Welcome to The Mad Lexiphile. It is my intent to explore words here; their origins, evolution, usage. Words are fascinating. They are alive; they are born, they change and, sometimes, they die. They are our principal tool for communicating with one another. There are millions of words yet only an estimated 171,476 words are in common current use. As a lexiphile, I enjoy discovering new words, using them and learning about their origins. Why yes, I do read dictionaries for fun... don't you?
Picking up after last week's diary, we move ahead to some slang that is not quite so old. That means we'll look at the 18th and 19th century up to the mid-20th century, encompassing colonial, pioneer, Civil War, World War I and jazz age slang.
(By request) Not enough room to swing a cat; Whether the 'cat' was real or whip used to punish sailors isn't clear. The phrase dates from at least the 17th century as seen from Richard Kephale's Medela Pestilentiae, 1665: "They had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in." So the phrase was already in use before the nautical terminology came along. In that context, the cat in question is the 'cat o'nine tails', a flail-like whip used for discipline on naval vessels. Its use required room in which to draw the whip back so as to deliver a blow.
Some people are referred to (unfortunately) as mad as a hatter. Many years ago, Mercury was used in the making of hats. This affected the nervous systems of those who made them. Symptoms included trembling and "insane" behavior. Mercury exposure can cause aggressiveness, mood swings, and anti-social behavior. Lewis Carroll obviously knew about this meaning when he created the character of the Mad Hatter.
If you have ever quit a habit suddenly, you have gone cold turkey. This term is most common in relation to drug or cigarette withdrawal. The earliest reference to that usage is from the Canadian newspaper The Daily Colonist, in October 1921: "When they go before him, they [drug addicts] are given what is called the 'cold turkey' treatment." Anyone who has gone through this may recall the shivers that one sometimes gets, and the oft accompanying goosebumps. This may be the source of the term, but that is pure conjecture.
Have you ever watched an old Western and winced at the stereotypical "Injun" portrayals? One word often used by an "Injun" character to indicate their ethnicity is Firewater. This is not a Hollywood affectation. It is from an Ojibwa word; ishkodewaaboo, meaning whiskey or distilled liquors. The other word indicators for the stereotype, "ugh", "how" and "-um" are prejudicial creations of writers and film makers.
An important person may be referred to as a Bigwig. In the 18th century, large wigs called perukes were worn by men of importance. Judges in particular wore large elaborate wigs to denote their line of work. These men sat in judgment of others, so they were important. The elitist behavior of many of them inspired the term. Consequently, anyone with great power became a big wig.
Pass the buck and the buck stops here are poker terms. Poker became very popular in America during the second half of the 19th century. Cheating was common and suspicion amongst players ran deep. In order to keep it fair, the position of dealer would rotate during games. The person who was up next as dealer would be given a marker, commonly a knife. In that era, knives often had handles made of buck's horn. Hence the marker became known as a buck. When the dealer was done he "passed the buck." Later, silver dollars were used as markers. This could very well be the origin of "buck" as a slang term for dollar. The best-known use of buck in this context is "the buck stops here", as a promise made by President Harry S. Truman. He kept this prominent in his own and the country's mind by the sign on his desk.
Every community relies on its scuttlebutt to know what's going on. Dating back to the early 19th century, the word is of nautical origin. A scuttle was a water cask kept on a ship's deck, called after the ship's scuttle, which is an opening in the deck. The second half of the word, butt, means "barrel." The sailors would gather around the scuttlebutt to take a break, have a drink of water and gossip.
We've all come upon something shoddy in our time. Because of a wool shortage in the mid 1800s, manufacturers began to collect used wool cloth so as to reprocess them into yarn. Workers called the recycled cloth "shoddy." During the Civil War the huge demand for uniforms increased the number of shoddy garments being produced. The shoddy uniforms looked fine, but they wore out quickly. The soldiers who wore the shoddy uniforms began using the word to signify anything of substandard quality. That meaning lives on to this day.
At least once in our lives, we've had to pull up stakes. All early dwellings in America were surrounded by fences. Gathering the timber and building the fences involved significant effort. So if and when settlers would decide to move they would take their fences with them.
Have you ever moved so fast that you were hell bent for leather? Also heard as hell bent for breakfast, these are terms for moving fast or doing something quickly. They appear to have been coined during the Industrial Revolution. The American versions, anyway. Charles Earle Funk claims that "hell for leather" is a British expression originating with the British army in India. It's possible that Rudyard Kipling coined it as he was the first to record it in The Story of the Gadsbys. Of course he may have been quoting army speech he had heard. The term probably referred to the beating inflicted upon leather saddles by riders at full speed. But even by Kipling's time it had acquired the current sense of indicating great speed.
If you make it clear that you are interested in something, you may be said to stake a claim. This term and the related grubstake, date to the California Gold Rush. Claim staking is the procedure of marking the boundaries of the mining claim, usually with wooden posts or piles of rocks. That claim was valid only as long as it was being actively worked. In the case where a claim was abandoned or not worked upon, other miners could "claim-jump" the spot. Some prospectors were lucky enough to have sponsors and a grubstake was a supply of food (grub) which a wealthy investor would provide a gold prospector in exchange for a share (stake) in whatever gold might be found.
Eventually, some of us may find something so difficult that we will meet our Waterloo. This phrase refers to the 1815 battle outside the Belgian town of Waterloo in which Napoleon Bonaparte was finally defeated by forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington. The term Waterloo quickly became synonymous with one's downfall or with anything difficult to master.
Hopefully, none of us have ever had to live on Skid Row. This expression came into popular use in the Great Depression. Living on Skid Row was was the last place for someone who was on the bottom of society, or "on the skids." These skids were a very real thing, though. In the late 19th century the logging industry was growing, especially in the northwest. Large tree-trunks had to be hauled, either to sawmills or to the nearest transport. They would be moved along tracks made of greased timbers. The loggers called these 'skid roads.' Legend has it that the first Skid Row was along a Skid Road built in Seattle.
Many of us use the term, A-1 or A-OK to connote something first rate. These come to us from the First World War. The British War Office created an ABC system of classification for the Department of Recruiting. Each category was then graded in a scale of 1 to 3. A-1 men were fit for general service overseas. The Americanized version is A-OK. There was a similar system which Lloyds of London used for evaluating ships. This may be a case of The Great War's spreading a term to a wider reach.
An area which is shunned by people is sometimes called a no-man's land. The term originally dates from the 1300s, when it meant the waste ground between two kingdoms. It did not acquire its military meaning until World War I, when it came to denote the territory between the Allied and German trenches, a place where no man would wish to be.
While jazz may now apply to just the music, it almost certainly had a different meaning at one time. It referred to copulation before it was applied to music, dancing, and other things (all that jazz). The word was in general use in dance halls in the early 20th century as evidenced by a 1919 announcement of the first 'jazz band' to play in Columbia, SC The thought inspired terror among the local Baptists because until that time 'jazz' had never been heard in the area except as a verb with the meaning previously mentioned! 'Jazz' probably comes from a Creole or maybe an African word, but exact connections have not been found.
Perhaps, when things are going well, you've said that everything is copacetic. This term was supposedly coined by Mr. Bojangles himself, Bill Robinson. It means everything is just hunky dory. Robinson claimed to have invented the word during his shoeshine days as a boy in the South, but others say it was used before Bojangles came along. An alternate theory of the word's origin and current use suggests that it may come from a similar sounding Hebrew or Yiddish word with the same meaning.
Whether you are a musician or a film buff will color how you define vamp. In music, it means to improvise so as to fill time. Singers often vamp at the end of a song. If you are a film buff, you immediately think of Theda Bara and this meaning; "a woman who uses her sex appeal to entrap and exploit men." The term goes back to a Kipling poem, The Vampire, which became a play and then a film, A Fool There Was, in 1915. Sultry Theda Bara played the title role and the word as we use it may ultimately trace to that. Bara (real name Theodosia Goodman) remains the classic vamp.
Not so much in use today but notable for its etymology (or entomology?) is the bee's knees. There is no definitive origin for it, but it seems to have been coined in the 1920s. The first printed reference is in the Ohio newspaper The Newark Advocate in 1922; "... you wonder when you hear a flapper chatter in typical flapper language. 'Apple Knocker,' for instance. And 'Bees Knees.' That's flapper talk. [an 'apple knocker' is a rustic]" Clearly the phrase must have been new then for the paper to take the trouble to define it. In the 1920s it was fashionable to devise nonsense terms for something good - "the snake's hips," "the kipper's knickers," "the cat's pyjamas," "the sardine's whiskers" etc. Of these, the bee's knees and the cat's pyjamas are the only ones that have stood the test of time. There is a possible connection between the phrase and Bee Jackson, a dancer in 1920s New York. She was the World Champion Charleston dancer and was quite celebrated at the time. It's not beyond possibility that the expression was coined in reference to her and her very active knees.
Some of us may have been lucky enough to have visited a ritzy place. Here is a word that began as a person. Caesar Ritz opened the first Hotel Ritz in Paris in 1898. It quickly set a standard of luxury and comfort. Due to Ritz's perfectionism, it became the measure of all other hotels. Ritz Hotels opened in London and New York and a few other cities and soon the name of the hotel and the man came to mean something lavish and extravagant. If one was aspiring to be high class, well-dressed or cultured, they were said to be "putting on the Ritz." Irving Berlin even wrote a song about it.
If you are feeling scared, you might say that you have the heebie-jeebies. Contrary to some rumors, it is not an anti-Semetic expression. The the Oxford English Dictionary tells us; the heebie-jeebies are a feeling of discomfort, apprehension, or depression. The term was coined by cartoonist Billy DeBeck in 1923. DeBeck was the creator of Barney Google, the hapless partner of Snuffy Smith and erstwhile owner of Sparkplug. DeBeck also invented hotsy-totsy (a term of approval) and horsefeathers (utter nonsense and a damn funny Marx Brothers film) in his strip. The only possible way to make it anti-Semetic is by its unfortunate similarity to the epithet Hebe. But it is innocent of the charge.
A word we use when we mean "go away!" is scram. When it first came into the vernacular in the 1920s, it was a shortened form of scramble or possibly came from the German word, schrammen "depart." But the word's history took an interesting turn in 1963 when a member of Enrico Fermi's team working on the first nuclear reactor used it as follows:
"The word arose in a discussion Dr. (Volney) Wilson, who was head of the instrumentation and controls group was having with several members of his group. The group had decided to have a big button to push to drive in both the control rods and the safety rod. What to label it? "What do we do after we punch the button?" someone asked. "Scram out of
here," Wilson said. Bill Overbeck, another member of that group, said,
"Okay, I'll label it SCRAM." _ As related by Gene Carbaugh of the Pacific NW National Laboratory
Have you ever watched a celebrity and thought that he or she has it? The word, used in this context, was coined by Elinor Glyn in her 1923 novel, The Man and the Moment. The book was the basis for a 1927 film, It, starring Clara Bow. The actress became known as "the It girl." What is it? The short version is "a euphemism for sex appeal" but there is more to it than just that. According to Glyn herself, to have it, the person must have sex appeal but not be aware of it. They are a person that remains unaffected by fame and riches. A woman with it is one that men want to be with and women want to be (or at least be friends with). Similarly a man with it is a man that other men would want to hang out with and women would like to bed. A few modern celebrities who have or had it (IMHO of course) are Audrey Hepburn, George Clooney, Paul Newman, David Boreanaz and Salma Hayek... I'm sure you can come up with more.
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Hey kids, thanks for hanging with me and letting me give you the low down on the the words. So, mitt me kid, if ya think I did a keen job. Or did I pitch a curve? Now, I don't wanna look like and Abercrombie, ya dig? So don't make tracks quite yet. Stay and flap yer gums (ok, fingers) a bit. What are your favorite slang words/phrases from the 18th century up to 1950?
Next week, we get more modern...