Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Hey, according to my Kitten of the Day calendar, it’s still September, so quit whining.  I guess I should do a column on “just under the wire” sometime soon.

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Through his On Language column for the New York Times and his many books on language, William Safire, who died on September 27, awakened and sustained an interest in language among millions of readers.  Although he never missed an opportunity to “gotcha” solecisms and silliness in the media (especially when uttered by politicians), he was far from being a language scold or usage purist.  He took an infectious delight in documenting new slang and jargon, and he took lexicographic research very seriously.  I never met Mr. Safire, though I recall speaking to him once on the phone years ago, and his researchers contacted me many times to ask if I had any information on, or an opinion of, a word or phrase which had suddenly popped up on his radar.  I was, of course, only a very small fish in the sea of sources he employed, but he took the trouble to plug my books and this website in his column, for which I am very grateful.

The Times obit refers to Mr. Safire as a “linguist,” although, strictly speaking, he wasn’t.  I suspect he would have preferred the term “philologist,” from the Greek philologos, meaning “lover of words and the study of human speech.”

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Onward. As I mentioned last month, our sister site (more of a wife site, really) How Come? has been updated yet again, and is eagerly soliciting questions.  Ask a question, win a book!

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Elsewhere in the news, this month marks the debut of a new WordPress theme for this site, Atahualpa, apparently named after some Incan malcontent.  Like most rural hermits, I hate change, so I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make it look as much like the old theme as I can. The advantage of this new theme is that it’s fluid, expanding to fill your screen and making the center column (if you operate at a resolution greater than 1024 x 768, anyway) much wider.  (The old theme looked a lot like this.)  It seems to work fine in all the browsers I’ve had a chance to test it on, though it looks a bit funny on Google Chrome on Windows, which a whopping 3.20% of you use.  So I suggest you folks stop using both Windows and Chrome.  Thanks.

The advantage of having a wider center column, incidentally, is that it makes text easier to read and will give me room to restore the column illustrations I had to drop because of space constraints.  I plan to start posting them again next month, but picking them is time-consuming, so don’t hold your breath.

If you’re looking for something to read while you wait, I suggest Give Me Something to Read.  I keep reading scary articles about how no one has the patience to read long things online anymore, but evidently some of us still do.

I know there’s something else I was going to say, but my mind has gone blank.  Oh right, please subscribe.  I often receive emails from folks who explain that they’re subscribing after “meaning to for years” but just never getting around to it.  Better late than never, of course, but if we could trim that “years” down to something that would satisfy a bunch of hungry cats (not to mention a rapacious mortgage company), it would be awesome.

On a related note, you will notice that some of these columns in our September issue have comments dated back in March or April of this year.  That’s because subscribers saw these columns months ago and already left their comments.  Right now, they’re reading columns on kidnap, full-fledged, the connection (if any) between fare and fair, high-muck-a-muck, to hawk one’s wares, cull, phony, nip it in the bud, gin up, ritz out, and many other words and phrases that won’t appear in this free part of this site for several months.  Why not do something nice for yourself (and me) and subscribe?

And now, on with the show….

Catching up with Marge and Tina.

Dear Word Detective:  Where does the term “I’m all sixes and sevens” come from, and what exactly does it mean? — Dean Harris.

It means that times flies, or, as Groucho Marx once put it, “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”  It seems like only yesterday, or maybe last year, five years tops, that I first answered this question, but it was actually way back in 1996.  Wow. That was when today was the distant future (the 21st century!), when we didn’t yet have 3-D TV, nobody had iPhone implants, and we still thought that flying cars might be a good idea.  Back when Madonna was a star.

I mention Madonna because she supplied the impetus for a small tidal wave of questions I received back then about “sixes and sevens.”  I was initially puzzled by the sudden interest in a phrase which had, after all, been snoozing in the dusty corners of our English vernacular since at least the late 14th century.   But a quick check of the then-primitive internet indicated that a film adaptation of the musical “Evita” that year, starring Madonna, had produced the wildly popular song “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” which contained the magic phrase “sixes and sevens” (“You won’t believe me, All you will see is a girl you once knew, Although she’s dressed up to the nines, At sixes and sevens with you”).

“Sixes and sevens” as we use it today actually has two related but distinct meanings.  When we say “I’m all sixes and sevens” or the like, it means that we are confused, disoriented and uncertain, either in general or in regard to a specific problem.  “Sixes and sevens” also describes a general state of confusion and disarray in something, such as a business, that ought to be orderly (“The affairs of the treasurer … are all at sixes and sevens,” 1809).  But “sixes and sevens” can also mean a state of irreconcilable conflict, usually preceded by “at” (“Bob and Bill were best friends, but the arrival of Mary set them at sixes and sevens for the whole summer”).

There are a number of colorful stories about the origin of “sixes and sevens,” tracing the phrase to medieval guilds and Biblical quotations, but, as usual with colorful word and phrase origin stories, they fall apart on examination.  Fortunately, the explanation most likely to be true is also pretty colorful.

A popular game of chance during the Middle Ages in Europe was called “Hazard,” and involved, as many games still do, betting on the outcome of a roll of a pair of dice.  A daring player might bet on the unlikely roll of five and six, known as “setting on cinque and cice” (from the French words for five and six).  This was considered a very foolish move, because the player’s entire fortune could be lost on one toss.  Over time, the phrase came to mean “to take a great risk” in other contexts, and “cinque and cice” became “six and seven” (a roll impossible with dice, by the way).   Chaucer, among other authors, used the phrase in this “risk everything” sense in the late 14th century.

By the 16th century, “at six and seven” had taken on the meaning of “in great confusion,” as Shakespeare used it in his Richard II (“But time will not permit. All is uneven, And everything is left at six and seven”).  By the 18th century, the plural form “sixes and sevens” had become standard, and by the late 1800s the phrase was also being used to mean “in stubborn disagreement” (“[These] differences … have for a long time kept society in Sofia at sixes and sevens,” 1887).

Don’t look back.

Dear Word Detective:  I looked up the word “qualm” and found “etymology unknown.”  What do you have? — Robert Coleman.

Me?  I have tons of qualms.  I have qualms about claiming my shoes as a business expense, for instance, because I do most of my writing sitting down.  I have qualms about not coming up with a better name for one of our cats than “Little Girl Cat.”  (I can tell even the vet thinks that’s pretty tacky.)  I have qualms about feeding cookies to the dog.  I have qualms about voting for judges based on the similarity of their last names to those of people I know.  (Just kidding about that one.  Mostly.)

“Qualm” is an interesting, and somewhat mysterious, word.  It’s mysterious enough that it’s understandable why most dictionaries, pressed for space, would snap “origin unknown” and move on to the next word.  But it would be more accurate to say “origin uncertain,” or (in an ideal world with plenty of space on the page) “origin uncertain, but it seems to be related to a whole bunch of other words although we can’t explain exactly how.”

We use “qualm” primarily to mean, as the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) puts it, “an uneasy feeling about the propriety or rightness of a course of action.”  Other senses currently in use (again quoting the AHD) are “a sudden feeling of sickness, faintness, or nausea,” and “a sudden disturbing feeling.”  A “qualm,” in other words, is that sinking feeling, that pang of dismay, that you get when you realize that you probably shouldn’t have seated your boss next to your brother-in-law at your dinner party.

But there are actually four separate “qualm” nouns in English, which complicates the search for origins a bit.  One “qualm” can be dismissed immediately as irrelevant, the now-obsolete 15th century use of “qualm” to mean “the sound of the cry of a raven.”  We can also probably ignore the 16th century “qualm” meaning “a brief period of boiling.”

It’s the two other “qualms” that may or may not be related.  The earlier, which we inherited from Old English, is “qualm” meaning “death, especially violent death,” and, more generally, “widespread death or disaster,” as in a plague or famine.  The root of this “qualm” was the Old English “qualm,” derived from Germanic roots meaning “torment, torture or death.” This “qualm” is now obsolete, but was apparently closely related to the same roots that gave us our modern English verb “to quell,” which originally meant “to kill,” but was subsequently diluted to mean “to suppress or extinguish.”

Our modern “qualm,” which dates to the early 16th century, appears to have come from the same Germanic roots as the obsolete “qualm” meaning “death,” but its initially milder meaning of  “pang” or “queasiness,” coupled with some gaps in the family tree, make considering these two “qualms” the same word unacceptable to lexicographers.  My personal sense is that they are indeed the same word, especially since the earlier “qualm” (in the form “cwealm”) was used in Old English to mean “pain or pang.”  Any definite answer is lost in the mists of history, as they say, but I think the “qualm” you feel today when you fudge your tax deductions is the same word that meant “mass murder” several centuries ago.

Just say no?

Dear Word Detective: The word “nope,” which I use more often than Mrs. Higgenbottom would approve, raised my curiosity to the point of looking for its origins.  I turned to your column, and nope, it wasn’t there.  I looked in the Wiktionary site and it said “nope” is probably from “ope” which is a shortened form of some word I can’t remember how to spell right now, which is okay because I don’t believe it, anyway.  “Nope” is derived from “no,” isn’t it, the hard consonant added to make it more emphatic?  And when did it first appear? — B. L.

Good question.  Incidentally, I’d have made a lousy primary school English teacher, because I’ve never really had any burning desire to correct other people’s grammar and usage.  Ask me what word or form is commonly preferred, and I’ll be happy to tell you, but scribbling stern red ink on student essays is beyond my bailiwick.  Dipping my toe in Geezer Pond, however, I must admit that if I were a teacher today and received papers written in “txt-speak,” I might well lose it.  Of course, I’m probably not immune, and soon I’ll be getting queries from the cell folk about the origin of “j2luk” or “plez.”  Oddly enough, neither of those inventions (meaning “just to let you know” and “please,” respectively) is listed in Wiktionary, which is an open-source dictionary modeled on Wikipedia’s write-it-yourself approach.  Omg!

It took me a bit of puzzling to figure out where that connection to “ope” came from, since “nope” meaning “no” has nothing to do with any such word.  But what Wiktionary does not make very clear is that there are actually several “nopes” in English.  As a noun, one “nope” means “a blow to the head” (probably from the obsolete and mysterious English dialect word “nolp”).  Another “nope” is a common English regional dialect term for the bird known as the bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula).  This “nope” is thought to have arisen from “ope,” a variant of “alp,” another name for the bullfinch, through a process known as “metanalysis,” where one letter in a phrase (in this case, “an ope”) migrates to the other word (becoming “a nope”)  The same linguistic process transformed the original “a napron” (from the Old French “naperon,” small tablecloth) into our familiar “an apron” several hundred years ago.

Our “nope” meaning “no” is, technically, an adverb, often used as an interjection, and is an American invention.  Your hunch is, of course, absolutely right.  This “nope” is simply “no” with a very emphatic (but linguistically meaningless) “p” sound stuck on the end, much as “p” is appended to “yeah” to produce the more abrupt and emphatic “yep.”  The “p” in both cases is a signal to the listener that the matter is not up for discussion (“‘Have you been in Europe before?’ ‘Nope,’ she replied shortly,” 1918).  The earliest citation for “nope” in print found so far is surprisingly recent, from 1888.  But “nope” was almost certainly in common use long before that date, kept out of print as “improper colloquial usage” by the Mrs. Higgenbottoms of the day.

Bedtime for botanists.

Dear Word Detective:  I am wondering about the correct usage of two phrases.  “Paint the lily” is the correct phrase, but how did “gild the lily” become the more popular use?  And “the exception proves the rule” is how we hear this phrase worded, but there is another wording, perhaps even the truly correct one.  But it’s so obscure I only vaguely remember ever hearing it once.  Do you know what it is? — Scott Clarke.

I sure do, but something just occurred to me.  I think I enjoy answering emails that contain more than one question is because I’m so conditioned by those “buy one, get one free” offers in the supermarkets.  Now that money is especially tight, I’m even more on the lookout for such deals, although my enthusiasm has occasionally led, in retrospect, to some rather odd purchases.  Tonight, for instance, we’re having “twofer” sardines on potato rolls with what I suppose you might call Pop Tart salad.  More groat pudding, anyone?

I’ve actually answered both of these questions in the past, but they’re so frequently asked that a rerun certainly won’t hurt.  “To gild the lily” means “to adorn or embellish something that is already beautiful or perfect; to attempt to improve something that cannot be improved, and thereby to risk spoiling it through excess.”  But “gild the lily” is, as you note, actually a misquotation of the original.  In his play “The Life and Death of King John” (1595), Shakespeare wrote: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

I think we can agree that Shakespeare’s version is clearly superior.  “Gilding” (applying a thin layer of gold) to actual gold would be the epitome of pointless adornment, and to slather paint on a delicate lily would be shockingly vulgar.  Gilding a lily, in contrast, seems only vaguely silly.  So why do we say “gild the lily” today?  It’s impossible to say why or even when the change took place (although the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for “gild the lily” dates to 1928).  Most likely someone misremembered Shakespeare’s line and committed it to print, thereafter to be copied by readers unfamiliar with the original.  Unfortunately, it’s far too late to propagate a correction, so we might as well get used to “gild the lily.”

“The exception proves the rule” is one of the most commonly misunderstood aphorisms in popular usage.  The legal doctrine on which it is based (which may be the longer form you’re thinking of) is “The exception proves (confirms) the rule in the cases not excepted,” meaning that a judge or other authority can grant an exception to a rule or law in a special case, while simultaneously affirming the basic validity of the rule itself.  The alternative would be to throw out the rule entirely (in which case the “exception” wouldn’t be an exception).  As I said in my explanation a few years back, it’s analogous to a parent letting a child stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Such bending of the rules on a special occasion doesn’t mean bedtime has been abolished from then on.

Flounders founder, woodchucks chuck, film at 11.

Dear Word Detective:  Some time ago, perhaps circa 1975, I remember reading a very convincing column in the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun Times (I believe) which mentioned that even the more educated people misuse the word “flounder” in the context of being perplexed and put badly off balance, while the more accurate word is “founder,” which I had always thought meant only “to sink beneath the waves” as most folks use it.  Since I’ve not read or heard anything further to settle this quibble, can you tell me which you believe is the more correct word to use in this sense?  Thank you for clearing this up. — Don Brennecke.

I’ll do my best, but lately I’ve been having trouble explaining much of anything to anybody, including myself.  I think I may be paying too much attention to reality.  By the way, that column you read about 35 years ago may well have been written by my parents, William and Mary Morris.  Starting in 1954, my father (joined later by my mother) wrote  a syndicated newspaper column called “Words, Wit and Wisdom,” answering readers’ questions about word origins and usage, which eventually ran in hundreds of papers in the US and abroad.  This column is a continuation of that creation, now in its 55th year of uninterrupted publication.

The matter of “founder” versus “flounder” is exactly the sort of question my parents delighted in exploring, and in their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1985), they delivered a concise verdict:  “These two verbs are often confused and consequently misused.  ‘Flounder’ means to ‘thrash about,’ as would an animal mired in mud.  ‘Founder’ means to ‘fail completely, collapse or sink.’…”

To begin at the beginning, the verb “to founder” means, in its basic sense, “to sink completely, collapse,” or, in an extended sense, “to fail utterly.” The source of “founder” was the Old French “fondrer,” meaning “submerge, send to the bottom,” and its ultimate root is the Latin “fundus,” meaning “bottom” (which also gave us the words “foundation,” “found” and “fundamental,” among others).

“Flounder” as a verb is an odd bird.  (The noun “flounder,” a kind of flat fish, is etymologically unrelated to the verb “to flounder”).  The verb “to flounder” is almost certainly an alteration of “to founder,” influenced by other verbs, such as “blunder,” depicting clumsy or frantic motion.  When “flounder” first appeared in the 16th century, it meant “to stumble,” and later “to struggle clumsily.”  A bit later on, it came to mean “to struggle along with great difficulty.”

The confusion between “founder” and “flounder” arises when the extended figurative uses of the words converge.  If clueless Jim has been promoted to sales manager and can’t handle the job, he may well “flounder” (struggle along) for a few months before he “founders” (fails) completely.  In the example you gave, I would tend to think that “flounder” was actually the proper word, but without knowing the exact wording, it’s hard to be certain.

We’ll always have Flapdoodle.

Dear Word Detective:  In my research for a Civil War novel I’m doing, I ran across a quotation of Robert E. Lee’s (back when he was a colonel) in which he referred to an unreliable report as “All flam and claptrap.”  Naturally, I thought of you.  The sense of the term is “nonsense,” but I find the origins nowhere.  “Claptrap” was a favorite epithet of my father’s, but “flam”?  Perhaps from “flim-flam,” which leaves me with “flim,” also obscure.  Assistance please. — Barry Longyear.

I think it’s notable, and weirdly inspiring, that some of our most colorful English words are used to mean “nonsense.”  Just a quick skip through Roget’s Thesaurus under “nonsense” produces babble, blather, blatherskite, gabble, gibberish, jabber, jabberwocky, twaddle, balderdash, bunkum, claptrap, drivel, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, tommyrot, applesauce, baloney, bilge, hooey, and malarkey (although for some reason they left out my favorite, “horsefeathers”).

Your hunch tracing “flam” to “flim-flam” (or “flimflam,” as it’s most often spelled today) is right on the mark.  “Flim-flam” dates back to the 16th century, and from the beginning meant “nonsense or idle talk” as well as “humbug, a flimsy pretense or deception.”  The distinctive trait  to “flim-flam” is its transparency;  a “flim-flam” is not a sophisticated scam or con but rather the sort of shallow trick that a reasonable person wouldn’t fall for.  As a verb, for example, “flim-flam” in the US came to mean specifically “to distract or confuse a customer so as to be able to shortchange him.”  The origin of “flimflam” is somewhat uncertain, but the “flim” part may be based on a English dialectical word of Scandinavian origin similar to the Old Norse “flim” (a lampoon or mockery).  Such a Norse origin of “flim,” if true, would be a legacy of the Viking invasions of Britain in the 8th to 11th centuries.

The form “flim-flam” is what linguists call “reduplication,” the repetition of a word with a slight change for emphasis (e.g., whim-wham, okey-dokey, etc.).  Oddly enough, although the “flam” part is simply a variant of “flim,” it apparently achieved escape velocity and became a word in its own right almost as soon as “flim-flam” appeared.  Thus we find “flam” being used as early as the 17th century (“All pretences to the contrary are nothing but cant and cheat, flam and delusion,” 1692) as a simple synonym for “flim-flam.”  This makes Lee’s use of “flam” in that quotation entirely logical.

“Claptrap,” incidentally, has a wonderfully sardonic origin.  It’s theater slang from the 18th century, originally meaning a line or speech in a play shamelessly designed to elicit (“trap”) applause (“claps”) from the audience.  A stirring speech by a character praising the national spirit, for instance, would almost certainly rouse the crowd, but was considered cheap “claptrap”  by many playwrights and actors (“There will be no clap-traps, nothing about ‘Britannia rule the Waves’,” 1799).  By the 19th century, “claptrap” had broadened from meaning “cheap, showy language” to its current meaning of “nonsense, silly rubbish.”

A cook’s best friend, however.

Dear Word Detective:  I have a friend that sometimes calls people “pot lickers.”  I don’t think it sounds very good. What does it mean? — Darlene.

It certainly doesn’t sound good, but that’s the whole point.  As an insult or derogatory term, “pot licker” has a nice ring to it, and since most people will have no idea of what it means, there’s the added sense of superiority that comes from confusing your adversary as well as insulting him or her.  I knew a fellow once who would occasionally refer to politicians he didn’t like as “pantaloons.”  Had there been any of his targets within earshot, they would have  understood the slur only if they had known that “pantaloon” is the Anglicized form of “Pantalone,” a stock character in the Italian “commedia dell’arte” (comedy theater) of the 16th century.  “Pantalone” was usually depicted as a demented old man clad in short, loose-fitting trousers, an image Shakespeare invoked in his play As You Like It (“… the lean and slippered pantaloon … his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”).  That may seem like a pretty obscure insult, but Pantalone was famous enough that his name, filtered through “pantaloon,” eventually gave us the English word “pants.”

As far as I know, Shakespeare never called anyone a “pot licker,” but I suspect he would have jumped at the chance had he been familiar with the insult.  Applied to a human being, “pot licker” means a low and contemptible person, one with no pride and no principles.  A “pot licker” is a bottom-feeder, a low-life whose career ambitions extend no further up the food chain than to be a “toady” (a fawning sycophant or yes-man, so-called after the “toad-eaters” who, back in the 17th century, actually ate toads as part of a traveling medicine man’s demonstration of bogus “antidotes” to poison).  “Pot lickers” give hangers-on a bad name.

As a personal insult, “pot licker” dates back to the 1830s and tends to be heard mostly in the Southern US, though it is apparently also common in the Caribbean.   In its literal and original sense, however, “pot licker” was not a person at all.  A “pot licker” is a mongrel dog, most often a nondescript hound mix, no good for hunting and generally considered worthless.  (I’m just reporting.  No dog, of course, is worthless, and several of my best friends have been mutts.)  The key to a dog being considered a “pot licker” is its timidity and complete lack of spirit, including an unwillingness to bristle or snarl even when abused.  The only reward such a dog deserves, in this view, is to lick cooking pots clean after the meal is served.  Compared to a well-trained hunting dog, considered very valuable in such circles, being a “pot licker” is about as low as a dog can go.

While being called a “pot licker” is certainly a serious insult to a human, it’s arguably not quite as bad as being labeled a “boot licker.”  First appearing in the mid-19th century, “boot licker,” meaning a person so subservient that they figuratively lick the boots of their master, carries even stronger connotations of abject servility than “pot licker.”

Not even close.

Dear Word Detective:  “The Perfect Summer” by Juliet Nicolson, page 80, reads:  “Lady Louisa Anson, an intimidating guest at Viceregal Lodge in (Victorian) Ireland, was so rude to the Viceroy’s children they stole the name card from her bedroom door and slid it into the holder on the door of the water closet. The lady was not amused when the maid persistently misdelivered her morning tea.  The story spread and from then on people needing a discreet reason to excuse themselves would announce they were off to visit Lady Loo or as it became known simply ‘The Loo’.”  Could this be true? — Roger Baker.

Absolutely not.  I’ve removed a few of the question marks you appended to your query for emphasis, but your incredulity is richly justified.  That story is nonsense.  I must say, however, that it is curiously attractive because it exhibits several of the key elements of a successful urban legend.  There’s the presence of the aristocracy, always a winner.  More importantly, the snobby rich person gets her comeuppance at the hands of the downtrodden (albeit also rich) children she has wronged.  And the whole tale centers on the socially taboo subject of toilets.  No wonder the author was suckered by that story.

That looks like an interesting book, by the way.  It’s a portrait of the summer of 1911, three years before the start of World War I, focusing on the upper crust of British society, and written by the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.  But did guests at a Viceroy’s mansion really have their rooms marked by little name cards on the door?  How tacky.  I wonder if they also wore those “Hi, My name is” things at dinner.

“Loo” is, of course, slang, primarily British, for the toilet, restroom or bathroom (or whatever your favorite euphemism might be).  The origin of “loo” has been hotly, and often quite creatively, debated since the word first appeared.  One popular theory suggests that servants in the 17th and 18th century, emptying chamberpots out the window, warned passersby in the street below with the shout “Gardez l’eau!” (French for “Watch out for the water!”), which was pronounced “gardy loo” in Britain and later shortened to “loo.”

This story, however, like many of the more colorful origins proposed, runs aground on the fact that “loo” first appeared in print relatively recently, in 1922 (in the form of a joke in “Ulysses” by James Joyce: “O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset.”).  The 1922 vintage of “loo” also casts doubt on Nicolson’s account, since it is set no later than 1911.

There are two theories, however, that should be considered more likely.  The French euphemism “lieux” (pronounced “loo,” from “lieux d’aisance,” meaning “places of comfort” or “comfort stations”) might well have been picked up by British soldiers in France during World War I (1914-17).  The period between the war and the first appearance of “loo” in print would be about right for armed services slang to percolate into general usage.

On the other hand, James Joyce may, in that quote from “Ulysses,” have been onto the actual origin of “loo.”  It may simply be a joke based on the use of “Waterloo” (as in “Battle of Waterloo”) as a punning take on “water closet.”  Such a linkage would make “loo” similar to  British rhyming slang, where a nonsense phrase rhyming with the “real” word (“plates of meat” for “feet”) is abbreviated and obscured still further by dropping the bit that actually rhymes (leaving us with the mysterious “plates” as slang for “feet”).  “Water closet” thus, in this theory,  became “Waterloo,” and then just “loo.”

Ironing out a quibble.

Dear Word Detective:  The subject of this question regards “G.I.” in reference to persons and things military, not in the medical sense of  gastro-intestinal.  I was astounded just now to note that Wikipedia says that the expression originally meant, not “Government Issue,” but “Galvanized Iron.”  There was other incorrect or misleading information in their brief article, enough to make me jump over to my favorite site and ask, “What have you got on this, O Sherlock of the vocables?” — Charles Anderson.

“Sherlock of the vocables”?  OK.  Actually, I should have known I’d end up in this racket when, as a child, I developed a fascination with Sherlock Holmes.  I’ve read every Holmes story Conan Doyle ever wrote, and I reread them every few years.  My wife can’t understand how I manage it, given that I know how they turn out, but I know how the Goldberg Variations turns out, too, and I still enjoy listening to it.

I looked up “G.I.” on Wikipedia, and I must say that whoever wrote that entry has absolutely no future as a diplomat (or, if we’re lucky, as a teacher).  There’s a weirdly hostile and arrogant undertone to that entry.  However, as least as far as the ultimate origin of “G.I.” goes, the author is not crazy.  But the question could certainly use much more explanation.

“G.I.” is, of course, slang for a soldier in the US Army, specifically an enlisted man or woman.  The term has been used in this sense since at least 1939, and was very commonly used during World War II.  As an adjective applied to the uniforms, equipment, etc., issued to soldiers, “G.I.” has long been considered to stand for “Government Issue” in phrases such as “G.I. soap,” “G.I. underwear,” etc.

In its first use by the military itself, however, “G.I.” did indeed stand for “galvanized iron.”  The heavy metal garbage cans found on every base were stamped “Can, G.I.” on the bottom, which would have been very visible to any unlucky soldier detailed to scrub one clean (i.e., almost every soldier at some point).  “G.I.” was also apparently stamped on buckets and various tools.  This government use of “G.I.” dates to around 1907 and continued at least though World War I.  During WWI, soldiers familiar with the heavy “G.I.” trashcans sardonically applied the term to large German artillery shells, which became known as “G.I. Cans.”

Around 1917, however, the abbreviation “G.I.” underwent a widespread “reinterpretation” among soldiers as standing for “government issue,” and by the 1920s “G.I.” was being appended to things (“G.I. cap,” “G.I. boots,” etc.) that could not possibly be made of galvanized iron.  This set the stage for “G.I.” to come into use meaning the soldier himself (or, eventually, herself).

Exactly what led to this change in the popularly-accepted meaning of “G.I.” is unclear.  It’s likely that the abbreviation “G.I.” simply became so well known among the troops, many of whom probably never understood that it meant “galvanized iron,” that a new, more logical meaning filled a need and became an unstoppable force.

So while “galvanized iron” was certainly the origin of the Army abbreviation “G.I.”, it’s perfectly true to say that today “G.I.” stands, as it has for almost a century, for “Government Issue.”

Some slurs are, evidently, eternal.

Dear Word Detective:  In a mystery novel (titled “The Dutch”), author Les Roberts says the phrase “doing the Dutch” is “street language” for committing suicide.  True?  How did it come to be? — Kathryn Little.

Reading novels again, are we?  That’s increasingly a girl thing, it seems.  There’s an interesting profile in a recent New Yorker magazine of the British novelist Ian McEwan.  In it McEwan tells of the time he and his son took thirty novels, culled from his home library, to a London park and tried to give them to passersby.  According to McEwan, “[E]very young woman we approached . . . was eager and grateful to take a book,” but the men “… could not be persuaded.”  McEwan concluded that “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”  Maybe the solution is to serialize novels on beer cans.

Meanwhile, back at your question, the answer is yes, “doing the Dutch” is indeed slang for suicide, also known as “the Dutch act,” which is obviously unfair to the Dutch.  If, as a nation, the Dutch really had an extraordinary predilection for suicide, the Netherlands wouldn’t be nearly so crowded.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of anti-Dutch slurs in the English language.

A survey of the wide range of pejorative terms in English that include the word “Dutch” would lead one to conclude that there is scarcely an unpleasant aspect of human existence that has not been unfairly ascribed to the Dutch by English-speaking people.  Most of these terms are relics of the fierce competition between the English and the Dutch in the 17th century, when the countries were establishing rival global empires.  According to Hugh Rawson, who devotes almost three pages of his wonderful book “Wicked Words” (Crown, 1989) to the linguistic products of anti-Dutch fervor in the Britain of that period, almost anything viewed as “inferior,” “abnormal” or “foreign” was labeled “Dutch.”  Many of these locutions lasted well past the period of  hostility between the two nations, and some are still heard today.

“Dutch courage,” for example, is false bravado, often fortified by large amounts of alcohol.  A “Dutch treat” is a dinner or similar occasion where no one is “treated” and everyone pays his or her own way.  “Dutch nightingale” was, at one time, mocking slang for a frog.  To “speak Dutch” was to speak gibberish or nonsense, and something completely incomprehensible was described as “double-Dutch.”  (“Double Dutch” jump rope is so-called because it is difficult and confusing, requiring hopping through two jump ropes twirling in opposite directions like an eggbeater.)   A “Dutch defense” was a sham defense to mask a retreat, and to “do a Dutch” meant to run away as well as to commit suicide.  To “take Dutch leave” was to desert, and today we still describe someone in trouble as being “in Dutch.”

Interestingly, some of these unpleasant creations crossed the Atlantic and were used in America, not because there was much Dutch presence here (apart from in early New York City), but because German immigrants to America were known as “Dutch” due to a common misunderstanding of “Deutsch” (meaning “German” in German) as meaning “Dutch.”  To this day the descendants of German immigrants in Pennsylvania are known as “the Pennsylvania Dutch.”

Agreeably nuts.

Dear Word Detective:  Please could you tell me whereabouts the word “balmy” originates?  It would settle an argument, as my mother-in-law says it must be a Norfolk saying.  We mean “balmy” as in “balmy weather.”  I really hope you can help. — Kerrie.

Me too.  By the way, I assumed that you were writing from Norfolk, Virginia until I saw the “uk” suffix on your email.  I didn’t know you folks had a Norfolk too.  According to Wikipedia, your Norfolk was founded by the Romans, but then invaded by the Angles (from whom the English language takes its name), who established two settlements, known as the “north folks” and the “south folks,” which eventually became Norfolk and Suffolk.  Call me cynical, but it seems that y’all passed up a substantial revenue opportunity there.  It’s never too late to rename them Exxon City and Murdochville, you know.

You specify “balmy” in the sense of “balmy weather,” but “balmy” in all its meanings is the same word with the same origin.

“Balmy” is, of course, an adjective, and behind “balmy” we find the noun “balm,” which first appeared in English in the 13th century meaning, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “an aromatic substance, consisting of resin mixed with volatile oils, exuding naturally from various trees of the genus Balsamodendron, and much prized for its fragrance and medicinal properties.”  In this sense, “balm” is essentially synonymous with “balsam” and, in fact, “balm” is derived from the Greek word “balsamon,” meaning “balsam.”  Balm has been used  for various purposes throughout human history, most notably as an ointment for soothing pain or wounds.  A mixture of balm and spices was also used for many centuries to preserve the bodies of the dead, a process still reflected in the modern English word “embalm.”

Given the widespread use of various kinds of balm to relieve pain and distress, it’s not surprising that by the 16th century “balm” was being used in a figurative sense to mean “a healing or soothing influence” (“See here the balms that passion’s wounds assuage,” 1807).  The related adjective “balmy,” once meaning simply “producing balm,” took on the figurative meaning of “soothing” (“Tir’d Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy Sleep!” 1742).  By 1704, “balmy” was also being applied specifically to mild, soothing weather.

In view of all these uses of “balmy” to mean something pleasant, it’s a bit of a jolt to find that “balmy” has also been, since the 1850s, common British slang meaning “weak-minded” or “insane,” and the connection is not, to put it mildly, obvious.  Most likely, “balmy” in this sense comes from the vague, tuned-out and “mild” manner of the afflicted, especially those of advanced age.  People who are “balmy” tend to be quietly loopy, not dramatically disruptive.

Another very similar slang term in Britain is “barmy,” which may sound like a form of “balmy” but actually comes from “barm,” the froth in the “head” of a glass of beer.  In the 17th century, “barmy” in a figurative sense meant “very excited” (like the fizzy bubbles in “barm”), but in the 19th century “barmy” essentially merged with “balmy” in the “crazy” sense and today the words are used interchangeably.