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

Continue reading October 2009 Issue

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Continue reading Awful / Awkward / Awesome

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Dear Word Detective: Tonight my wife was complaining about the unseasonal spring heat, saying she was “sweating bullets.” Of course I know what that means (sweating profusely); but what suddenly occurred to me was that I could not entirely make the image evoked by the phrase make sense. Sweating flying off you at the speed of a bullet? Sweating in fear because you might get shot? Nothing seemed likely, and I thought maybe it had mutated from some earlier phrase that made more sense, but a bit of poking about the internet

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Dear Word Detective: “Hooferah” — am I spelling this correctly? This is something my father says a lot, but he doesn’t know how to spell it, either. When something’s too fancy, he says, “too much highfalutin’ hooferah.” Can you please explain? — R. Perreault.

I’ll give it a shot. Incidentally, this is one of “those questions.” Every so often I spend hours searching for a word that someone has heard a relative use, only to find no evidence that anyone other than that relative has ever used the word. So I

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Dear Word Detective: I have been a big baseball fan all my 53 years of life. While listening to a baseball game, I heard the announcers talking about a pitch called “Uncle Charlie.” But never having played much baseball myself, I was surprised that I did not know what kind of pitch it was, much less the origin of the phrase itself. Hoping you won’t toss me a curve ball but shoot me an answer “down the pipe”! — Simon Bernard.

I’ll take a swing at it, but I can’t promise I’ll get a hit.

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Dear Word Detective: I was thinking of the air-conditioner salesman yesterday, and the word “smarmy” jumped unbidden into my mind. It’s in the dictionary, but they don’t even bother with “obscure origin.” They just omit the etymology section entirely. Searching your site, I noticed that it is one of your favorites, but no entry about origin, et cetera. Please tell us what you can find out about it. — William Blum.

What is it about air-conditioning salesmen? We had a whole-house system installed a few years ago (the furnace, which dated back to the Civil War, had finally given

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Dear Word Detective: An officemate and I were discussing our favorite words yesterday. I said mine was “serendipity” (which you covered so well in one of your columns many years ago). She said hers was “velleity.” We both wondered where it came from but she just didn’t have the ambition to look it up. — Donald Wilkinson.

Ba-dum-bump. My keyboard lacks a “rimshot” key, so that’s the best I can do. But you’ll be pleased to know that it took the better part of a full minute for that to sink in, which is

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Dear Word Detective: When I was a child in the 50’s in New York City (Harlem and the South Bronx), we used the word “chew” to express our bad reaction to having heard certain sounds. The most famous (infamous?) sound that produces a bad reaction in people is the one made when fingernails are scraped along a chalkboard. What used to “chew” me the most was the sound produced when two vinyl records were rubbed together. It didn’t chew others I was with, just me. It would still chew me today, if not for the near extinction of

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