Needs more unicorns.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m reading “Whose Body” by Dorothy Sayers. She refers to Wimsey’s library as a “gilded paradise.” I’ve searched the web and while I find that description (“a gilded paradise”) a lot, no one ever says what it means! Also, “to do someone down.” How did that phrase originate? — Barbara Peterson.

That’s two interesting questions, which is why I’m answering them, even though I noticed you also posted the first one to a message board in the UK and received a perfectly fine answer there. Yes, kids, I am Big Brother (gotta pay the bills, right?), and I see everything. You’re lucky it’s me, actually, because I find most of the weird stuff you people do online incredibly boring. And I hate filling out reports.

Onward. “Whose Body” (1923) was Dorothy Sayers’ first mystery novel, and marked the debut of Lord Peter Whimsey, the “gentleman detective” who would star in Sayers’ numerous subsequent novels and short stories. I actually found the text of “Whose Body” online, which makes it easy to present the paragraph in question:

“Lord Peter’s library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting.”

Is it just me, or does that room sound just a bit overdone, a trifle busy? Probably the ruddy chrysanthemums. In any case, Sayers is comparing its ornate opulence to a Medieval painting in the idealized formal style of that period. The adjective “gilded” (drawn from the same Germanic root that gave us “gold”) is most likely to be taken literally; Medieval artists frequently used paint containing gold or applied gold foil to their paintings, giving their work an almost hypnotic elegance. So in likening Whimsey’s library to “gilded paradise,” Sayers is saying that it was both awe-inspiring and a snug refuge from the outside world.

To “do someone down” is a colloquial English phrase meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it, “to get the better of” or “to bring to grief” a person (“He saw nothing but a spiteful and malignant world trying, as he phrased it, to ‘do him down’,” 1911). In this sense, “to do down” has been found in print (so far) only as of the early 20th century, but it’s probably much older than that. “To do down” appeared in the more literal sense, now obsolete, of “To put down; to take down; to lower; to subdue; to depose” (OED) in the early 14th century.

The use of “do” in “do down” is just one of a dizzying range of uses of the verb “to do” in English. “Do” is, of course, one of the most basic verbs, and comes ultimately from Indo-European roots carrying the sense of “to put, place, do or make.” “Do” in “do down” is one of a euphemistic subset of uses of the verb to mean actions ranging from “to better or outdo” to “to ruin, finish, hoax, cheat or swindle” to “doom, destroy or kill,” as in “to do in,” “do for” (hence the form “done for”) or simply “do” (“‘You’ve done me,’ he cried, and lay still,” A. Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905).

Debatable, or maybe not.

Dear Word Detective: I’m a non-native speaker of English (one who, rather perversely, enjoys exploring the seemingly endless confusion within this language). I wanted to ask you about this word “moot,” which seems to be used in three very different, even contradictory, senses. First, people say “moot question” to mean, roughly, “the key point.” The second sense in which I’ve heard this word used in the sense of “redundant”: so a “moot” issue would be an issue that has been rendered pointless. And finally, “moot” means contentious, under dispute (and this last meaning is the only one my Oxford English Dictionary (OED) seems to support, with a full etymology — but I’ve heard the other two senses used too often for them to be simply individual errors in usage, or so it seems to me). So what is the right usage? And (assuming the first two aren’t entirely “wrong”) how did one single word come to have such opposing meanings? — Partha Sen Sharma.

Well, if you’re looking for things that doesn’t make sense, especially words that are used to mean two or more apparently contradictory things, you’ve picked the right language. English is full of what are sometimes called “contranyms” or “autoantonyms,” words which have, for one reason or another, evolved over time into being used as their own opposites. Two examples that pop up frequently are “cleave,” which can mean both “to cut apart” and “to stick together tightly,” and “fast,” which is used to mean “moving rapidly” as well as “firmly fixed.”

The source of our modern “moot” is the Old English “mot,” which meant “meeting” (and came from the same root that gave us “meet”), most often used in the word “gemot,” which meant “community meeting to discuss public affairs and policies.” The Anglo-Saxon parliament, for example, was known as the “Witenagemot,” which meant “meeting of wise men.” The use of “moot” to mean “meeting” was common from the 12th century onward, and still occasionally crops up (“The moot, consisting of all school, community, and ancillary staff, ? was dealing with such issues as representation on the governing body,” 1973).

Since most meetings involve at least a little argument, beginning in the 13th century “moot” came into use meaning “a discussion or argument.” And, since most truly momentous arguments wind up in court, “moot” soon came to mean “a plea, accusation, or other cause of action in a court of law.” So if I had sued you back in 1566 for breaking my water skis, that suit would have been called a “moot.” This usage, combined with the tradition of “moot” meaning a community meeting where issues were thrashed out, gave us “moot” as an adjective meaning “open to argument; debatable.”

That use of “moot” to mean “active case in court” eventually became obsolete in the actual judicial system. But “moot” had taken on a special meeting in law schools, where a “moot” was an actual case, already settled by a real court, that was re-argued by law students as practice in gatherings called “moot courts.” But while these “moot cases” were based on real issues of law and helpful in training lawyers, the moot court arguments were purely hypothetical, and by the 19th century the common use of “moot” had shifted from “up for argument, unsettled, debatable” to “settled, of no consequence, irrelevant.”

This use of “moot” to mean “irrelevant” (especially “having been rendered irrelevant by events”) is now the primary usage, at least in the US (“Senators McCain and Kerry have probably made moot … the War Powers threat that has been fitfully gathering steam in the House,” 6/22/10). But every so often you’ll run into “moot” meaning “debatable” or “in doubt,” so context is the only way to be certain of the intended meaning.