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Trivia

All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

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English (on a ball, etc.)

Tilt.

Dear Word Detective:  I was watching billiards (“pool,” if you will) on ESPN the other day (yes, I was bored), and the announcer was talking about the players putting “english” on the ball, i.e., making it spin with their cue sticks to get the cue ball to end up in a desired location.  Then I thought also about the phrase “body english,” which I sometimes use to try to make a putt go in the hole at the golf course. Where and how did these usages of “english” come in to being? Why not “put some french on the ball,” or use “body spanish” to alter physics? – Lisa Gold.

“Billiards” is fine by me.  Whenever somebody says they spent the evening “playing pool,” I picture one of those inflatable float toys with a horse’s head.  I guess I need to spend more time in bars.  Not that I’m a big fan of swimming pools, either.  While I’m always up for meeting new strains of exotic bacteria, pools really aren’t much fun if you’re blind as a bat without your glasses.  Incidentally (he says in a frantic attempt to get back to the subject), the word “billiards” comes from the French “billard,” which was actually the word for the cue stick (from “bille,” piece of wood).  “Pool,” the game, comes from the French word for it, “poule,” also meaning “collective stakes” (what we call a “pool” or “pot” in other games).  Interestingly, “poule”  also happens to be the French word for “hen.”  The French “poule” was originally used to mean a kind of card game, but the name apparently harks back to a game in the Middle Ages that actually involved throwing things at a chicken.

The use of “English” to mean “spin induced to a ball or other projectile in order to alter its   course” is a fairly recent American invention, dating back only to the mid-19th century, although the practice itself is probably as old as throwing stuff at chickens.  (Capitalization of this kind of “English” is inconsistent, but I capitalize it to avoid giving my spellchecker fits.)  In billiards, “English” is applied by striking the ball with the cue stick slightly off-center, causing the ball to spin and take a curved, rather than straight, path.  The same technique is also called “side,” especially in Britain, because the ball is struck slightly to one side.  “English” can be used in almost any sport that involves a ball (e.g., golf, tennis, baseball), and the term is also used in a broader sense to mean “force or fiddling applied to a tool, lock, etc., to make it work” (“When Simon tried to close the door … he encountered difficulties. The officer lent a hand. ‘You have to put a little English on it,’ he explained. ‘There’s a defect in the catch,'” 1966).

There are two popular theories about the origin of “English.”  The more baroque, which strikes me as cumbersome and unlikely, is that “English” is a botched translation of the French “angle” (meaning “angled”), which was mistaken by someone for “Anglais,” meaning “England.”  The other theory is that the technique was introduced to the US by English pool sharks in the 19th century.  That’s certainly possible, but I suspect that “English” in this sense is just another example of our tendency to label anything even faintly exotic as “foreign” and perhaps faintly disreputable and unfair.  If I’m right, “English” is a fairly mild product of the same national finger-pointing that gave us such terms as “French leave” for desertion from the army, “Dutch nightingale” for a frog, and “Irish confetti” for bricks thrown in a street brawl.

“Body English” was originally actually a sardonic bit of humor.  It means contorting one’s body (leaning, twisting, etc.) after the shot is made, too late to apply real English, in mock hope that the course of the ball can be thereby altered.  I have, however, also seen it used to mean altering one’s posture while making a shot (or putt, etc.), when “body English” actually can make a substantial difference.

Bad Penny

It comes around.

Dear Word Detective:  Every now and then, I’ll come across the phrase “He’s like a bad penny, he always turns up.”  What was a “bad penny,” and what did it mean for them to “turn up”?  Did they curl on the edges? Were they heavier on one side, so they always landed face up? — Debbie.

Funny you should ask that.  We live out in the country, and, in addition to being surrounded by actual farms, we’re quite close to several roadside “farm stands,” which purport to sell fresh locally-grown produce.  But their real claim to fame must be possession of working time machines, because they’re selling some produce in mid-summer (e.g., sweet corn in June) that won’t be harvested around here for months.  Anyway, I have a burning desire to open my own farm stand, call it Bad Penny’s Produce, and make my motto “We always turnip.”

OK, never mind.  “A bad penny always turns up” is a very old proverb that dates back to at least the mid-18th century and is probably much older.  The general sense of the phrase is, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the predictable, and often unwanted, return of a disreputable or prodigal person after some absence, or (more generally) to the continual recurrence of someone or something.”  A “bad penny” is a person whose presence is unwelcome on any occasion, but whom fate perversely employs to torment you by making said person appear (“turn up”) repeatedly, often at the worst possible times.  The ne’er-do-well nephew who appears only at family weddings, funerals and holiday dinners, never invited but always mysteriously materializing at your elbow and asking for a loan, is the classic “bad penny.”  Former romantic flames can also be counted as “bad pennies” if fortune (or fanaticism) dictates too many accidental reunions (“Don’t stalk him! If you turn up like a bad penny every time he leaves the house, he’ll think you’re a bunny boiler,” Cosmo Girl, 2004).  (“Bunny boiler,” of course, is a reference to the behavior of the character played by Glenn Close in the 1987 film “Fatal Attraction.”)

A “penny” to us here in the US (and to many of you furriners) is a coin worth one cent (from the Latin “centum,” one hundred), or 1/100th of a dollar.  The origins of “penny” are uncertain, but it’s a very old word with relatives in many languages, and may have come from a root meaning “pledge.”

Pennies today are viewed as nearly worthless by many people (although not so many as a year ago), but when the term “bad penny” first appeared in the 18th century, pennies were serious money.  This made them ripe targets for counterfeiters, and to reach into your pocket or purse and discover that you had ended up with such a counterfeit coin, a “bad” penny, was a depressing and annoying experience.  The only recourse available if you were stuck with a “bad penny” was to try to spend it as quickly as possible and hope that an inattentive shopkeeper would take it.  But because everyone was trying to unload their “bad pennies” this way, according to the common wisdom of the time, your odds of encountering one, or even the very same one you had gotten rid of a week earlier, were quite high.  Thus “bad penny” became an idiom meaning “an unwanted thing that keeps showing up.”

Shoo-fly

Quick, Henry, the Flit!

Dear Word Detective:  I had found the word “shu-fly” before, but now a Google search says there is no such thing.  It is a small road or access (usually temporary) used to connect two things (roads or right of ways) together.  I have a friend who always gets angry when I use the word and I needed something “official” to show her there really is such a thing.  Oh, by the way, we do use a “cat” to clear the roads or rights of way; it just isn’t furry but has metal tracks and a big engine. — Tim McTaggart.

And I’ll bet it doesn’t shed.  I assume  that by “cat” you mean (for the benefit of our readers not familiar with construction equipment) a Caterpillar bulldozer (or something similar made by another manufacturer).  Incidentally, the verb “to bulldoze” was originally, in the late 19th century, spelled “bulldose,” and meant to beat someone up very severely (to give them a “dose” with the force and savagery of a bull).

I’m not surprised that Google didn’t turn up anything on “shu-fly,” but I would have expected them to suggest the more common spelling, “shoo-fly” (or “shoofly”).  “Shoo-fly” has a long history, especially in the American South, and since the middle of the 19th century has acquired an almost bewildering variety of meanings and applications.

In its most basic sense, “shoo-fly” is an expression of annoyance, the sort of thing one would exclaim while waving away an annoying fly.  “Shoo” is itself what the Oxford English Dictionary calls an “instinctive exclamation” (I love that phrase), used for centuries “to frighten or drive away poultry, birds, or other intruders.”  The “fly” in “shoo-fly” is just the common fly.  “Shoo-fly” became a catch phrase in the US around 1870, when a song and dance man named Dan Bryant did a song by that name that became so popular that a “shoo-fly” fad, as H.L. Mencken later noted, “afflicted the American people for at least two years.”

“Shoo-fly pie” is popular among the Amish of Pennsylvania as well as in the US South, and is really more of a molasses crumb-cake than a pie.  The name, which first appeared in print in  1935, is said to come from the understandable attraction the molasses holds for hungry flies.  Less clear is why a rocking horse with a seat between two wooden cutouts of a horse would be known as a “shoo-fly rocker,” but it has, since at least 1887.  Ten years earlier, “shoo-fly” had also appeared in print meaning “a police officer detailed to check up on other police officers,” a use most likely drawn either from the expression “no flies on him” meaning “alert and perceptive” or referring to the role of the officer is “shooing” away metaphorical “flies” of corruption.

“Shoo-fly” meaning “temporary bypass” first appeared in railroad jargon around 1905. The logic of this use is unclear, but I think it’s significant that around the same time “shoo-fly” was also being used to mean “a local or commuter train.”  My guess is that such trains, traveling slowly with frequent stops, were considered a rustic or “hick” mode of travel, likely to be carrying as many flies as human travelers (requiring passengers to constantly “shoo flies”).  Perhaps the “shoo-fly” name then broadened to mean bypasses from the main line where trains would have to slow down and, eventually, to any sort of bypass, even on a highway.  In any case, your use of “shoo-fly” in this sense is clearly an extension of the railroad use more than 100 years old, and your friend should thank you for expanding her vocabulary.