Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Before I forget (yeah, right), if you’ve been planning to subscribe at some point but forgetting, this would be an awesome point at which to remember to subscribe. Things are dicey, pickings are slim, and the cats are getting that “Maybe you’ve forgotten that we are, after all, predators” look in their eyes.

And now, a message from Edith Freedle:

Dear Internet: Please excuse Mister Detective’s absence for the past month. He has been sick and has been unable to do anything even remotely constructive. In early September he developed a horrible cold which turned out to be due to a gum infection which turned out to be due to a bad tooth. He has been to the dentist four times in the past month and has now had all of his teeth removed, as well as several random molars he had apparently borrowed from neighbors. The doctors say that if this doesn’t solve the problem he may have to have his ears cropped, although such a drastic step doesn’t actually have anything to do with his teeth (or the lack thereof). But they say it will make his hats fit better.

At the moment he is still under the effects of last week’s anæsthesia (at least we hope that’s it) and has been unable to do anything but post utter nonsense to something called “Tweeter,” which is apparently some kind of online club for weirdos. He is, of course, on a liquid diet, which we assumed meant gruel (he loved gruel as a child growing up in the workhouse). But he belligerently insists that the dentist specified gin and tonic (with limes to prevent scurvy). Since the dentist now forwards all our calls to a personal injury lawyer (evidently someone was bitten during last week’s appointment), we have been unable to verify this prescription and so must assume it’s true.

He is steadily, if slowly, improving, and he thinks he may be able to handle a little pizza next week (liquified in a blender, of course). We have tried to get him to do his homework and update this website, but he has built a fort out of the couch cushions and refuses to come out. This would be an acceptable state of affairs for the short term were it not for our well-founded suspicion that he is smoking some of his strange homemade cigarettes in there.

In any case, the poor little lad has suffered a month of pain and torment, so I hope that you will forgive his absence, and that this unfortunate turn of events will not affect his Google Rank and thus his chances of earning enough pennies from ads to pay the dentist bills and feed the cats, several of whom, apparently from hunger, have taken to licking his feet in a very creepy fashion.

If the other children on the internet would like to contribute, please tell them that, short of sending bales of actual cash, the most important, helpful and compassionate thing to do would be to subscribe to TWD-by-Email.

Yours sincerely,

Edith Freedle, Assistant to, and reluctant temporary caretaker of, Mr. Detective.

p.s. — Mr. Detective briefly emerged from his burrow a few moments ago, just long enough to insist that I warn his readers not to pay attention to the various political ads currently running on this site, which are in “no freaking way, shape or form” under his control. It was difficult to make out exactly what he said next as he seemed to be trying to hold his breath for some reason, but it sounded like “All those lying dirtbums belong in the Graybar Hotel.” Wherever that is.

And now, on with the show….

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Well, there you go. I’ll bet you’re wondering what I did on my summer vacation. In fact, I’ll bet you’re wondering why I never mentioned that I was taking a summer vacation. I’ll explain after the jump.

First off, thanks to all the folks who expressed condolences on the loss of our kitty Harry. He is sorely missed.

Secondly, we now have a couple of hundred fans on our Facebook page, which is awesome, although I’m still not sure why we have a Facebook page. It was my assistant Edith Freedle’s idea, and she went on an “emergency vacation” right after she set it up. She’s been on vacation for a long time, and her cell phone seems to be busted, but I’ll ask her about it if and when she ever comes back.

I kinda like Slate’s tech columnist, Farhad Manjoo. He’s certainly better than the relentlessly smarmy and ethically-challenged David Pogue at the NYT. But this is a seriously silly article. Nobody needs to have 200 browser tabs open at once. First of all, there is at least one Firefox extension, Tab Mix Plus, that makes it easy to save “sessions” (groups of tabs) so you can reopen all of them later. I do a lot of research online, often involving dozens of tabs, but I don’t leave them open all the time. That’s like trying to wear all the socks you own at once.

Secondly, it’s nice that he built himself a speedy computer, but his biggest problem with performance in his old machine (apart from the tab nonsense) was almost certainly Windows 7 (aka Vista II) itself, most particularly in its need for some kind of resource-hogging anti-virus software. Dude, seriously, I hate Macs personally, but get a Mac for pete’s sake. That anti-virus stuff (especially the bloated Norton, McAfee, etc.) eats more processor speed than most viruses and malware do. Any Mac with similar specs is gonna run faster. And Linux is gonna run much, much faster. The secret about Linux is that it’s a great way to revivify an aging PC. I have an eight-year old Dell cheapo single-core Pentium running Ubuntu that runs snappier than Windows 7 on a brand-new laptop.

Speaking of such things, I’ve been using the latest version of Ubuntu Linux since last spring and I’m very impressed. I’ve been using Linux since I dumped Windows about six years ago, and Ubuntu has finally gotten to the point where I’d be willing to recommend it to just about any PC user. You can try Ubuntu, incidentally, without installing it on your hard drive, and as soon as you reboot your computer it’s gone, leaving no trace on your computer.

There is one part of the current Ubuntu which does not work, however, and that’s the Ubuntu One online backup service. I tried using it on three different computers and it really just isn’t reliable enough to depend on. Having been bitten by the idea of an online backup service that would allow me to painlessly share files between computers, I went looking for alternatives and discovered Dropbox, which differs from Ubuntu One by actually working the way it’s supposed to. Now I can turn on any of my computers and know that I’m looking at the latest version of my columns. Dropbox works on Windows, Mac or Linux, a 2 gigabyte account is free, and if you use this link to sign up, you and I will both get an extra 250 megabytes of storage space for free.

And now, those of you interested in my lame excuses for missing deadlines can follow the link below…

Way back before there were MRIs and CAT scans and lumbar punctures, doctors had an interesting way to diagnose multiple sclerosis: they would take the afflicted person and dump them into a bathtub full of hot water. If the person floated, they were declared a witch and put to work transforming toads into investment bankers. If, however, they merely flopped around on the floor when pulled from the tub and reported that they had lost all feeling in their limbs, they were diagnosed with MS and sent on a charity walk. (Seriously, am I being too cranky when I point out that all these MS walks are in dubious taste on some level? Probably.)

So now fast-forward to this past July, when the thermometer here in Central Aheya hit the mid-90s and pretty much stayed there for the next two months. Badda-bing, all my symptoms went to eleven. Muscle cramps, numbness, muscle cramps with numbness with a side of blinding headaches and blurred vision, topped with the kind of exhaustion normally experienced by people who work a lot harder than I do. The strangest (and most distressing) effect was a new one: my legs, after just a few minutes standing, would stop answering the phone. They might hurt at that moment and/or they might be numb, but eventually they would simply stop working and resist all my orders. It’s a very weird moment when you can see your leg, and sorta feel it, but it refuses to even twitch for you. This is, I can attest, very inconvenient when it happens, as it did one day, when you’re standing in the middle of a crowded bookstore and suddenly literally can’t walk, even with a cane.

Now that the temps have come down a bit things are better, but the weird disconnect in my legs after a few minutes standing seems to be a permanent feature. I also can’t really hold things in my left hand and, when I type, that hand makes scads of typos. It’s been exactly four years this month that they diagnosed me with primary-progressive ms, and I guess this is progress of the sort they meant. All I know is that it is enormously depressing and makes getting anything done a major chore. I would never have suspected how attached to walking across the room I was. Anyway, that’s where the August issue went.

See? Lame excuse. Is joke. You will laugh now.

Incidentally, speaking of lumbar punctures, one last thing. I mentioned a few months ago that I have taken to watching House in reruns. Certain people are apparently driven nuts by my willingness to watch the show out of sequence. I knew, for example, that a certain character’s paramour had died even before I knew said paramour existed. But since the show is supposedly modeled on the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, I like to derive an extra meta-thrill by deducing the backstory of each episode without the crutch of chronological order.

Anyway, lumbar puncture (aka spinal tap) seems to crop up as a diagnostic procedure fairly often on House (and they seem to initially suspect MS in almost every case), but, speaking as a onetime puncturee myself, I find the presentation of the procedure on House a bit deceptive.

In the show, they lay the victim on a table in a vaguely fetal position, swab his or her back with antiseptic, stick a long needle into the spinal column and suck out a bit of fluid. So far, so accurate. But the next scene is almost always a bit later, when they go into the patient’s room to deliver the test verdict. And here’s where reality diverges from House. In House, the room is quiet except for the snarking. In real life, however, the snark would be inaudible, drowned out by the howls of pain coming from the recently tapped patient.

When you have a lumbar puncture, the doctor will tell you that it is very important to lie completely still on the table for an hour or so after the procedure, lest you develop a headache from the test. What they don’t tell you is that the reason you may develop a headache is that they have just essentially drained your oil, lowered the pressure in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) surrounding your brain. But the reason they want you to lie there quietly for an hour is not to minimize the chances of you developing a headache. You are absolutely, positively going to develop a headache, the worst headache of your life, a week-long blinding weeping pleading bulletproof lie-on-the-couch-and-scream headache from hell, until the pokey little CSF factory in some remote province of your body tops off your tank again.

Lying very quietly on the table will not prevent this, so you might as well jump right up and go have a slice of pizza while you still can see, think and chew.

The real reason they tell you to lie there for an hour is to give the doctor a chance to get out of the building and halfway home before you start vowing to kill him and burn down his clinic.

I speak from experience, and House owes it to its viewers to depict lumbar puncture and its aftermath a bit more realistically. Let me put it this way: I recently saw an episode from a few years ago where an ex-patient shows up and, with no explanation, shoots House several times with a rather large handgun. And my first thought was “I bet they gave that guy a spinal tap.”

p.s. — Please subscribe.

Eww. Eww eww eww.

Dear Word Detective: After hearing someone accused of being “squeamish” because they didn’t like modern blood and gore movies, the word started to buzz around my head like something from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. How odd, I thought. What is a “squeam”? Can one “squeam”? As is often the case, my dictionary came up with a metaphorical Gallic shrug of the shoulders, or “dunno” in modern idiom, so I wonder if you can shed any light on it. — David, Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.

In space, you know, no one can hear you squeam. Hmm. Although it doesn’t object to the lameness of that line, my spellchecker adamantly denies the existence of a verb “to squeam,” which is a shame. I can imagine all sorts of places it would come in handy: emergency rooms, sausage factories and televised awards ceremonies, just for starters. Incidentally, as someone who rigorously avoids the “slasher-horror” movie genre, I’d chalk up my objections to “boredom,” not “sqeamishness.” The best horror movie I’ve seen in the past few years was “The Others,” a truly fascinating, deeply creepy and almost entirely blood-free film. There’s a huge difference between being scary and being merely startling.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “squeamish” as meaning “easily nauseated or sickened; nauseated,” “easily shocked or disgusted,” or “excessively fastidious or scrupulous.” The Oxford English Dictionary adds “distant, reserved, coy, cold” (“A woman of virtue keeps a guard upon her eye, and yet don’t affect to look soure, squeamish, and suspicious,” 1710). “Squeamish” covers a lot of territory and varies with context. While most of us would feel “squeamish” in an operating room, the truly refined, it seems, turn green at the gills when presented with substandard bottle of wine.

“Squeamish” first appeared in print in English in the 15th century, with the spelling “squaymysch” (other spellings since have included “squaimish,” “sweamish,” and the nifty dialect form “skeemish”). The origin of “squeamish” is, strictly speaking, very simple: it’s a modification of the now largely obsolete word “squeamous,” which is about two centuries older in English and meant pretty much the same thing as “squeamish.” That “squeamous,” in turn, came from the Anglo-French “escoymous,” but here we have hit a brick wall, etymologically speaking, because no one knows where “escoymous” came from or exactly what it meant. At all. Not a clue. Game over.

I always feel a bit guilty when I hit this sort of dead-end, although it isn’t really my fault that folks weren’t taking proper lexicographic notes back in the 13th century. So I though I’d make up for it by explaining the origin of “queasy,” a word in the same bilious ballpark as “squeamish,” meaning “nauseated, easily nauseated or causing nausea” and “uneasy, troubled.” Unfortunately, the origins of “queasy,” which also first appeared in the 15th century, are similarly cloudy. The problem with “queasy” is that in its early days it was spelled in a variety of ways, which makes tracing its genealogy difficult. Probably the best candidate for a source of “queasy” is a Scandinavian root meaning “boil” (the blister kind), possibly based on an Old French word meaning “to wound” or “make uneasy.”

So now we have two mysteries, but the good news is that we also have two very useful words.

Or not Toby?

Dear Word Detective: I was just wondering if you could shed some light on the history of the word “toby,” meaning “A drinking mug usually made in the shape of a stout man wearing a large three-cornered hat.” My dictionary says it comes from the name Toby. I looked through your archives and did not see that you have talked about this word as of yet. — Sam West.

All in good time, my readers, and your little dog, too. Speaking of dogs, as I apparently am, I realized when I read your question that for some reason I tend to associate the name “Toby” with small dogs, the kind that yip and snap at your ankles. It turns out that there’s a good reason for that: the small trained dog introduced into the classic Punch and Judy puppet show in the 19th century was named Toby, thus accounting for the traditional popularity of the name for small obnoxious dogs.

Now that we’ve solved my mystery, on to yours. Your dictionary is correct, by the way. The use of “toby” to mean a “novelty” mug of the kind you describe definitely comes from the personal name “Toby,” which is most often a shortened form of “Tobias.”

As slang, “toby” has had several uses in English. The oldest, dating back to the 17th century, was as a popular term for the buttocks, most often found in the phrase “to tickle one’s toby,” meaning to spank or beat that part of the anatomy (“Our gracious Queen Elizabeth tickled their Tobies for them,” 1681). The logic of this use is not entirely clear, but may reflect the use of “Toby” in popular culture as a typical name of a jolly, boisterous, and usually corpulent character (probably influenced by Sir Toby Belch, a character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). The US version of “Toby” as a “type” is a loud, unsophisticated country bumpkin, and “Toby shows,” featuring such characters, were once common on the traveling theater circuit in rural America.

The “toby” mug you’ve encountered was common in the 19th century, and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was usually “in the form of a stout old man wearing a long and full-skirted coat and a three-cornered hat,” i.e., a typical 18th century costume. Given the popular image of “Toby” as a fun-loving, gregarious fellow, the choice of the figure for a slightly kitsch, but very popular, drinking vessel was a natural fit.

Of course, there looms a larger question here, which is how a mug came to be shaped like a person in the first place. In the 18th century it was common to cast mugs in the shape of human figures, especially outlandish characters with grotesque faces. So popular was this fad, in fact, that “mug” (from a Scandinavian root meaning “drinking vessel”) became slang for the human face, a sense we still use in “mug shot” and similar terms. The verb “to mug” came into use meaning “to make a grotesque face” (as in “mugging for the camera”), but also took on the grimmer meaning of “to rob by punching the victim in the face,” and the modern “mugging” was born.

I mean, c’mon: egg plant? That ain’t right.

Dear Word Detective:  When I’m in one of my darker moods, my favorite song is Meat Loaf’s “Life is a lemon and I want my money back.”  Today I began to wonder where this use of the word “lemon” came from.  We use the corresponding word “Zitrone” in the same sense in German, along with the extended phrase “mit Zitronen handeln” (literally, “to deal in lemons”).  Obviously, lemons can be unpleasantly sour, but I could name quite a few things that taste a lot worse.  So, why lemons? — Holger Märtens, Germany.

There are indeed a lot of things that taste worse than lemons.  I would nominate, for example, eggplant, which pegs my personal Yuck-O-Meter (all the way to eleven, in fact).  Why anyone would voluntarily eat that stuff utterly eludes me.  Right now several thousand readers are, of course, shaking their heads and tut-tutting, “That poor deluded boy.  He’s just never had eggplant cooked correctly.  I’ll send him my recipe!”  Please don’t. I already have a wonderful recipe for eggplant, coincidentally the same one recommended by Samuel Johnson for his own least-favorite vegetable:  “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

Lemons have had an image problem pretty much ever since humans began cultivating them.  On the one hand, used as a flavoring, lemons make all sorts of yummy things possible, from lemonade to lemon meringue pie to lemon drop candy.  On the other, lemon juice on its own is acidic, sour and stings like the dickens when it gets in your eyes.  (For some mysterious reason, lemons hate me and attack at every opportunity.)  Very few people sit around munching on lemons, but that’s true of useful flavorings such as garlic and cinnamon as well.  Still, we don’t call a new car that croaks after 500 miles “a garlic,” so there must indeed be something about the lemon.

The word “lemon” comes to us from the Old French “limon,” which was derived from Arabic roots and served as a generic term for citrus fruit in general (which explains how the same root could also give us “lime”).  The use of “lemon” to mean “disappointing result” or “something unwanted” is very old, reflecting the fact that, while useful in cooking, a lemon standing alone is just a lump of sourness with a tough skin to boot.  In Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labours Lost (1598), for instance, one character proclaims, “The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty, Gave Hector a gift …,” to which another puckishly suggests, “A lemon.”

In the mid-19th century, “lemon” was used as a colloquial term for a person of a “tart” disposition, as well as, more significantly for our purposes, slang for a “sucker” or “loser,” a dim person easily taken advantage of.  It has been suggested that this latter use stems from the idea that it is easy to “suck or squeeze the juice out of” such a person (“I don’t know why it is, rich men’s sons are always the worst lemons in creation,” P.G. Wodehouse, 1931).  By 1909, “lemon” was also firmly established in American slang as a term for “something worthless,” especially a broken or useless item fobbed off on an unsuspecting customer.

It’s likely that the current use of “lemon” to mean “something that doesn’t live up to its billing” or “a disappointing purchase” comes from a combination of “lemon” in the “sucker” sense (i.e., the buyer got “taken”) and the much older sense of “lemon” meaning “something undesirable.”

Tee many martoonies.

Dear Word Detective: I just read in an article that “binge” (as in a drinking binge) may come from the Belgian town of Binche. The author of the article apparently doesn’t trust that story himself. The only thing I could come up with through research was that “binge” used to be a dialect word from Northampton. — Alex, Switzerland (Yes, we even read your column here).

Hey, I’ll tell you a secret. Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit lonely I check the access logs for www.word-detective.com to see where my visitors come from. It’s really rather amazing. In just the past hour, in addition to the usual gang of Americans, Canadians and Brits, I’ve had visits from Bangkok, Mumbai, Sri Lanka, and Auckland, New Zealand. Five people in Moldova have visited this month, and I’m not even entirely certain where Moldova is. But it’s nice to know that if I wake up some morning and find myself on Malta I have at least sixteen friends there.

The article you sent along (www.globalpost.com/dispatch/benelux/100217/binche-carnival), about the annual Mardi Gras celebration in Binche, Belgium, is fascinating, and the slideshow that comes with it makes our Mardis Gras in New Orleans look almost sedate. “Mardi Gras” (French for “Fat Tuesday”) is, of course, the name given to celebrations culminating in what is also called Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar. As Lent is a time of fasting and self-denial, Fat Tuesday was traditionally one’s last chance to use up all the fat, butter and other sinful goodies in one’s kitchen — thus the name.

It’s more than halfway through the article, just after a mention of “considerable drinking in the town’s many cafes” during the festivities, that the author ventures to mention that “It’s said that the English word ‘binge’ can be traced to Binche.” And I’d agree that no, the dude doesn’t believe that at all. “It’s said” is a classic journalist’s dodge. It’s actually refreshing to see a reporter decline to declare as absolute truth whatever some Chamber of Commerce has dreamed up to add a little more flapdoodle to the pile. “Binche” may bear a superficial resemblance to “binge,” but there is no connection between the two.

Celebrations of Mardi Gras have been going on in Europe since Medieval times, but “binge” is a relatively recent word in mainstream English, first appearing in print in 1854 meaning “a heavy bout of drinking.” I say “mainstream English” because “binge” was borrowed from the Northampton (UK) dialect verb “to binge,” which meant, appropriately enough, “to soak.” The origin of that dialect “binge” is uncertain.

Although “binge” as a verb was originally used specifically to mean “to drink to excess,” by the 1930s “binge” was being used to mean any kind of out-of-control spree, from eating food (“Marshall Neilan now and then goes on an eating binge,” 1937) to drug use (“The period after … [his] 1981 drug binge was a nightmare,” 1990) to shopping (“Consumers needed the steroids of repeated tax cuts and successive rounds of mortgage-refinancing to sustain their remarkable spending binge,” 2004).

Round and round.

Dear Word Detective: I remember my father using the expression “beltline” to refer to a particular highway in Minneapolis. This was back in the ’50s before any highways encircled a metropolitan area, so it puzzled me then and has since. Are we talking about something that cuts through the middle? Something that wraps around? Or something else? When did the expression start and did it apply to subways or elevated trains at first? Or did it describe highways? — Barney Johnson.

Oh boy, highway nomenclature. I haven’t considered the subject lately, but what people called roads seriously confused me as a child. I grew up within coughing distance of the New England “Thruway” (aka Interstate 95) in Connecticut, but we often spent Sunday afternoons driving on the Merritt “Parkway,” and trips to Ohio usually involved the Pennsylvania “Turnpike.” Here in Central Ohio, people refer to I-70 as “the freeway” (or just “70″), although “freeway” is also applied to the “outerbelt” circling Columbus. (In Washington, D.C., the same sort of “outerbelt” is called “the beltway,” and “inside the beltway” serves as shorthand for the social and political world of DC insiders.)

Most of these terms are fairly easy to decode. “Thruway” (originally “throughway”) for instance, refers to a limited access highway that may or may not charge tolls. A “freeway” is the same thing, “free” referring to freedom of movement, not necessarily freedom from tolls. A “turnpike” definitely extracts tolls from travelers; the “pike” was originally, in the days of horse and carriage traffic, a staff which blocked passage until turned aside when the toll was paid. “Parkways” were originally highways elaborately landscaped with trees and shrubs to give travelers a scenic view to look at before the days of in-car DVD players (my personal nominee for worst idea of the century).

“Beltlines,” however, were developed in the mid-19th century, before the advent of the motor vehicle. They were routes followed within many medium and large cities by horse-drawn or electric trams or railways that connected various areas of the city, facilitating the transport of goods and materials as well as workers. The city of Buffalo, NY, for instance, had a “belt line” railroad, built in the 1880s, that connected nineteen stations around the city to a central terminal where transfers could be made to trains to anywhere in the US. New York City had several horse-drawn tram lines in the 19th century, but in 1887 more than a thousand horses perished in a fire at the Belt Line Railroad Company stable.

Such “belt lines” tended to form a closed loop, like a buckled belt, although not necessarily forming a ring around the edges of the city as modern “outerbelt” highways do. The idea was that a passenger (or cargo load) could board the tram or train at any point on the route and ride the loop as far as was necessary.

I think your father’s use of “beltline” to refer to a specific highway almost certainly came from the fact that the road formed such a closed loop, or something close to it. It may be that the highway actually followed an old “beltline” rail or tram route.

Boom chocka-locka-locka.

Dear Word Detective: I live in North Carolina and “Cackalacky” seems to be a synonym for the old north state (as well as a barbecue sauce.) I was wondering if it originally had meaning or was just a great nonsense word. — Caroline Sunshine.

Ah, North Carolina, the Tar Heel State, otherwise known as the Old North State, both of which are seriously strange nicknames. I had, I must admit, never heard North Carolina referred to as “Cackalacky” before I read your question. I initially suspected that it was, as you suggest, simply “a great nonsense word,” a silly name the locals had invented. After a bit of research, however, I discovered that there is quite a bit more to the story.

The first thing to note is that “Cackalacky” seems to be used as a nickname for both North Carolina and South Carolina. The second, and more productive, thing I’ve learned about “Cackalacky” is that there are a lot of people out there, especially at the University of North Carolina (UNC), trying to figure out where this “Cackalacky” business came from.

In a 2005 posting to ADS-L, the mailing list of the American Dialect Association, Bonnie Taylor-Blake pointed to the work of two UNC faculty members, Paul Jones and Connie Elbe, who have been searching for information on “Cackalacky” (also, according to Taylor-Blake, sometimes seen in the forms Cackalackie, Cackalack, Kakalak, Kakalaka, Cakalacky, Kackalacky, Cakalaka, and others).

There are a number of theories about the origin of “Cackalacky,” but, despite the efforts of folks at UNC, so far no one has been able to pin down its source with any real certainty. Such vagueness is not uncommon in cases of “folk speech,” which may pass from generation to generation by word of mouth for many years without ever being written down. This seems to be especially true in the case of “Cackalacky,” which was apparently completely undocumented in printed form until it was used (in the form “cakalaka”) in the lyrics to a hip-hop song by A Tribe Called Quest in 1991. Since that time, use of the term in hip-hop lyrics and on the internet seems to increased its popularity quite a bit.

One theory about “Cackalacky,” suggested by Glenn Hinson at UNC, traces it to “a capella” gospel groups in the American South in the1930s, who used the rhythmic (but apparently meaningless) chant “clanka lanka” in their songs. This theory seems plausible. Elsewhere, a South Carolina newspaper reported back in 2003 that Page Skelton, the inventor of “Cackalacky” brand hot sauce, believes the word may have come from a combination of “Tsalaki” (pronounced cha-lak-ee), supposedly the Cherokee way to say “Cherokee,” and “cocklaleekie,” a Scottish soup. That theory strikes me as deeply implausible. But both of those theories are preferable to the one that traces “Cackalacky” to “Kakerlake.” which is German for “cockroach” (although you folks down there do have those disturbingly large “palmetto bugs,” which are actually just jumbo cockroaches).

So as it stands right now, the origin of “Cackalacky” remains a mystery. But with the increasing popularity of the term, it’s entirely possible that someone, somewhere, will stumble across some historical material, perhaps an old newspaper or memoir, that puts the matter to rest.

He’s jake, Jim.

Dear Word Detective: I read in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent book, “Team of Rivals,” that after the attack on Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton cabled individuals to tell them that Secretary Seward and his son had been “assassinated” and were gravely hurt. He obviously knew they were not yet dead, so my question is: Did Stanton misuse the word “assassinate,” or have I been wrong all my life in assuming it inherently means the victim has died? — Jeff Driggs.

Well, heck, English is a big language. I’m sure there’s room for both you and Stanton to be right. Incidentally, I had to fire up the old Wikipedia to refresh my memory of what I learned in school about the events of that fateful night. Strictly speaking, we should speak of the “attacks,” plural, since Seward and his son were attacked in Seward’s home by one of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators on the same night in 1865 that Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater. Both Sewards were severely injured, but both survived.

“Assassin,” the noun on which the verb “assassinate” is formed, is one of those words with a story so “colorful” that it turns up sooner or later in nearly every printed venue. I’d be amazed if there weren’t a fortune cookie out there somewhere containing a short-form etymology of “assassin.” Part of the charm of the story for the average Joe is the fact that it involves drugs, thus serving up a frisson of the forbidden. The other hook, unfortunately, is that it plays into an atavistic but depressingly persistent stereotype of the Middle East.

The root of “assassin” is the Arabic word “hashishiyyin” (or “hashshashin”) meaning “hashish eaters,” but also the name of an Ismaili Muslim sect active at the time of the Crusades. Members of this sect were said to use hashish or other hemp products to steel their nerves before attacking the enemy, especially on missions to kill rulers or leaders who opposed the sect. There has long been, however, considerable debate in the scholarly community as to how much of this is true and how much is a Western invention. The name “Hashsashin” itself, in fact, may only be a reference to Hassan ibn al-Sabbah, leader of the sect.

Whatever the truth, the word “assassin” traveled through Europe, arriving in English in the 16th century with the meaning of “one who murders a public official or other politically important person, usually for political motives.” The verb “to assassinate” appeared in English shortly after the noun, with the meaning of “to kill with treacherous violence” (“Brutus and Cassius … conspired to assassinate him,” 1618), and with the same requirement that the target had to be a political or otherwise powerful figure.

But while the core definition of “assassinate” since it first appeared in English has been “to kill,” implying that the victim ends up, y’know, actually dead, there was, for a time, some wiggle room in the word. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists a secondary definition of “assassinate” as meaning “to endeavor to kill by treacherous violence; to attack by an assassin,” and lists two citations from printed sources, one from 1683 (“William of Orange was twice Assassinated, and lost his Life the Second time”) and the other from 1706. The OED labels this usage as now “obsolete,” which is certainly is. But for at least a few centuries, including in Stanton’s day, it was apparently possible to survive one’s own assassination, and Seward did.

Those tiny screams you hear are my brain cells dying.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve started to wonder what the famous explorer Marco Polo has to do with children’s water games in US. I’ve seen several American TV shows where children or sometimes childlike adults lounge or play around a pool shouting “Marco” and some other answers “Polo.” What gives? — Topi Linkala, Finland.

That’s a darn good question. I tend to fall behind in my knowledge of what the childlike adults around here are up to, probably because I don’t watch enough TV, although I do my best. I even tried watching parts of the Super Bowl this year. But there must have been something wrong with the TV, because what I saw was insanely boring, just a bunch of guys in Spandex pedal-pushers running in circles and falling down. If those helmets are intended to prevent brain damage, they really ought to consider giving them to the spectators.

You probably didn’t realize this when you asked it, but there are actually three parts to your question, which are are Marco Polo, polo, and Marco Polo again.

Marco Polo was, of course, a famous traveler, born in Venice, who, with his father and uncle, wandered through Asia, eventually, in 1275, ending up in China in the court of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, with whom he became best buds. Upon his return to Venice twenty years later, Marco Polo wound up in jail in Genoa, where his dictated his account of his voyages. Published as “The Travels of Marco Polo,” the book was enormously popular and supposedly inspired Christopher Columbus to light out for Asia.

There is, however, absolutely no connection between Marco Polo and “polo,” a game played by teams on horseback, the object being to hit a small ball through the other team’s goal with a long-handled mallet. Invented in China but developed in Persia, polo is considered the quintessential ruling-class sport (which is why designer Ralph Lauren picked “Polo” as his brand), but it’s actually a very exciting game. The word “polo” comes from the Balti Tibetan word “polo” meaning “ball,” and first appeared in English when the game arrived in England in the late 19th century. This “polo” is relevant to your question because there is a related game called “water polo,” played with a much larger ball in swimming pools. Water polo does not involve horses but would, no doubt, be more interesting if it did.

“Water polo” is not, however, the source of the mysterious “Marco-Polo” call-and-response you have seen on TV. That is part of an entirely different pool game called, for reasons no one has ever plausibly explained, “Marco Polo,” essentially a very wet version of Blind Man’s Buff. There is no ball involved. The person who is deemed “It” closes his or her eyes and calls out “Marco,” to which the other players must reply “Polo,” thus giving auditory clues as to their locations in the pool. “It” then attempts to catch and touch one of them, whereupon a new “It” is born and the game continues until the entire company is overcome by gnawing existential dread and lights out for Asia. Or something.

So there you have it. Someone, somewhere, actually invented a game more insipid than football. Might be fun to try it with horses, though.

Play it again, schmuck.

Dear Word Detective: Could you tell me anything about the saying “this room looks like a hoorah’s nest with the hoorah gone,” or something like that? — Birdy.

You know what’s scary? When someone asks you a question about a phrase, and you know that you’ve heard the phrase before, but you can’t remember any of the details. So you do what any normal earthling would do and plug it into Google (motto: “We Have Replaced Your Brain. Why Fight It?”), and hit Search. And then the first result that pops up is a column you wrote about the phrase many years ago, followed by a bunch of people quoting what you wrote. I have the horrible feeling that if I were to look up “feeb” in the dictionary there’d be a picture of me.

The phrase you’ve encountered is “hurrah’s nest,” and it means something in a state of great disorder or raucous confusion, whether it’s a bedroom in chaos or a crowd rioting in the street. “Hurrah’s nest” first appeared in the US, in the early 19th century (“Everything was pitched about in grand confusion. There was a complete hurrah’s nest,” 1840). The question, of course, is what a “hurrah” might be, and why its nest is always such a mess.

The “hurrah” part of the phrase is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the same “hurrah” we shout when our team wins, an exclamation of excitement, approval and joy at victory. (The form “hooray” is perhaps more common today, but it’s the same word.) “Hurrah” can also be used as a noun to mean a great hubbub or fanfare, such as greets a rock star stepping on stage. It can also, however, mean a scene of great confusion or disorder.

“Hurrah” dates back to the late 17th century, and although most exclamations of joy, anger, pain and surprise (such as “Ouch!” or “Hey!”) have no intrinsic meaning, “hurrah” may actually have a bit of semantic history to it. We know that “hurrah” is a modification of the exclamation “huzzah,” itself about a century older. “Hurrah” was said to be a favored battle cry of soldiers in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), and “huzzah” was apparently popular among sailors of the period. Both of these words may have been strongly influenced by the Middle High German words “hurr” and “hurra,” cries meaning “move forward” or “hurry,” used by hunters pursuing game as well as by soldiers attacking the enemy. There is also some evidence that “huzzah” is related to the Scots word “heize,” meaning “lift or hoist,” and was originally used as an exhortation to sailors hoisting sails.

You’ll notice the absence of anything in that history likely to build itself a nest, but there’s a simple explanation for “hurrah’s nest.” Given the use of “hurrah” to mean “a state of complete confusion,” it’s a short but playful leap to imagine a “hurrah” as some sort of great, messy animal with terrible housekeeping skills. Thus the mess left behind by a loud and chaotic “hurrah” might be said to be a “hurrah’s nest.”

We need a national Cone of Silence.

Dear Word Detective: I hope it’s not too heavy a subject for you to weigh in on, but I’d like to know why someone “weighs in” on an issue. I’ve read of the term relating to boxers getting weighed immediately prior to a fight, to confirm their eligibility to fight in a particular weight class. I find that unconvincing, since the fighters are weighing in prior to the competition, but when pundits “weigh in,” they’re already participating in the battle of opinion. — Paul Mailman.

Ah yes, pundits and the battle of opinion in the marketplace of ideas. Pardon me for sounding cynical. I used to love to argue, or to listen to an argument, on almost any topic. Best band, best president, best brand of mustache wax, it didn’t matter. But no more. I think I lost my will to wrangle about the time that “pundits” began talking (or shouting) over each other on cable TV news shows and the obnoxious habit spread into the general population. A lot of people apparently miss the fistfights at recess in fourth grade, but I’ll pass, thanks.

It’s true that “to weigh in” is frequently used today to mean “to join a discussion or debate already in progress and express one’s opinion.” Back when I watched the TV shoutfests, the host would often ask a reticent member of the assembled punditude if he or she wished to “weigh in on the subject.” (I’m sure it was supposed to seem courteous, but I always got the sense that it really meant “Hey, we’re paying you to scream at these people. Get to work.”)

Incidentally, inasmuch as “pundit” comes from the Hindi word “payndit,” meaning “learned man, teacher,” isn’t it way past time to be looking for a new term for those people on TV?

The basic sense of “weigh” when it first appeared in English was “to lift, hold up or carry” (a meaning still found in “weigh anchor”), and the sense of “to measure the heaviness of” and its derivatives were later developments. The ancient source of “weigh” was the Indo-European root “wegh” (to carry or move), which also produced the Latin “vehere” meaning the same thing, which eventually gave us such useful English words as “vehicle” and “vector.”

“Weigh in” in the sense of “be weighed in preparation for entering an athletic contest” first appeared in print in the early 19th century. The first citation (1805) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) refers not to boxing, but to weighing jockeys before horse races. The earliest citations for the boxing sense come from the early 20th century. By the late 1880s, “weigh in” was being used to mean “to produce something noteworthy” (“The journal ‘weighs in’ with a prismatic Christmas number,” 1885), and by 1909 “weigh in” was being used to mean, as the OED puts it, “to bring one’s weight or influence to bear; to enter a forceful contribution to a discussion, etc.” (“I want you to ask the Chief Rabbi to weigh in,” G.B. Shaw).

It seems clear that in this use of “weigh in” the contest, so to speak, is already underway. But I think this use of “weigh in” reflects a combination of the “prepare to enter a discussion” sense and the “bring one’s weight to bear” sense of the term. To ask someone to “weigh in” on a topic is to acknowledge that the person has some “weight,” i.e., expertise in, or influence on, the subject. After all, it makes no sense to ask a “lightweight” to “weigh in” on important matters of state or public policy (unless, of course, you’re running a TV talk show, in which case Ashton Kutcher will do just fine).