled “Don’t You Dare Call that Stuff Pizza” (a sequel to my best-selling “No, Virginia, That is Not a Bagel”).

Just kidding, of course. Regional variations in language are the soul of American English (and keep people like me in business). Incidentally, “hella” (probably a cropping of either “helluva” or “hellacious”) is slang meaning “extremely” (“Going hella fast”) or “lots of” (Hella cats you’ve got”), first appeared in the late 1980s, and is usually considered native to Northern California, although the earliest print citation for it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a newspaper in Toronto. Go, as they say, figure.

I actually almost explained “toboggan” in the sense you mention a few years ago, but I ran out of room in that column. I was grappling with the fact that what I and many others had for years been calling a “watch cap” is now evidently known as a “beanie.” A “watch cap,” of course, is a close-fitting knitted cap, often made of wool, originally worn by sailors in the US Navy while “on watch” (posted on deck) in cold weather. A “beanie,” until recently, was a much lighter skullcap, sometimes sporting a small propeller on top, often worn by small children in the 1930s and 40s. Sometime in the 1990s, however, skateboarding fans decided that a “beanie” was any sort of knitted cap, even if made of thick wool, and the rest of the world obediently fell in line. Go figure again.

Compared to “hella” and “beanie,” the transformation of “toboggan” you mention actually makes a fair amount of sense. A “toboggan” is, of course, a simple type of sled, usually consisting of a flat slab of light wood with the forward edge turned up. Modern toboggans can often seat three or more riders, which is nice because then you’re not lonely when you hit that tree. The word “toboggan” is derived from “tobakun,” the Canadian Algonquian Indian word for such sleds, and first appeared in English in the early 19th century. “Toboggan” meaning a knit cap comes from “toboggan cap,” a long woolen hat (essentially an elongated watch cap) considered appropriate headgear while tobogganing in the early 20th century. The use of “toboggan” by itself to mean a woolen cap dates to around 1929, and seems fairly widespread in the US today, often in contexts far from the sledding slopes (“He [a burglar] was wearing a red toboggan and tight pants, police said,” Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, 1975).

That thing you use.

Dear Word Detective: There are many wonderful and mysterious names for tools in every trade, and ironworking is no exception. A long-handled device used for bending rebar is known as a “Hickey bar” (or “Hicky,” or “Hickie,” depending on who’s doing the writing). Try as I might to get to the bottom of the name’s origin I have been stymied. Can you gain any traction on it? And, if you’re in the mood for a two-fer, hold forth on the origin of “spud” (as in an ironworker’s spud wrench). — Richard Meltzer, Haverhill, Mass.

Not a clue.

That’s a wonderful and mysterious question. I haven’t even started to attempt an answer, and I’ve already learned something. I’ve been wondering for years exactly where the term “rebar” (the steel bars embedded in concrete to strengthen a structure) came from. Unfortunately, I had never wondered about “rebar” while I was anywhere near my desk, and inevitably forgot to look it up when I was. But it turns out to be a blend, a “portmanteau” word, formed from “reinforcing” and “bar.” “Portmanteau” is, by the way, a very old word for “suitcase,” and the term “portmanteau word” was coined by Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking Glass in 1871 (“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ … You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word”). “Motel,” a blend of “motor” and “hotel,” is another portmanteau word.

As for “hickey,” we have good news and we have bad news. The good (or at least interesting) news is that the first occurrence in print for “hickey” in any sense is from 1909, when it was specifically defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “a device for bending a conduit, consisting of an iron pipe used as a handle fitted at one end with a tee through which the conduit is passed,” which sounds a lot like your “hickey bar.” The term “hickey” has subsequently been applied to a variety of tools, gizmos, doodads and even flaws in various materials, as well as being the well-known teenage term for the mark left by a “love bite.”

Unfortunately, the bad news is that there doesn’t seem to be any particularly neat story associated with the origin of “hickey.” The word is almost certainly what linguists call a “fanciful coinage,” a word made up for something that lacks a proper name when people get tired of calling the thing “that thing.”

“Gizmo,” “dingus” and “doodad” are similar inventions. In fact, if you blend “doodad” with “hickey,” you get “doohickey,” yet another name for a “whatsis,” in this case dating to 1914.

Although we usually encounter “spud” as another word for “potato,” it originally, in the 15th century, meant a kind of short knife or, later on, a gardening implement (used, among other things, to dig up potatoes, which themselves eventually became known as “spuds”). My understanding is that a “spud wrench,” at least in the construction field, is a wrench with a narrow, elongated handle which is used to line up holes in beams, etc., through which bolts are to be put (and presumably then tightened with the head of the wrench). The origins of the word “spud” itself are uncertain, but it may be derived from a Scandinavian root meaning “spear.” If true, that would, given the long, narrow handle of a “spud wrench,” explain how the tool got its name.

Aw shucks

Dear Word Detective: I recently read an item in the news where the writer actually constructed the following clause: “it was something to be awed at.” After my head exploded, I started wondering about “awful,” “awkward,” and “awesome.” Is “aw” in these words coming from some common origin, but now used to mean opposite things? — Chris Schultz.

why go on?

I guess it’s because I’ve been writing professionally for long enough to know that there are times when the old noggin just shuts down and you find yourself typing the most appalling things, but my reflex on reading that clause was to start dreaming up excuses for the writer. Perhaps he or she was writing on a subway platform and the train suddenly arrived. Perhaps the silly putz was dictating while skydiving, and wanted to finish the sentence before pulling the ripcord. Burst water pipes, surprise visits from in-laws, and irate tigers are also possibilities. Or perhaps the culprit is just a hack who wouldn’t recognize the vital serial comma in the preceding sentence.

On the other hand, “to be awed at” may strike us as weird and ugly, but it is not, strictly speaking, any more “wrong” than “to be frightened of” or “to be impressed by.” The verb “to awe” simply means “to inspire feelings of reverential wonder and/or fear.” It would, perhaps, be somewhat less jarring to say one is “awed by” something than “awed at,” but, considering that Americans eat twenty percent of their meals in their cars, we probably shouldn’t be too picky.

That verb “to awe” comes from the noun “awe,” which came from the Old Norse word “agi,” meaning “fright or terror,” and first appeared in the 13th century. “Awe” meaning “fear” was so often used in religious contexts, however, that it gradually acquired the meaning of “fear mixed with respect and reverence” toward, for instance, one’s deity. In secular contexts, “awe” came to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the feeling of solemn and reverential wonder, tinged with latent fear, inspired by what is terribly sublime and majestic in nature, e.g., thunder, a storm at sea.”

Both “awful” and “awesome” are based on this “awe.” The “some” suffix of “awesome” means “causing or characterized by,” and the “ful” of “awful” originally meant “full of” or “characterized by, inspiring.” The transformation of “awful” from meaning “inspiring awe” to “really bad” came in the 18th century, probably from repeated use of “awful” to mean “so bad as to inspire awe.”

“Awkward” is completely unrelated to “awe,” and comes from the Middle English “awkeward,” meaning “in the wrong way” (ultimately from the Old Norse “afugr” meaning “turned backwards”). When “awkward” first appeared in English in the 14th century, it carried the literal meaning of “turned around backwards,” and it wasn’t until the 16th century that the modern meaning of “clumsy,” in both literal and figurative senses, appeared.

Home Sweet Hut

Dear Word Detective: In New Hampshire, Spring doesn’t officially arrive until “ice out” is declared — but we start getting our hopes up for warmer weather when the local news anchors remind us that’s it’s time to bring in the bobhouses for the year. While the local population generally knows what a “bobhouse” is (a portable fishing shanty, placed on a frozen body of water, to protect the fisherman while he/she fishes through a hole in its floor), no one seems to know the term’s origins. Some say it’s from the “bob” on the line that lets the fisherman know he’s hooked something. Some say it’s from the way the shanties themselves might bob a few times before going under, when their owners forget to bring them in off the ice before the Spring thaw. While I haven’t yet heard anyone claim that it’s for some legendary fisherman named “Bob,” I suppose I shouldn’t dismiss that possibility out of hand. I’m actually wondering, though, if it’s from a similar origin as “bobsleigh,” referring to the short runners sometimes mounted on the bottom to make it easier to shift the shanty out on the ice. Can you defrost the history on this one? — Katrina.

That’s an interesting question. I’ve never given much thought to ice fishing, possibly because I grew up next to the Atlantic Ocean, which only freezes every few million years.

OK, now put me back.

I can find no indication that “bobhouse” has anything to do with anyone named “Bob,” although, knowing how people love colorful word origin stories, I’m sure that if anyone ever starts a “bobhouse museum,” an apocryphal “Bob” (perhaps even a “Bob House”) will appear in its brochures.

As for the verb “to bob,” meaning “to move up and down,” a 1954 article cited in the Dictionary of American Regional English confidently traces the term “bobhouse” to just such a motion: “Some fishermen have wire springs that bob up and down, whence the name ‘bob house’.” It’s unclear from that snippet whether the springs are mounted on the houses, the fishing lines, or the fishermen themselves, although I suppose it must refer to the lines. I’m actually very skeptical of this assertion, however. Even if some icefishers did attach springs to their lines, that hardly seems a sufficiently novel practice to determine the name of such an outlandish structure as a tiny hut sitting on a frozen lake. The springs, in other words, are not the story here.

I’d be willing to bet, on the other hand, that your hunch is correct and that the “bob” in “bobhouse” is the same “bob” as is found in “bobsleigh” (or “bobsled”), “bobtail” and a slew of other “bob”-words. This “bob” comes from the verb “to bob,” meaning “to cut short” (as a horse with cropped tail is called “bobtailed”). The verb “to bob” came from the noun “bob,” which originally meant “a bunch, lump or cluster,” possibly from the Irish word “baban,” meaning “cluster” (of grapes, etc.). In the case of “bobhouse,” the term simply means a “bobbed,” i.e., extremely small, house or hut.

Incidentally, the verb “to bob” meaning “to bounce up and down” is considered a separate word from “to bob” meaning “to cut short,” but the two may be related through the noun “bob” in its original sense of “lump.” In English “bob” took on several meanings in the sense of “hanging weight,” including the weight on a fishing line or pendulum. The “bouncing” verb kind of “bob” may well have been inspired by the motion of such “bobs.”

And the company jet is for when I have to look something up at the Cancun Public Library.

Dear Word Detective: A vendor of ours assured us (or tried to) that his company is operating “above board.” What is the origin of “above board”? — Chris.

This is really about the bonuses, isn’t it? Won’t you people ever stop? This whole thing is an enormous, gargantuan, obscenely bloated misunderstanding. We columnists were promised those bonuses years ago, probably long before any of you whiners were born. And if it weren’t for the promise of those teensy-tiny checks, we all probably would have jumped ship for some more lucrative occupation, perhaps dog-grooming, years ago. Besides, recent studies have shown that the average consumer doesn’t know the difference between a billion and a bullion, so what’s the problem? You have something against soup?

Not your friend.

But seriously, that’s a good question, and it raises another question about that vendor. As old Willie Shakespeare put it in a slightly different context, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Well, methinks that a vendor who is truly honest wouldn’t take such pains to proclaim his honesty. That’s reminiscent of the waiter who asks, “OK, which one of you ordered the clean glass?”

“Above board” means, of course, “open, fair, candid, honest and forthright,” or, in the word of the moment, “transparent.” Dealings that are “above board” are rigorously legal, legitimate and open to inspection. Nobody “knows a guy who knows a guy” and nothing “fell off a truck” when everything is truly “above board.”

“Above board” first appeared in print, as far as is known, in the late 16th century, and the phrase originated in the world of gambling, in particular card games. To play “above board” was to keep your cards above the level of the playing table (as opposed to down in your lap) so as to avoid any suspicion of cheating. The “board” in the phrase is simply an old use of “board,” common at the time, to mean “table.” The same sense of “board” is also found in “boardroom,” originally just a room with a large table around which a governing council or the like met. Eventually the term was extended to the group itself, which is why corporations today have a “Board” of Directors. “Board” was also extended to mean “dining table” and the food found there, which gave us “room and board” (room plus meals) and “boarding house,” where your rent covers both your room and at least some of your meals.

Interestingly, the “open, honest” sense of “above board” we use today is a figurative use of the gambling term, but it appeared almost simultaneously with the first appearance of the literal sense, which is unusually rapid for such a transformation. I guess the world was just waiting for a better way to say “I am not a crook.”

I still have my weird leather helmet.

Dear Word Detective: Where did the word “jerrycan” come from? — Achintyarup Ray.

Lulu Belle

Ah, a succinct question, but one that brings back pungent memories. It was back in 1942, just before the second battle at El Alamein, when our tiny tank Lulu Belle and its crew were marooned in the trackless Sahara. Just me, Humphrey Bogart, Dan Duryea, my pal Frenchie, and a bunch of guys whose names I never caught. We had run out of water the week before and were surviving on six jerrycans of cheap red wine Frenchie had found when the real Jerries (German troops) showed up. Things were pretty hazy by that point, but apparently the Germans were big Bogie fans, so they surrendered toot sweet and we all went home. Then Bogart stole our story and made a movie about it called “Sahara.” Frenchie and I never saw a dime of the loot, but we’ll always have El Alamein.

Not fair, Bogie.

OK, my memory may be playing tricks on me in that paragraph, but there is a direct connection between “jerrycan,” meaning a flat-sided five-gallon metal container usually used to carry or store gasoline, and the German army during World War II. The Germans developed this distinctive type of container early in the war, and considered its design a military secret. After Allied troops captured a few, the British and American forces copied the design and issued millions of the cans to their troops in the field. Since “Jerry” (derived from the word “German”) had been derogatory slang for German soldiers among British troops since World War I, the containers were immediately known as “jerrycans” (or, occasionally, “jerricans”). The genius of the jerrycan was that it could be easily stored, could be carried by one soldier, and, unlike other cans in use at the time, allowed the contents to be poured without a funnel or hose. Jerrycans are still used by many armies and are common in civilian use as well, but are now usually made of plastic.

The “jerry” in “jerrycan” brings to mind two other terms that often cause confusion. We speak of something as being “jerrybuilt” when it is poorly made of inferior materials or constructed in a flimsy fashion. But this “jerry” seems to be unconnected to the slang “German” sense of “jerry,” and “jerrybuilt” dates back to the late 19th century. It’s likely that “jerrybuilt” is connected to an actual person named “Jerry,” perhaps a particularly notorious homebuilder, but the exact source is unknown. “Jury-rigged,” on the other hand, means that something, once broken, has been patched together well enough to work for the moment. It comes from the old naval term “jury-mast,” meaning a temporary, makeshift mast substituted for one broken at sea. The standard theory, although unverified, is that “jury” was originally short for “injury.” This “jury-rig” appears to be completely unconnected to “jury rig” in the “subvert a trial” sense.

The English language being the unruly child that it is, you’ll often hear various “mashups” of these terms, “jerryrig” in particular, and it’s probable that eventually “jury-rigged” and “jerrybuilt” will simply fuse into one term. But for the moment, there remains a shade of difference between the two, as “jerrybuilt” connotes deliberately shoddy work, while “jury-rigged” describes an honest attempt to make do in an emergency.

Go now

Dear Word Detective: I just watched “O Brother Where Art Thou” on TV and it struck me that the scene where Homer Stokes is “ridden out of town on a rail” seemed, well, just a little too literal. I have looked for other explanations on the internet, but I’m not sure if I can trust those sources and I would like to hear it from you. — Rick.

I saw that movie. I remember seeing that movie. But I don’t remember much of anything about that movie, except that it was supposed to follow the general outline of Homer’s Odyssey and it contained George Clooney and some interesting music. I’ve had this problem with movies since I was a kid; they just don’t sink in the way books do. The bright side is that I can watch movies I like over and over again and be entertained, which drives the people around me crazy. But there really are subtleties in “Tremors” you don’t catch the first ten times.

An obvious candidate.

All of that is by way of explanation of the fact that I didn’t remember who Homer Stokes was or exactly what fate befell him in the movie. After consulting Wikipedia, however, I understand that he was a demagogic politician who, having been exposed as a hypocrite (quelle surprise!), was unceremoniously driven from town “on a rail.”

To “ride someone out of town on a rail” is a classic American locution dating back to the early 19th century. In its usual figurative use, “to ride someone out of town on a rail” means to severely punish them by means of ridicule or public condemnation and, optimally, to banish the person utterly from further serious consideration in whatever field they committed their offense.

For a phrase more than 200 years old, and one that seems quite mysterious when you really stop to think about it, “ride someone out of town on a rail” remains remarkably popular in common usage. The current economic crisis in particular, with its target-rich environment for vengeful urges, has apparently put a lot of folks in the mood to “ride someone out of town on a rail” (“In the old days the management of both [the banks and General Motors] would have been run out of town on a rail after being tarred and feathered for lying and cheating investors, workers and retirees,” letter, Detroit Free Press, 4/12/09).

“Running men out of town on a rail is at least as much an American tradition as declaring unalienable rights,” according to historian Gary Wills in “Inventing America” (1978), and the punishment does seem to have been a fairly common, and uniquely American, phenomenon until the early 20th century. While the “rail” in the phrase might conjure up images of the disgraced malefactor being dispatched out of town via the nearest railroad track, the actual “rail” involved in literally “riding someone out of town” was usually the sort of rail used to construct fences, i.e., a long, often rough-hewn, bar of wood. The victim was usually seated astride the rail as one would ride a horse (a position which was, not surprisingly, very painful). The rail and its rider were then borne by two men, usually part of a large mob, to the town limits, where the banishee was dumped in a ditch and warned not to return. The warning was often amplified by the application of hot tar and feathers to the rider, a punishment that was extremely painful, often permanently disfiguring, and occasionally fatal.

Since I don’t remember “O Brother Where Art Thou” in any detail, I can’t comment on the accuracy of the film’s depiction of this ritual. But if it involved a howling mob and a long piece of wood, they were in the ballpark.

Stubbed, stove and just plain busted

Dear Word Detective: I recently stubbed my toe on my kitchen table. The thought occurred to me — why do we say, “I stubbed my toe”? We don’t “stub” other body parts, not our ankles, knees, chin, or elbows. You smack, hit, whack, bang up, etc., but not “stub” them. I’ve tried researching this on my own and I found nothing. The meaning of the word “stubbed” comes from tree stumps in a field, but I can’t follow it from there. Anything you could find out would be great! — Lainey.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve not only stubbed but actually broken most of the toes on both my feet over the years. I’m not sure why we don’t speak of “stubbing” one’s fingers, however. I was using a shovel last year and managed to severely “stub” my little finger when my grip slipped.  [Update:  It was broken.  Duh.  Now it has a funny kink in it.]

I have no idea what this means.

The verb “to stub” comes from the noun “stub,” which, as you found, originally meant “the stump of a tree” and comes from the Old English “stybb.” Over the centuries since then, “stub” has acquired a variety of meanings, most involving something shortened, stunted, or cut off, frequently the remaining portion of something (as in the “stub” of a movie ticket). As a verb, “to stub,” which first appeared in the 15th century, initially meant “to dig up by the roots” (i.e., to remove a tree stump, etc.), but soon developed a range of related meanings centered on the general idea of either “shortening” or “crushing” various things.

In the late 17th century, however, people began to speak of “stubbing” a horse, injuring its legs, by allowing it to trip over or jam its hooves on “stubs,” tree stumps. By the mid-19th century, this use of “stub” had carried over to humans, and meant specifically to strike one’s toe against an obstruction while walking or running. While this verb “to stub” does refer back to the noun “stub” in the “tree stump” sense, it also invokes the sense of “shortening” one’s toe by jamming it lengthwise into an object. It’s that “lengthwise” smashing that distinguishes “stubbing” one’s toe from simply “banging” one’s elbow or knee. The same verb “to stub” is used to mean extinguishing a cigarette or cigar by crushing the lighted end into a solid surface.

Incidentally, the verb used to describe “stubbing” one’s finger the way I did is, for some strange reason, “to stave,” a verb which originally meant to destroy a cask or barrel by smashing the “staves” of which it was constructed. “Stave” is actually the archaic plural of “staff” in the sense of “rod or stick,” and when we speak of “staving off an attack,” it originally meant to use sticks as weapons. A ship which has had a hole punched in its hull (e.g., by a rock) is said to be “stove” (the archaic past tense of “stave”) or “stove in,” and a finger which has be damaged by being jammed with great force lengthwise into an object is said to be “stove.” The term “stove in” has also been used, since the early 20th century, as slang for anything that is worn out or run down, including people (“Mr. Avery’ll be in bed for a week — he’s right stove up. He’s too old to do things like that,” Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960).