And where it flew, I have no clue.

Dear Word Detective: I was wondering if there was any relation between the word “quiver” as a holster for arrows and “quiver” as a shaking of the body from being scared or cold. — Graydon.

Whoa, synchronicity city, dude. I was just, this evening, watching a rerun of the Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon was playing Wii archery with Leonard. In the course of the game he mentioned that his father taught him to shoot a bow and now he has olfactory flashbacks of Kmart bourbon whenever he plays the Wii version. I don’t think Kmart actually sells bourbon, but I’ve never actually looked, so they may. Anyway, I was told I would like this show, and I sometimes do, but I have to watch it with closed captions on and the sound turned way down  because the laugh-track makes me seasick. Those people will laugh at anything.

This is all relevant because, as a nod to authenticity, Sheldon insisted that Leonard mime the action of pulling each imaginary arrow from an imaginary quiver slung across his back before each shot. Having been deeply into archery for a few months as a yoot, as they say in Brooklyn, I found this quite believable. I had a weirdly medieval suede quiver apparently designed to evoke fantasies of being a pint-sized Robin Hood, which I definitely wasn’t.

Of the two “quivers,” this is the older, a noun meaning “a case, usually tubular, for holding arrows.” It first appeared in English in the early 14th century, adapted from the Anglo-Norman “quivere,” from the Old French “quivre.” Further back are Germanic roots that also produced the English word “cocker,” which is now obsolete but in the early 8th century appeared meaning the same thing as “quiver” does today. In addition to its literal use in the world of archery, “quiver” is commonly used figuratively to mean “repository, resources or collection,” a metaphorical “arsenal,” or simply “bag of tricks” (“The remaining S&P companies … keep their profit outlook under wraps, and this is the information that analysts ultimately have in their quiver,” Barron’s, 2011).

“Quiver” in this “arrow case” sense can also be used as a verb meaning “to put arrows in a quiver,” but the other, more common, “quiver” verb is utterly unrelated to arrows. This “quiver” first appeared in English in the late 15th century meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it, “to shake, tremble, or vibrate with a slight rapid motion … to make a movement of this kind as an expression of cold, rage, fear, etc.” The verb “to quiver” can also be used transitively to mean “to cause to vibrate or tremble” or, more often, “to produce in or by quivering; to utter or give out in a trembling voice” (OED). This “speak or sing with a shaky voice” sense covers “quivering” both from shock or fear (“‘No!’ quivered out poor Mary, scarcely conscious that she spoke,” 1849) or simply because your voice is not ready for prime  time (“The middle-aged, stubble-bearded piano player in the red jacket quivering out the ‘song’ from Philadelphia in a wimpy falsetto,” 1994).

The origin of the “shaking” kind of “quiver” is uncertain, but it’s likely that it arose as a variant of the somewhat earlier “to quaver,” also meaning “to tremble or quiver,” especially trilling in one’s voice or in playing a musical instrument (“He quavers in his musical Aires melodiously,” 1665). “Quaver” is based on the verb “to quave,” dating to the 13th century and meaning, predictably, “to shake or quake.” At this point the trail runs cold, and the origin of “quave” is a mystery, although it may be related in a remote, foggy fashion to the verb “to quake,” which would make sense.

I can’t work the lobster shift ’cause I’m allergic.

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of calling a shift of work a “trick”? I grew up in a railroad town and always heard “trick,” but never heard a reason why we called them that. — Rich Hileman.

That’s an interesting question. Actually it’s two interesting questions, because you defined “trick” in terms of being synonymous with “shift,” another somewhat odd term for a period of time someone is scheduled to work. I remember that the first time I ever heard “shift” used in that sense I was quite young, and assumed that it had something to do with the gearshift on a car, perhaps in reference to driving to work. This was, I should add, at a time when automatic transmissions were not the default on cars. I actually learned to drive on a 1968 Pontiac GTO with a four-speed transmission. I had no idea at the time that I was driving what would eventually be considered the quintessential American “muscle car.” I was just trying to avoid trees and crossing guards, not an easy task as I was learning on icy roads in the dead of a New England winter.

“Shift” first appeared as a verb in Old English (as “sciftan”) from Germanic roots with the basic sense of “to divide” or “to arrange.” In English the verb “to shift” originally meant “to put in order; to arrange,” but also “to apportion; to divide up.” It wasn’t until the 14th century that “to shift” developed the meanings “to change” or “to move” that underlie most senses of the verb we use today. As a noun appearing in the 15th century, “shift” carried the sense of “a movement to do something; a beginning” as well as that of “a share; an assigned portion.” This noun “shift” went of to acquire a broad range of meanings, from “a clever artifice” to “a change,” with dozens of sub-senses. One was “shift” meaning “initiative” or “gumption,” the lack of which leads to a person being called “shiftless.” Another was “a change of clothes,” which gave us the kind of formless dress called a “shift,” originally a garment both men and women would  put on after changing out of something a bit fancier.

In the 18th century, “shift” in this “change” sense came to be used to mean each of the successive crops rotated by farmers to maintain their land (corn one year, then “shift” to wheat the next, etc.), and that “shift” was soon also used to mean a change of horses or of workmen at a task. By the early 19th century, “shift” had come into general use in its modern meaning of “the period of time a person is scheduled to work.” So the “shift” you work is actually named for the fact that the task is “shifted” to you from the worker who preceded you.

“Trick” is a little bit trickier. The noun “trick” first appeared in the 15th century, from the Late Latin “tricari,” meaning “to deceive; to shuffle,” and pretty much from day one meant “a deceit, swindle or prank” (“If any one plays their tricks upon me, they shall pay for their fun,” 1796). “Trick” did, however, develop a remarkable number of other senses. In the 16th century, “trick” was used to mean “a particular habit, quality or custom,” usually one frowned upon by society. This sense is most often heard today in speaking of someone who is “up to his old tricks,” i.e., misbehaving in a personally characteristic manner.

“Trick” was also used in a related sense to mean simply “a pattern of expression or behavior” as in a style of dress or personal habits (“He detected … even the trick of his walk,” Bulwer-Lytton, 1846) . This broad sense of “trick” meaning “something one does routinely” produced, in the mid-17th century, the use of “trick” as naval slang for “the period a man is assigned to duty at the helm of a ship.” And that “time at the helm” sense eventually gave us “trick” in the more general sense of a “shift” at any job. This “trick” also expanded, in the 1930s, to serve as underworld slang for a sentence served in prison (“After serving a few tricks in the penitentiary they might turn State’s evidence,” 1939).

Travels with Trifey.

Dear Word Detective:  For many years, I have worked with juvenile delinquents at various institutions in Ohio. They used to use the word “trifey” as a synonym for “dirty” (as in “a person gets lice by being trifey, don’t he?”), but now it just seems to be an all-purpose insult. Moreover, it seems that they are conflating it with the word “trifling,” only not pronouncing the “g.” An online urban dictionary stated that it originally meant “slutty” but I have not heard it used that way. I read somewhere that the word may have derived from “treyf” (sometimes spelled “traife”), a Yiddish word meaning “un-kosher.” Can you tell me if this is the correct etymology, and if not what is? — Emily Coulson.

Read it somewhere, eh? You weren’t living in New York City back around 1996, were you? I ask because back then I was writing a column for the Daily News called City Slang in which I answered questions about, well, city slang. And I happened to write an item about the word “trife,” which I still have on my computer, which is amazing. This may mean I need a new computer.

Anyway, the good news is that I actually remembered writing that column as soon as I read your question, which should prove to certain people that I am not enfeebled, despite the fact that I sometimes leave a dog or two outside after a walk. So I’m glad this question came round again. I just hope it doesn’t mean I’m about to be inundated with a new wave of questions about “the third word ending in ‘gry’.” If that doesn’t ring a bell, please don’t ask.

It’s apparent from your explanation that the “trife” a reader asked me about in 1996 and the “trifey” you’ve encountered are, in fact, the same word. At that time I wrote that “In current hip hop and rap slang, an action or thing that is ‘trife’ (rhymes with ‘wife’) is bad or degrading in an especially low way. Cheating on your income taxes may be wrong, but ripping off your friends or hurting your family is truly ‘trife.’” The term seems to have appeared in rap slang in the 1980s, but the earliest example I’ve found so far is from the song “Mecca and the Soul Brother” (Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, 1991): “Okay, you wanna act trife and flip the script / With your Wonderama drama slash coma riff.” (“Flip the script” is a great slang phrase meaning “reverse course, change your mind, turn the tables, do the unexpected.”)

At the time I first wrote about “trife,” I noted that its origin was very uncertain, but that the source might well be “the Yiddish word ‘trayf’ (rhymes with ‘safe’), used to describe food that is not Kosher and thus forbidden.  In a broader sense, ‘trayf’ is applied to anything thought to be wrong or harmful, from racy movies to shady business deals.” The word “trayf” (which is also spelled “trefa,” “trifa,” “treyf,” “traife” and a few dozen other ways) comes from the Hebrew “taraf,” meaning literally “to tear or rend,” and originally referred to the flesh of an animal that had been killed by a wild beast, i.e., the roadkill of the day, not slaughtered in accordance with the dictates of Jewish religious law.

No sooner had my column on “trife” been published, however, than I received a note from Dr. Angela Taylor, then at Rutgers University and now an authority on criminal justice at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, who suggested that “Rather than stemming from the word ‘trayf,’ it is more likely that trife is an abbreviation of the word ‘trifling,’ which is in common use among African-Americans. Especially among the young, ‘trifling’ has acquired a meaning that goes beyond its dictionary definition (i.e., petty, unimportant) to describe negative behavior that is beyond the pale.”

So is “trife” (or “trifey”) an expanded sense of “trayf” that made the leap into the hip-hop world of the 1980s, or a greatly expanded use of “trifling” to mean “very bad, dishonest, unpleasant, dirty”?  It’s impossible to say, although I tend to lean towards the “triflng” theory simply because it involves a linear expansion of a common word and not a radical leap over cultural boundaries. Of course, it’s also possible that both theories are somewhat true; “trayf” is not an obscure term in urban areas, even to non-Jews, and its expanded sense of “no good, disgusting, wrong” makes that one little word very useful.

The Armchair Ornithologist.

[Note: as will shortly become obvious, this column was written last December.]

Dear Word Detective:  What is a “smalas”? Jules Verne uses it in “An Antarctic Mystery” (Chapter X) when looking at a flock of penguins. As he usually uses “stupid” in front of the word “penguin,” I’m assuming it’s derogatory. All I can come up with is a reference to the entourage that follows an Arab sheik where ever he goes, so I don’t really get what Jules means. Can you help? — Rose Hopwood.

That’s a darn good question. Speaking of penguins, something occurred to me recently while I was lying insensate in front of the TV, hypnotized by the non-stop barrage of holiday shopping ads. It’s a good thing I don’t have any money, or I’d be up to my eyebrows in iPhones, iPads, iPads for Pets, iBlenders and iPlumberSnakes. Anyway, what’s up with Santa Claus and the penguins that have begun to appear with him in many commercials? Because there are, in fact, no penguins, none, nada, at the North Pole. Penguins live mostly in Antarctica, at the other end of the freaking planet. Hmmph. When it comes to Santa Claus, I expect zoological accuracy. Now about those reindeer…

Thanks for asking about a word that appears in a public-domain book. It’s very dispiriting when someone asks a question about something they found in a book to which my only access involves ponying up $25 to Amazon. But “An Antarctic Mystery” is available freely on the internet.

Verne certainly seems to be out of step with our modern adoration of penguins. As you note, it’s rare to find a mention of them in his 1897 book without that pejorative adjective nearby (“These stupid birds, in their yellow and white feathers, with their heads thrown back and their wings like the sleeves of a monastic habit, look, at a distance, like monks in single file walking in procession along the beach,” Chapter I). One doesn’t have to be an ornithologist to find that level of antipathy toward an innocent little bird weird, and it’s even weirder given the fact that Verne had never been anywhere near Antarctica (or even the southern Indian Ocean, the setting of the story) when he wrote the book.

In any case, the relevant passage in Chapter X describes the penguins’ entirely understandable reaction to the approach of Verne’s protagonist: “Whole ‘smalas’ of penguins, standing motionless in interminable rows, brayed their protest against the invasion of an intruder — I allude to myself.”

By “smalas” Verne apparently means “large group, crowd,” and his placement of the term in quotation marks could be taken as an indication that it is a zoological term or what James Lipton (author of the wonderful collection of such terms “An Exaltation of Larks”) called a “term of venery,” such as “pride of lions” or “murder of crows.” But Verne’s use of “smalas” is an extended sense of a term he had no doubt picked up from adventure books himself, and its origin has as little to do with penguins as Verne himself did.

You won’t find “smalas” in an English dictionary because it’s French, and in that language a “smala” or “smalah” is simply an “entourage,” a group of people who routinely accompany a person of power or prestige. In Hollywood, for instance, a famous actor’s “smala” would probably consist of several childhood friends, a few assistants, a bodyguard or two, a broker and a botox artist. Here at Word Detective World Headquarters, my “smala” seems to consist largely of cats, though I do have two dogs on call in case the UPS guy shows up.

The root of “smala” in French is the Arabic word “zmalah,” meaning “tribe,” which originally meant the large retinue accompanying a sheik or other leader on a journey across the desert. Such a group would include other nobility, a contingent of soldiers, and a complete household staff (cooks, servants, etc.). Non-human traveling companions in the “zmalah” routinely included squadrons of camels, of course, but also flocks of sheep and enough furniture and knicknacks to fill a Pottery Barn. Not your usual weekend camping trip, in other words.

Verne’s use of “smala” to mean simply “herd” or “large group” is a bit of a stretch, but by Chapter X he must have pretty much exhausted his thesaurus of terms for lots of birds. And using an exotic term like “smalas” also adds a soupçon of authenticity to a story written by a guy who wouldn’t have known a penguin if it had, justifiably, bitten him.

Trust me.

Dear Word Detective:  I’ve got two questions for you: 1) where did the phrase “beyond a shadow of a doubt” come from, and 2) which is more correct, “beyond a shadow of a doubt” or “without a shadow of a doubt”? I believe the latter is not right, maybe because doubt probably casts a long shadow no matter what, so you want to be beyond that shadow. I’ve been hearing the “without” version on stupid late-night infomercials. — P.J.S. Hutchinson.

Hey, I love infomercials. I saw a weirdly fascinating one for a vacuum cleaner the other day. It’s a cheap imitation Dyson, and they spent the first few minutes lavishly praising the real Dyson and its supposedly awesome virtues. It could have been an unusually informative Dyson commercial. Suddenly, even though we own two elderly but functional Sears vacuum cleaners, I wanted a Dyson. But then they pointed out, rather bluntly, “Let’s face it. You’re in no position to spend $600 on an awesome vacuum cleaner, so you might as well buy ours.” Thanks, guys, I feel poorer already.

“Beyond a shadow of a doubt” and similar phrases mean “absolutely true, without any possibility of negation” applied to a statement of fact.  As such, “beyond a shadow of a doubt” doesn’t work well with subjective statements of preference, taste, or emotional state, and announcing that “I am, beyond a shadow of a doubt, happier with my cheapo plastic vacuum than you will ever be with your dumb old Dyson” is unlikely to be accepted by listeners. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt” also has no place in a courtroom (except as hyperbolic rhetoric), where the standard in US criminal trials is usually that the defendant must be found guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” a lower hurdle than “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Just when “beyond a shadow of a doubt” first appeared is hard to pin down, but the equivalent “without doubt” (meaning “absolutely true”) appeared in the early 16th century, and “shadow of a doubt” was popular in the 19th century. “Doubt,” of course, basically means “uncertainty” and comes ultimately from the Latin “dubitare,” meaning “to waver in opinion.” “Doubt” is also related to the word “dubious,” which can mean both “full of doubt” (“Bob was dubious about his chances of surviving the camping trip”) and “of uncertain outcome; questionable” (“The dubious land deal backfired and Jim landed in jail”).

The key part of “shadow of a doubt,” however, is “shadow.” Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary in its most basic literal sense as “Comparative darkness, especially that caused by interception of light; a tract of partial darkness produced by a body intercepting the direct rays of the sun or other luminary,” our modern “shadow” first appeared in the 13th century from the same Germanic roots that gave us “shade.”

Apart from that literal “you’re standing in my light” sense, “shadow” has acquired a slew of figurative meanings over the past few centuries. A “shadow” can be a person who closely (and sometimes surreptitiously) follows (“shadows”) us, a weak or vague version or vestige of something or someone (“a shadow of the star he once was”), a sense of gloom, an emotional impediment (“Bob’s accident cast a shadow over their friendship”), the stubble of a beard on a man’s face (“five o’clock shadow”), or the influence or proximity of a person, place or thing (“His years in the shadow of his more famous brother were spent in the shadows of the Rockies, which he loathed”).

The use of “shadow” to mean a “dim vestige” or “remnant” of something once grand mentioned above leads us to the “shadow” in “shadow of doubt.” Here “shadow” means “a small amount, a trace or hint” of something, as opposed to something solid or substantial. Thus the “shadow” in “shadow of a doubt” should not be taken too literally, as if doubt itself were casting a shadow from under which one must step in order to be trusted. It’s more the sense that the “shadow of a doubt” is a just a tiny hint, an inexpressible hunch, that something that seems true might be less than absolutely true.

Given that we’re talking a metaphorical “shadow” twice-removed from that “blocking the light” sense, the distinction between “beyond a shadow of a doubt” and “without a shadow of a doubt” is nearly meaningless. “Beyond” does evoke a process of trust or belief gradually increasing to the point of complete certainty, but in the end “beyond a shadow” and “without a shadow” describe the same state of trustworthiness, and both phrases are considered “correct.”

What ails you.

Dear Word Detective:  I always wondered where the word “mulligrubs” came from. I heard my grandparents use it once, and upon a bit of research it turns out that it is also a TV series. I would have to guess that it comes from French, but I honestly have no clue. — Max.

“Mulligrubs” are new to me, but they sound delicious. Actually, come to think of it, I think I vaguely remember a TV commercial for them. Suburban family dinner table, Mom waves a ladle full of something that seems to be moving and says, “More mulligrubs, Bobby?” Next scene is Bobby in Mexico guzzling a mason jar of tequila and mumbling, “The horror, the horror.”

There actually is a creature called a “mully-grub,” at least in Australia. It’s a kind of grub that feeds on coarse grain, and the “mully” part is an old English word meaning “dusty or  mealy.” “Mully-grub” is also used as a term of abuse (“Oh! a plague rat tha! Ya mulligrub Gurgin!” 1746). The “gurgin” in that quote, incidentally, would today be spelled “gurgeon,” and also means “coarse flour”; the grub in question often goes by the full name “mully-grub-gurgeon.” The Australian TV series “Mulligrubs,” aimed at preschool children, apparently took its name from these cute little critters.

None of that, however, has much (if anything) to do with the “mulligrubs” your grandparents probably meant. Those “mulligrubs” (always in the plural form) are a state of depression or low spirits (also known at various times as “the dumps,” “the blues,” “the doldrums” and, of course, “the mubble fubbles,” which I am not making up). The “mulligrubs” can also be simply a bout of crankiness or a bad mood (“When any of the brothers had the mooligrubs or sullens, she would tell him she would whip him,” 1933).

But wait! There’s more! The “mulligrubs” can also mean gastric distress ranging from a bout of indigestion to a severe stomach ache or worse (“I had the 24-hour mulligrubs last night,” 1973).

“Mulligrubs” first appeared in print in the late 16th century, and its origin is considered “uncertain.” But there’s a good chance that it’s related to the earlier (15th century) word “megrim,” which first meant simply “a severe headache,” but later took on the same meaning of  “depression, low spirits” as “mulligrubs.” The roots of “megrim,” thankfully, are a bit more certain than those of “mulligrubs.” It’s simply an Anglicized version of the Middle French “migraine.”

“Mulligrubs” is fairly common as a folk term in both Britain and the US, and, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), it’s most popular in the southern US. Alternate spellings include “mollygrooms,” “mollygrubs,” “muddigrubs,” “mullygrubs,” and “mullygrumps.”

An interesting notation in the DARE entry for “mulligrubs” compares that word to the disease known as “the collywobbles,” which sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss, but apparently is just the “mulligrubs” by an even weirder name. The term “collywobbles” is thought to have originated as a folk rendition of “cholera morbus,” a 19th century medical term for gastro-intestinal disease that resembled cholera but lacked cholera’s epidemic punch and fatality rate. The “collywobbles” would today be more accurately called “gastroenteritis” in most cases. DARE suggests that “collywobbles” might also have been influenced by the words “colic” (severe pain in the belly) and “wobbles,” which the “collywobbles” would definitely give you.

Don’t hunker, hanker!

Dear Word Detective:  I’ve been learning to tie knots in my old age just for fun. My wife is learning knitting and I realized that that craft is essentially serial knot tying. Are “knit” and “knot” versions of the same word? — Bruce Brantley.

That sounds like fun. Good, cheap fun, which is, of course, not what this economy needs. I want you two to put down your ropes and yarn this instant and go buy something you don’t want or need. How about a couple of those blanket things you wear, the ones that make you look like a giant Ewok? Home doughnut makers are big this year, and several companies are offering vacuum cleaner attachments for dogs. Dogs just love being vacuumed. Velcro denture tape? Solar-powered beer maker? Talking screwdriver? I bought five of those, and they’re awesome.

Never mind. You guys just keep knitting and knotting, and I’ll sit here musing over what a weird word “vacuum” is. OK, back to work. “Knot” and “knit” aren’t exactly versions of the same word, but they are closely related.

“Knot” is the more basic of the words, although it’s not really possible to say it came first because both words are so old. “Knot” first appeared in Old English with the meaning, still the primary one today, of “an intertwining of cords, ropes, etc., made in order to fasten something together or attach something to another object.” In Old English “knot” was “cnotta,” which came from Old Germanic roots, specifically “knutton,” to which we will return shortly. The general meanings of these words was “knot” as we use it today, but there are indications that a bit further back the word may have originally meant “lump” or “knob,” which makes sense since, if you tie a knot in a rope, you have indeed created a sort of lump.

Apart from its literal uses, especially in the names of the dizzying variety of knots invented over the centuries, “knot” has been used in a variety of extended and figurative uses. One biggie is described by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) thus: “A piece of knotted string fastened to the log-line, one of a series fixed at such intervals that the number of them that run out while the sand-glass is running indicates the ship’s speed in nautical miles per hour; hence, each of the divisions so marked on the log-line, as a measure of the rate of motion of the ship (or of a current, etc.).” Modern ships do not, of course, carry sand-glasses or actual log lines (a rope attached to a small log of wood), but their speed (and that of the wind at sea) is still measured in “knots” (and “knots per hour” is, of course, redundant).

We also use “knot” to mean “a lump,” especially in a muscle or the like, a stressful situation is said to “tie us up in knots,” and the “knot” of a problem is the central point of contention. The most famous “knot” in historical mythology was the Gordian Knot, tied by King Gordius of Phrygia. Legend had it that whoever untied the complex knot would conquer Asia; Alexander the Great supposedly took a bold shortcut and cut through it with his sword. To “cut the Gordian knot” thus means to solve a problem with creative, decisive (and possibly not quite sporting) action.

“Knit,” as I mentioned above, also first appeared in Old English (as “cnyttan”), and also comes from Germanic roots, the same that produced “knot,” branching off from “knot” somewhere back around that Old Germanic “knutton.” The original meaning of “knit” in English was “to tie in or with a knot,” and people would say “knit a knot” as we say “tie a knot.” The modern sense of “form a close texture by interweaving loops of yarn or twine” dates back to the early 16th century. The tight weave of knitted fabric led to the use of “knit” to mean “draw closely together, make firm; concentrate or make compact” or “to grow closely together” as a broken bone eventually “knits” as it heals. “Knit” can also mean “to mend,” as Shakespeare famously noted in Macbeth (“Sleepe that knits up the ravel’d Sleeve of Care,” 1616). Bees clustering in a tight mass are said to “knit,” and when we are worried or angry, we “knit our brows” as our facial muscles tense. Personally, I’ve found that happens mostly when I watch TV news or read the internet. Or think too much.

Of course “knitting” with yarn is famous for its calming effects, so perhaps I just need to follow your wife’s example and knit a few mittens and scarves for the cats. But I’m still gonna keep my talking screwdrivers for company.

 Peak experience.

Dear Word Detective:  I have just recently discovered your column by virtue of being gifted your book and became an instant fan. Perhaps you can help me suss out the mystery behind one of my favorite songs? Shortly before his death Warren Zevon released an album including a song titled “MacGillycuddy’s Reeks,” which a quick Googling reveals to be a mountain range in Ireland. However, “reeks” seems only to refer to offensive odors rather than scenic hills. How, if at all, are these related? — Will Voorhies.

Thanks. I’m an instant fan of your first sentence, because your use of “gift” as a verb is going to drive the Usage Cops nuts. But when they come banging on your door, just point out that “gift” has been used as a verb since the 16th century by writers, including heavy hitters such as Henry Fielding and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“The world must love and fear him Whom I gift with heart and hand,” 1844). Warren Zevon is on my short list of folks I really wish were still around, a list that also includes Hunter Thompson, Carl Sagan, Phil Ochs and Abbie Hoffman. Oh well. And I’ve always thought that history would have been different had Buddy Holly lived longer. I’m fairly certain he could have stopped the Beach Boys.

There are actually three “reeks” in English. The oldest, which first appeared in Old English, is “reek” as a noun meaning “a bad or noxious smell” and, as a verb, “to stink, to strongly emit a noxious odor.” Both the noun and the verb derive from ancient proto-Germanic roots, but followed very complex and twisting routes into English. The noun “reek,” for instance, comes from slightly different roots than the verb “to reek.” In any case, the original sense of “reek” centered on smoke from something burning (and the verb meant “to emit smoke”), but our modern “reek” covers nearly anything that smells very foul, even figuratively (“I’m certain he’s miserable and lonely. Dunwood House reeks of commerce and snobbery and all the things he hated most,” E.M. Forster, 1907).

We can treat the second kind of “reek” as a rest stop, because it’s an obscure noun meaning “seaweed” and it’s been obsolete since the 17th century.

That brings us to “reek” as found in “MacGillycuddy’s Reeks” on Zevon’s 2002 album “My Ride’s Here.” This “reek” is an Irish English noun meaning “a hill or mountain.” The title of the song refers to a striking mountain range in County Kerry, in the southwest corner of the Republic of Ireland. According to Wikipedia (caveat lector, as usual, but they do have some nice pictures of the range), MacGillycuddy’s Reeks was named for a clan that lived there, Mac Giolla Mochuda, which was eventually Anglicised to MacGillycuddy.

The “reeks” part of the name of the range does not refer to the smell of the mountains, which is probably quite nice, heather and all sorts of flowers and whatnot. This “reek” is an Irish form of the more familiar English word “rick,” meaning “a pile of something.” One again, things get a bit confusing here, word-history-wise, but it appears that both the English “rick” and the Old Irish form “cruach” (which became “reek”) came from the same Indo-European root (which also produced the equivalent “rook” in Dutch, “rauk” in Norwegian, and “rok” in Swedish).

In any case, “rick” first appeared in Old English meaning “a stack of corn, hay, etc.,” especially one formed into a neat shape and thatched for protection from the weather. “Ricks” in farmers’ fields were long a common sight in Britain, and provided impromptu shelter to travelers, fugitives, and the merely hopelessly lost in many novels (“That night she took refuge from the Samaritan … under a farmer’s rick,” Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1865). In the US, a “rick” usually means a stack of wood cut to uniform measure (four feet high by eight feet long, according to the Oxford English Dictionary).

By the 17th century, all this hay and wood notwithstanding, “rick” had come into use in a more general sense to mean simply a pile of anything (“Mr. Bass … had seen the animal scratching among the dry ricks of sea-weed thrown up upon the shores,” 1807), although it seems most often used in reference to a pile of something deliberately piled and stored for later use (“The tubers stored in these houses are carefully assorted and sacked, and the sacks piled in ricks,” 1913).

Lastly, since someone is bound to ask, “suss” as you used it to mean “figure out” originated as police slang in the UK around 1953. It comes from “suspect” and originally meant “to suspect a person of a crime,” but it broadened to meaning “to imagine or surmise,” finally reaching its modern slang sense of “to understand or explain.”

Buckets of hogwash?

One of the things that make this column fun to write is the nearly instantaneous responses I get from readers. (The other things that make it fun are the cookies that come down the chute in my cage when I finish a column.) Anyway, when I first started writing this column back in the early 1990s, I’d get letters about what I’d written, real snail-mail letters with stamps and everything, weeks later — if at all. Thanks to the internet, however, I can now finish a column, send it by email, go downstairs to feed the dogs, and come back upstairs to find a nice email telling me I’ve just written something that is totally wrong. Actually, the vast majority of emails simply add helpful details to something I’ve written, and I urge readers to post those as comments when I put the column online.

Once in a while, however, a reader will send me information that completely changes my mind about something I’ve written, which brings us to today’s case. A couple of months ago, I wrote a column answering a reader’s query about the term “one-horse town,” meaning a small, backward burg. In the course of the column, I mentioned the equivalent 19th century epithet “jerkwater town,” and offered the following explanation: “Locomotives in the age of steam required regular replenishment with water, and in a small town lacking a water tower, the crew would have to form a bucket brigade and literally ‘jerk water’ from the nearest creek. By the late 1800s, ‘jerkwater’ had become an epithet applied to any thing or place considered ‘provincial, backward and insignificant’.” That is, in fact, the accepted origin of the term, echoed in dozens of dictionaries and etymological sources. The Oxford English Dictionary endorses this origin with two citations, from 1941 and 1945, that recount the “jerking water” explanation.

A week or so after I wrote that column, a reader named Robert J. Moyer sent me links to several sources that pointed out that the “bucket brigade” explanation really made no sense at all. Steam engines need two things: fuel (either wood or coal) to fire the boiler, and water, to fill the boiler and, as steam, to run the engine. A steam locomotive needs a lot of water, so many towns on its route would have water towers by the track, which made filling the tank on the tender simple. But we are talking hundreds of gallons of water, and the thought of railroad workers hauling it bucket-by-bucket from nearby streams is, quite frankly, a bit silly when you consider that train crews probably consisted of fewer than ten men, tops.

One of the links Mr. Moyer sent along was to a post about “jerkwater” on a blog called “Wordmall” (verbmall.blogspot.com/2008/05/jerkwater-town.html), run by Michael J. Sheehan, a retired college English teacher in Michigan, who rightly questioned the “bucket brigade” theory and provided some interesting links, as did his commenters. Long story short, it’s questionable whether railroaders themselves ever actually used the term “jerkwater town” for small, isolated towns; it was apparently more common to speak of “tank towns,” stops where the train stopped only to take on water from a water tower.

So if the “bucket brigade” story fails the practicality test and “jerkwater town” wasn’t authentic railroad lingo for a tiny town where the train stopped, where did it come from? This is where it gets truly interesting.

It turns out that steam locomotives did rely on “jerking water” to refill their tenders, but they did it without stopping at all. According to an article published in 1982 by the New York Central System Historical Society, several large rail systems that relied on steam locomotives outfitted them with remotely operated water scoops that could be lowered as the train passed through a station, scooping water from a shallow metal trough mounted between the track rails and passing it to the engine’s water tank. Such systems were apparently introduced around 1860, and, according to the article, there were still 19 such watering stations on the line between Harmon, NY, and Chicago in 1948. In the 19th century, this process was called “jerking water,” but by the early 20th it was known more felicitously as “scooping water,” and just before World War II it was possible for a train to travel at 60 miles per hour while “scooping” water.

This obviously puts a whole new light on “jerkwater,” but in a strange way it comes full circle and may explain the use of the term (by whoever used it, even if it wasn’t the actual train crews). A town where the locomotive “jerked water” from a trough between the rails was, by definition, a town where the train did not ordinarily stop at all, i.e., an unimportant, probably very small town. So while we may have lost that quaint story about a bucket brigade, we’ve gained a technically fascinating explanation of the phrase “jerkwater town.”

That’s a long way to tip a werewolf.

Dear Word Detective:  We have ancestors with the last name Hussey. The Husseys were a rather prominent family from Dingle, Ireland. My mother was rather proud to be related to them and use to brag that her grandmother was a Hussey, sometimes to the amusement of others. I have long wondered how this word came to be associated with a loose woman. Do you have any idea? — Gerald Sharkey.

Hey, this is pretty neat. I assume you already know this, but there are several web pages devoted to the Hussey family and their role in Irish history. According to one site in Canada (www.hussey.ca), the Husseys were originally Scandinavian. They moved south to France (who wouldn’t?) and then joined William the Conqueror for the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. They then supposedly ended up in Bath, from where they wandered over to Ireland and eventually became big shots in Dingle, County Kerry. Then they all became prostitutes… Just kidding! Then they became pillars of the Dingle community, and to this day the entrance to Dingle Bay is dominated by a massive stone tower called “Hussey’s Folly,” thought to have been erected by one of your ancestors as a “stimulus project” to give employment to the locals during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. And none of this has anything at all to do with the use of “hussy” as an antiquated pejorative term for a woman considered “loose” or immoral.

The portion of the definition of “hussy” in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) relevant to your question is “[A] woman of low social status. Also: a disreputable woman of improper behavior, or of light or worthless character; a badly-behaved, pert, or mischievous girl; a minx.” When “hussy” was more commonly heard (prior to 1950 or so), it was usually accompanied by an intensifier such as “brazen,” “shameless” or “bold” (“That bonnetless, bold hussey round that corner,” 1889).

The use of “hussy” as a pejorative arose in the mid-17th century, but the word “hussy” itself (in a variety of spellings including “hussey,” “hizzie,” and “huzzie”) had already been kicking around in common usage since the early 1500s. Originally, the word “hussy” meant simply “The mistress of a household; a thrifty woman” (OED) and a “hussy” was a good thing to be (“Her being so good a Hussy of what Money I had left her,” Daniel Defoe, 1723). That’s because “hussy” was simply a shortening (or “phonetic reduction”) of the word “housewife.” Who knew?

“Housewife” itself is an interesting word, appearing around 1225 in the form “husewif” and derived from the Old English “huse” meaning “house” (also the source of our modern English “house”) plus “wif,” meaning “woman” (also the source of “wife” and “woman,” which was originally “wifman,” the “man” at the time meaning simply “human being”).

Interestingly, although the connotation of “housewife” was originally, as it is now, neutral and often fairly laudatory, there was a time, shortly before “hussy” came to be used to mean “tramp,” that “housewife” was used in that same derogatory sense of “A frivolous, impertinent, or disreputable woman or girl” (OED). That makes sense, since they are, after all, literally the same word.

Elsewhere in the domestic universe, the Old English “huse” (house) found yet another home in “husbonda,” from the Old Norse “husbondi,” from “huse” and “bondi,” meaning a peasant who owned his own house and land. Anyone who hasn’t already figured out that “husbonda” became “husband,” see me after class.

“Husband,” however, didn’t really become popular until the late 13th century. Prior to that time, the term of preference was the Old English “wer,” which meant simply “man” (and made a nice match with “wif,” woman). The only place you’re likely to meet “wer” today is in “werewolf,” literally “man-wolf” or “wolfman.”

Pizza is my wont at lunch, won’t not want.

Dear Word Detective:  The words “wont” and “want” seem close in meaning. Seems I have so many questions for you, as I am wont to do, but I want an answer! Sorry didn’t mean to get excited, just wondering if they were the same word at some point and just diverged into different meanings. — Bradford Cornell.

Well, I have good news. My spell-checker (in Open Office) doesn’t try to get me to change “wont” to “won’t,” which I find impressive. Not that I’d necessarily notice if it did. I guess it’s because I use oodles of seriously obsolete words and Old Norse roots in this column, but I’m used to my paragraphs being so festooned with squiggly red underscores that they look like they’ve got a bad case of varicose veins.

So, right, you had a question. And the answer is no. “Wont” and “want” are not now, and never have been, relatives, despite the fact that they differ in only one letter and have a certain amount of overlap in their meanings. After all, if you are “wont” (accustomed) to doing something, chances are that you “want” to do it at least a little, right? Gotcha. Admit it — you were expecting the English language to make sense. Don’t hold your breath, bucko.

The verb “to want” first appeared in the 13th century, probably derived from the Old Norse “vanta,” which meant “to be lacking.” (The Germanic roots of that “vanta” also gave us our modern English “wane” and “vain.”) The original meaning of the English “want” was also  “to be lacking,” a sense we still use when we say that an unsatisfactory explanation, solution to a problem, or other situation is “found wanting” or “proves wanting.” This sense of “want” was, you’ll notice, very close to that of “need.” We also use “to want for” and similar phrases in a negative construction to mean that something is actually abundant (“Mrs. Bumble … did not want for spirit, as her yokefellow could abundantly testify,” Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1838).

“Want” broadened its meaning in the 18th century, and most uses of “want” today boil down to “wish for” or “desire,” reflecting a mental or emotional state that is pretty much the opposite of “need” (“If every one of your clients is to force us to keep a clerk, whether we want to or not, you had better leave off business,” Dickens, 1841).

“Wont” is a different kettle of fish entirely. In the sense most often seen, as in “I went for a walk on Sunday, as is my wont,” it’s a noun meaning “habit, custom, routine,” and came from the adjective “wont” (meaning “accustomed”), which in turn came from the Old English verb  “gewunian,” meaning “to stay, to dwell in a place.” Further back, you find roots that mean “to be content, to be happy” and “wont” actually shares roots with both “to win” and “to wish.” Those roots also gave us the verb “to wean,” which originally carried the sense of an infant becoming accustomed to no longer nursing.

Although “wont” today is not considered archaic or obsolete, its use is uncommon, especially in the US, and it’s most likely to be heard used in a jocular or self-deprecating way (“I bought the DVD the day before it went on sale, as is my wont”).

By the way, just for the record, “wont” is completely unrelated to the common “won’t,” which is a contraction of “will not.” The reason “won’t” is not “willn’t” or something similar is purely historical accident. The form in Middle English was “wynnot,” up until the 18th century “wonnot” was common along with several other spellings, and the modern “won’t” didn’t appear until the 1500s. As a matter of fact, “willn’t” did exist, and was used well into the 19th century by some very prominent authors (“That willn’t wash, Miss,” Charlotte Bronte, 1849).

I can’t believe we used to picnic at Bear Mountain. Sounds like the setup for a bad horror movie.

Dear Word Detective:  You were kind enough to answer a previous question of mine regarding “to the manner born” (love Shakespeare!), so here I am again. I have noticed that lately the words “grizzly” (as in bear) and “grisly” (as in gruesome, bloody) seem to have  merged and are being used interchangeably. Can you explain the difference between the two words, and how we seem to have become confused about them? — Mary Funke.

Really? Dat’s distoibing. I actually thought, back in the 1990s, that the increasing popularity of the internet would be a boon for reading and language skills because, back then, reading was the only thing you could do online. Practice makes perfect, yadda yadda. Text is still the bulk of content online, but the catch is that much of it appears to have been written by drunken chipmunks, or perhaps just by people with a very shaky grasp of standard spelling. Oh well, things do fall apart. I used to joke about the inevitable arrival of a “point and grunt” interface for computers, but then the iPhone and iPad arrived, proving that true genius often consists of patenting the stupidest thing you can possibly imagine.

One problem with distinguishing “grizzly” from “grisly” is that the two are homophones, words that sound the same even though their spellings differ. Another problem is that, while the two words are far from being synonyms, they both denote sources of fear and anxiety for most normal people and are thus far more similar in connotation than many other pairs of homophones (pail/pale, tail/tale, plane/plain, days/daze, etc.). Both “grizzly” and “grisly” play in the same mental ballpark. It’s a similar case when so many people type “free reign” rather than “free rein.” Both “rein” and “reign” connote forms of control.

While grizzly bears make lousy pets, their name does not refer to their marked propensity for mayhem (which did, however, earn them the Latin name “Ursus arctos horribilus”). But don’t take my word for the bear’s personality defects. Look up “grizzly bear” in Wikipedia at the moment, and you’ll find Stephen Colbert quoted to the effect that bears (apparently all bears) are “… godless killing machines … The insatiable blood lust of Bears can never be quenched and therefore all must be destroyed in order to save the human race. Recent scientific studies have shown that all Bears are possessed at the moment of birth by demons from Hell, which explains their Satanic behavior. …” That paragraph has, no doubt, already been pasted into dozens of term papers.

The “grizzly” in the bear’s name, however, is the common English adjective “grizzly” meaning “gray, grayish” or “grizzled,” from the Old French “grisel,” meaning “gray.” Grizzly bears are also known as “silver-tip bears” from the silvery-gray tips of their otherwise brownish fur.

Interestingly, the name of the grizzly bear may reflect an early instance of the “grizzly/grisly” confusion. When naturalist George Ord gave the bear a scientific name in 1815, based on the observations of Lewis and Clark (who had returned from their explorations with a dead grizzly), he called it “Ursus horribilus ord,” meaning “Ord’s horrible bear.” Some sources suggest that Ord misunderstood the “grizzly” in the bear’s popular name as “grisly,” meaning “horrible; causing horror, terror and extreme fear.” Ord’s use of the Latin word “horribilus”  (also meaning “causing horror or great fear”) would tend to indicate that he believed the bear got its popular name by being extremely scary, rather than from having silvery fur. In any case, the grizzly is now known as “Ursus arctos horribilis,” meaning “horrible northern bear,” to differentiate it from the closely-related brown bear.

The word “grisly” (from the Old English “grisan,” to shudder) first appeared in English in the 12th century meaning “causing great fear or terror or dread, as of death,” but in modern use “grisly” has been diluted a bit, and generally means simply “scary” or, most often, “grim, frightening and shocking.” In journalism, “grisly” has become a euphemism for “brutal” or “bloody” (“Investigation continues into grisly elevator death,” ABC News headline, 12/11). In our house, at least, “grisly” is a code word for “change the channel.”