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Trivia

All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

Any typos found are yours to keep.

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Light fantastic, trip the

What, me waltz?

Dear Word Detective: Mad magazine used to run a regular feature called “Horrifying Cliches,” where common phrases were illustrated as a literal event, with some kind of odd-looking creature (in a Gothic setting) as the focus.  In my example, two similar odd creatures (one fat, one skinny) are walking down a path, and the skinny creature is falling from being tripped by a person who’d been lying in wait.  The caption: “Tripping the light fantastic.”  I know “tripping the light fantastic” is a reference to dancing, but how?  What’s the connection?Where did this phrase come from? — Curtis Anderson.

Funny you should mention Mad magazine.  I was sitting in a Barnes & Noble in-store “cafe” last week, waiting for the nausea caused by a glance at their Best Sellers table to pass, when I noticed Mad on a nearby rack.  The cover was festooned, as it usually is, with the beatific visage of Alfred E. Newman, and I had a sudden epiphany: more than any other influence — school, home, friends, the alien abduction — reading Mad as a child had made me what I am today.  So thanks, gang.  You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.

I’m not sure that I would classify “trip the light fantastic” as a cliche, simply because it’s so rarely encountered these days.  Cliches are, by definition, words and phrases that have been overused to the point where they’ve lost whatever evocative power they ever had, as in “at the end of the day,” all the rage a few years ago but now, thankfully, fading fast.  “Trip the light fantastic” is, however, what I would call a “twit alarm” in that it warns that you’re in the presence of the sort of insufferably pretentious poseur who also peppers his speech (ninety percent of these critters are men) with words such as “eschew” and “indubitably.”  I know I’m not supposed to dislike innocent little phrases, but “trip the light fantastic” gives me the wimwams.

Your understanding of “to trip the light fantastic” as meaning “to dance” is correct, especially “to dance with enthusiasm and abandon.”  Waltzing, in other words, does not usually  qualify as “tripping the light fantastic,” though an energetic tango might.  For a phrase that sounds as if it might have been invented by a 20th century ad agency, “trip the light fantastic” is rather remarkably old, coined by the poet John Milton in his “”L’Allegro” in 1642 (“Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides, Come, and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastic toe.”).  Milton, by the way, was using “trip” in the now-obsolete sense of “to move lightly,” not the “fall on your face” modern meaning.

The condensed phrase “trip the light fantastic” has been used periodically ever since by writers who needed a whimsical synonym for “dance” (“When I was your age I twirled the light fantastic with the best,” 1913).  But its popularity today is largely due to James W. Blake and Charles B. Lawlor, whose enormously (and enduringly) popular 1894 song “The Sidewalks of New York” contained the verse “East Side, West Side, all around the town / The tots sang ‘ring-around-rosie,’ ‘London Bridge is falling down’ / Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O’Rourke / Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.”

Tier-ranger

Somewhere over the gunwales.

Dear Word Detective:  Greetings from Oz. I have become a little obsessed with the term “tier-ranging.” I came across this term whilst reading a book entitled “The Man Who Stole the Cyprus,” a factual story set in convict times between Van Diemen’s Land and England during 1829 and 1831.  I am aware that “tier-ranging” describes a criminal activity, however I am unable to determine what this term relates to.  I would be most grateful for any guidance. — Spencer G. Jones, Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia.

Oz?  Awesome.  Oh, right, Australia.  I was going to ask you to pass a message to Glinda, but never mind.  It’s just that these things are way too tight and I think the batteries must be dead.  Anyway, that’s a good question, if one takes “good” to mean “maddening” and perhaps a bit exhausting.  Then again, I started out from a position of disadvantage, because “Van Diemen’s Land” rang absolutely no bells with me, not even a tinkle.

For the benefit of readers similarly ignorant, “Van Diemen’s Land” was the original name  (original to European explorers, at any rate) for what is now called Tasmania.  Tasmania is a very large island (and state) lying off the southeastern tip of Australia, named after the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who was, in 1642, the first European to visit the island.  Tasman, however, initially named the island Anthony van Diemen’s Land after his sponsor, and it was known as Van Diemen’s Land until the mid-19th century.  For the first half of the 19th century, Van Diemen’s Land served as a penal colony, housing prisoners (as many as 75,000 over the years) transported from England.

One of those prisoners was a man named William Swallow (originally William Walker), the subject of the book you read.  Sentenced in London to be “transported” to the penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land for a petty crime, Swallow and a group of his prison pals there stole the government ship “Cyprus” and sailed across the Pacific all the way to Japan.  It sounds like a fascinating story.

Judging from the previews available on Google Books, the term “tier-ranging” occurs five times in the book, and it seems to have been the default occupation of William Swallow.  A “tier-ranger” in the 19th century was a thief who specialized in stealing from moored ships, especially those berthed in the “tiers,” the long ranks of ships being loaded and unloaded, in the Thames river in London.  These thieves “ranged” in the sense that they went from ship to ship, usually at night, and took what they could, whether it was tools or more expensive loot such as sextants, which they then fenced.

We use “tier” today primarily to mean a horizontal row of a thing or things (such as seats) placed above or below other rows (as in a stadium), but since English adopted the word around 1569 from the Old French “tire” (meaning “rank, order or sequence”), “tier” has acquired a wide range of specialized uses, from a row of guns on a man-of war to overlapping ruffles on a dress.   From the early 16th century until well into the 20th, “tier” was also used to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “A row of ships moored or anchored at a particular place; hence, an anchorage or mooring-place where ships lie in rows or columns.”

While “tier-rangers” like William Swallow are a thing of the past, the crime was common enough in the mid-19th century to make two appearances in Charles Dickens’s 1858 essay “Down with the Tide” about life on the Thames waterfront (“Tier-rangers, who silently dropped alongside the tiers of shipping in the Pool, by night.” and “We took no Tier-rangers … nor other evil-disposed person or persons.”).

Tizzy

Now say “Tizzie Lish” five times real fast.

Dear Word Detective: From where did the expression “all in a tizzy” come?  I have heard that it might be traced back to a coin, but I wondered if it might have something to do with the alcoholic beverage Tizwin (or Tiswin). — Carmen Christopher Caviness.

That’s an interesting guess. Wrong, but interesting. You’re still one step ahead of me, however, because I must admit I’d never heard of “tizwin” until I read your question. I assumed that my ignorance was just another example of my illiteracy in matters alcoholic, and that “tizwin” was either an exotic relative of absinthe (pretty exotic itself) or a crude concoction made, perhaps, of vodka and Windex and favored by newly-impoverished investment bankers. Then I realized that there is, as yet, no such thing as an impoverished investment banker and decided to actually look up “tizwin.”

According to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians (which is published by Houghton Mifflin and therefore presumably reliable), “tizwin” (or “tiswin”) is a “potent alcoholic beverage traditionally brewed by the Chiricahuas and Western Apaches.” Made from the mescal plant, tizwin was reputed to produce an especially boisterous species of drunk, and its manufacture and consumption on Indian reservations was banned in the late 19th century. The Apaches rightly resented this interference, and the ban prompted the Apache leader Geronimo to lead a breakout from the reservation.

None of that, however, has anything to do with “tizzy” meaning “an agitated state of nervous anxiety” (“Maybe it’s better for the future of the race to live from daze to daze in a perpetual tizzy like Alix,” Ladies Home Journal, 1938). Nor does “tizzy” in this “panic attack” sense have any apparent connection to the use of the word “tizzy” as antiquated British slang for a sixpence coin. That use may be related to the use of “tester” as slang for the same coin, which goes back to the Italian word “testa,” meaning “head,” and its derivative “teston,” a coin featuring the head of a ruler. The first such coin minted in England was a shilling (later devalued to sixpence) bearing the visage of Henry VII.

Since we’ve eliminated so many sources that didn’t produce the “tizzy” we’re investigating, pinpointing the correct origin should be a snap, right? This just in: Life not fair, film at 11. Nobody knows for sure where “tizzy” came from.  The most likely explanation may be our old pal onomatopoeia or “echoic formation,” the development of a word in imitation of the sound (or “feel”) of the thing itself. “Tizzy,” in this scenario, simply sounds like someone upset and anxious.

The question remains as to why “tizzy,” describing a truly ancient human condition, only first appeared in print in 1935. Etymologist Michael Quinion, on his excellent World Wide Words web page (worldwidewords.org), suggests that the sudden popularity of “tizzy” in the 1930s was due to a long-running (1929-47) US radio program called “Al Pearce and His Gang,” which featured a perpetually excitable and distracted character named Tizzie Lish. It’s possible, of course, that the character was named from an existing (but undocumented) folk term “tizzy.”  But since the word “tizzy” in the “state of anxiety” sense didn’t appear in print until this show had been on the air for a while, it’s also entirely possible that the actual origin of “tizzy” can be traced back to whoever named that character “Tizzy Lish.”