October 2010 « The Word Detective

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.”

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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.”).

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Future puzzles

Shapes of things too glum.

Dear Word Detective: Do you ever wonder what usages of today will have future etymologists scratching their heads? For example, from a NYT article about the investigation of the attempted bombing in Times Square: “The police earlier on Monday sifted through footage from 82 city cameras mounted from 34th Street to 51st Street between Avenue of the Americas and Eighth Avenue ….” A generation or two hence, people may wonder why electronic data was referred to as “footage.” — Ken Lerner.

Ha! You said “hence,” the telltale sign of an old fogey. But that’s an interesting question. I generally try to avoid making predictions about the future because my track record isn’t exactly exemplary. Although I’ve never camped out on a mountaintop waiting for the mothership to arrive, I do happen to have more than a few cans of beans in the cellar dating back to the months before Y2K. I’m especially leery of predicting how much of what is known now will puzzle our descendants, because the only real growth stock I’ve spotted in the past few years is historical ignorance. Yes, kids, of course Paul Revere should have just texted the colonists, but his dad had cut off his account.

Your question is related to the topic of “retronyms,” which are new terms coined for things that already exist (such as guitars) when a new form of the thing (such as electric guitars) arises, forcing a clarifying name for the old thing, such as “acoustic guitar.” (The term “retronym” was coined around 1980 by Frank Mankiewicz, then president of National Public Radio.) Thus when color TV came along, regular old television became “black and white TV.” Some years later, the spread of cable TV spawned the need to speak of “broadcast TV,” and the rise of cell phones necessitated the contrasting “land line.” Our speech evolves to avoid ambiguity. No problem.

But when the original (usually “analog”) root of a term subsequently falls into obscurity, the term itself can become a mystery. Most folks, however, seem to carry on without a pause, never noticing that, for example, “footage” (originally referring to film or videotape) makes no literal sense when speaking of digital media. I’d be willing to bet that 90% of email users don’t know that “cc” stands for “carbon copy,” let alone what carbon paper was. Apple’s iTunes store sells “albums” of music (as well as single “songs”). But most iTunes customers are probably only dimly aware of “record albums” in the sense of a flat cardboard sleeve containing one or more humongous 33-1/3 rpm long-playing vinyl records. “Album” in this sense was itself, of course, an analogy to old-fashioned picture albums, full of family photographs taken with “film cameras” and printed on photographic paper. Speaking as one who spent his formative years in a darkroom, bathed in the amber glow of the safelight while breathing the heady fumes of Dektol and fixer, I find that last sentence incredibly depressing. Tri-X in D-76 forever!

Predicting such changes is tempting, but probably impossible with any real accuracy. If a newspaper folds its “print edition” and exists only online, in what sense is it still a “newspaper” and not just a “website”? If print magazines go the way of the dodo, will Slate and Salon still bother to call themselves “online magazines”? If the medium of ink on paper dies entirely and “e-books” become the only “books,” will folks wonder about (or even use) idioms such as “on the same page” and “turn the page”? Will even the “page” in “webpage” become naught but a meaningless suffix? How about that grand old interjection, “Stop the presses!”? Will whatever comes after Generation Twit assume it had something to do with weightlifting? And when we finally get our flying cars, will there still be stop signs? I’m gonna go lie down now.

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