Pick a peck of soul-crushing boredom.

Dear Word Detective: What do the English words “kip” and “spike” mean? I found them in Orwell’s biography in Wikipedia, but I could not find any proper definitions in any dictionary. — Jana, Czech Republic.

Thanks for an interesting question. Then again, it’s hard to imagine an uninteresting question that involves George Orwell (pen name of Eric Blair, 1903-50), author of 1984, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, and many other books and essays. The Wikipedia page about Orwell actually does a good job of briefly recounting his peripatetic and amazing life.

The two terms you encountered, “kip” and “spike,” are both associated with Orwell in the 1930s, when he set out to document the conditions of London’s poor and homeless. Orwell dressed as a vagrant and frequented the dive bars, flophouses and hangouts of the poor, and his experiences furnished the material for his first published essay, titled “The Spike” (1931). His further experiences “undercover” in London (and elsewhere) eventually resulted in his book “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933.

Of the two terms, “kip” is the easier to explain. A “kip” in the sense Orwell meant it is a lodging house, usually humble, in which beds are rented by the night or week. “Kip” is also used in extended senses of “a bed in such a place,” “a bed” in general, or even “sleep” in a general sense (“I got to have a rest. I ain’t had no kip,” 1938). “Kip” in this sense first appeared in print in 1879, but it had been used in the sense of “brothel” since 1766. It appears to be related to the Danish word “kippe,” meaning “hut” or “low alehouse” (i.e., a “dive” bar).

“Spike” takes a bit more explaining, but it’s also a more interesting word. In Orwell’s accounts of life among the poor and homeless, a “spike” was a workhouse, a public shelter for the homeless where food and board were supplied (just barely) in exchange for menial work performed by the residents. Workhouses (or “poorhouses”) had been established in England in the 14th century, but were still common in the 1930s. Originally established to care for the poor and indigent, workhouses proliferated in the 18th and 19th century, and depended on the labor of their residents to remain solvent. The labor usually consisted of mind-numbing tasks such as crushing stone or “picking” oakum (“He had heard of a work-house, in this city, into which refractory servants are committed, and put to hard labour; such as pounding hemp, grinding plaister of Paris, and picking old ropes into oakum,” 1804).

“Oakum” is the short, coarse fibers of hemp, jute or flax, which are separated from the longer, smoother fibers that are used to spin cloth. Oakum was used to caulk ships, seal plumbing joints, and even as dressings for wounds (“Who should it be but Mr. Daniel, all muffled up … and his right eye stopped with Okum?” Samuel Pepys, Diary, 1666). One source of oakum was old ropes made of hemp, which were laboriously picked apart by hand to free the fibers of oakum for re-use. The picking of oakum from old rope was most often done by hand with a large metal nail, or spike, and it’s likely that the workhouses got the nickname “the spike” from this instrument of long hours of toil. Picking oakum with a spike all day every day was almost certainly the most painfully memorable aspect of life in a “spike.”

Interestingly, the Latin word for oakum was “stuppa,” and back in Roman times “stuppa” was often used to seal the necks of jars or bottles like a stopper. This practice spawned the Late Latin verb “stuppare,” which, a few centuries later, produced our English verb “to stop” in all its senses, from “stopping” the flow of water from a leak to “stopping” a speeding car.

All I want for Christmas are my new front teeth.

Dear Word Detective: When I was a kid, the older boys in my south Minneapolis neighborhood spent a lot of time building and riding go-carts. At least, they are called “go-carts” everywhere else in the world, including most of Minneapolis, but in our weird little micro-logoverse, they were called “chugs.” (They were not powered, which may have been implied.) Have you ever come across this, or is this the ultimate in regional dialect? — Charles Anderson.

One of the great things about writing this column is that it gives me a good excuse to relive my childhood. I well remember building, with my friends in the early 60s, various wheeled death-traps we called “go-carts,” even though ours were cobbled together from old packing crates and lacked the engine, steering and brakes of a “real” go-cart (which was probably a good thing). I also vividly remember the day that my friend across the street was given a Thunderbird Junior, a miniature electric car, by business associates of his father (it had a huge Pepsi logo on the side). That car so effectively trumped anything the rest of us could possibly muster that I took up rock collecting a week later.

Speaking of “go-carts,” which we use to mean a very simple, often home-made, racing car with or without an engine, I was surprised to see that the term dates all the way back to the 17th century. It was originally applied to a wheeled wooden frame in which children learned to walk without falling.

“Chug” is a very interesting word, for two reasons. First, although “chug” has, as a noun, a verb, and in combination with other words, produced dozens of varied meanings, it’s a relatively young word. “Chug” first appeared in print as a noun in 1866. Secondly, all the various senses of “chug” refer, in some way, back to its origin, which was onomatopoeic, or “imitative” of a particular sound. In the case of “chug,” the particular sound is a dull, muffled and somewhat explosive sound, a little bit more energetic and mechanical-sounding than a “thud,” but definitely in the same aural ballpark (“The ponderous brother came down upon the floor with a ‘chugg’ that shook the house,” 1866). Although it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what sound inspired “chug,” it is so often likened in dictionaries to the sound of a steam or internal-combustion engine that it’s reasonable to assume that some sort of engine gave us the word.

The most common use of “chug” is, no doubt, in reference to the sound of an engine, especially a steam engine, such as on a locomotive. Applied to a car engine or some other machinery, “chug” often indicates either that the contraption is under-powered or that the engine is running a bit roughly. “Chug” as a verb is also used, by extension, to mean “moving along slowly but steadily” (“After dinner we hit the road again, and passed Harry about 20 miles up the road, still chugging along in his old Pinto”).

“Chug” has also, in US regional speech and slang, been used to mean “to hit” or “to punch,” or “to throw a heavy object into water,” again referring to the dull sound produced. But the most well-known use of “chug” as a verb is probably to mean “to drink a great quantity (usually of beer, etc.) without pausing.” This “chug” is actually a short form of “chugalug,” meaning the same thing, which is a US coinage dating back to the 1940s. The “alug” in “chugalug” is meaningless, but makes the word perfectly imitative of the sound of someone “chugging” a pitcher of beer (minus the subsequent retching, of course).

The closest I’ve found to the use of “chug” to mean “go-cart” comes from the 1920s, when “chugwagon” was US slang for an automobile (“I could buy and sell guys that’s got three homes and a couple of chugwagons,” Burnett, Little Caesar, 1928). I haven’t found any documentation of “chug” as widespread slang for any sort of homemade car, so I guess you and your Minneapolis friends were a linguistic lost tribe in that regard. “Chug” in that sense does do a good job of evoking the slow and precarious nature of such vehicles; we should probably be glad it never appeared in a newspaper headline.