Weird Words

There’s a vocabulary test going around on line that in four minutes purports to tell you how well you speak English.  I’ve taken the test a couple of times, once scoring 96%, which is excellent, and another time 73%, which is…well, not so hot. 

The test, however, has one big flaw.  It asks you to indicate whether or not you recognize several words, some of which are non-words created just to fool you. If you say you know those non-words, it counts against your score. The trouble is, some of the so-called non-words turn out to be real words.  I said I recognized some of them and lost points for it. For example, I found balker and cuffer in Webster’s dictionaries, even though the online test claims they were made-up words.

Here are some words you may or may not find in a dictionary.  They’re all purported to be real words—but most of them are obsolete or so uncommon that most dictionaries won’t fool with them.  As with many weird words, a lot of them are Scottish in origin.

Snoutfair: A person with a handsome face

Lunt: Walk while smoking a pipe

Groak:  Silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them

Jirble: Pour out (a liquid) with an unsteady hand

Curglaff: The shock felt when one first plunges into cold water

Spermologer: Gossip monger

Tyromancy: Divining by interpreting the coagulation of cheese

Resistentialism: Seemingly spiteful behavior exhibited by inanimate objects

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is a prime example of resistentialism, in that he is almost invariably both spiteful and inanimate.  He also jirbles quite a lot.

            They say that using lots of words

            Will make you seem sophisticated,

            But that advice came straight from nerds

            Who phoned talk shows and bloviated.           

            A case in point: a famous poet,

            Uses lots of words in rhymes,

            But even though he might not know it,

            He repeats some several times.

           

            Don’t give me more vocabulary,

            Or think that I’m a cognoscente—

            I’ll summon the constabulary;

            The words I know right now are plenty.

Help! Police!

If you find yourself in a foreign country and suddenly have a need for law enforcement, the chances are good that you’ll be understood if you say “Police!”  The similarity in words for the constabulary in languages as diverse as Finnish (poliisi), Azerbaijani (polis), Basque (poliziak), and Swahili (polisi) is remarkable.  In Germany you call the Polizei, in Spanish-speaking countries make that the policía, in Estonia it’s politsei, and when in Rome do as Romans do and ask for polizia. In Bosnia, Lithuania, and Latvia, the cops are the policija, and it Norway it’s the politiet. Even in Russia, once you transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet (полиция), you'll wind up with the politsija. 

And so it goes around the world—except for a few outliers like Hungary, where you would summon the rendőrség (if you knew how), Iceland (lögreglan), Viet Nam (công an), and Wales, where you’d have to shout yr heddlu at the top of your lungs and and hope an officer would respond. 

The word police entered English in the early sixteenth century, from the Middle French police, which stemmed from Latin politia and meant "civil administration."  Its ultimate source was the Greek politeia, meaning "citizenship or civil organization," which derived from polis, meaning "city."  By the eighteen century the French began to use police to mean the "administration of public order."

In 1798 the English formed a unit of officers to protect the port of London, and they called this the Marine Police. This was the only usage of the term to mean a body of law enforcement officers until 1830, when the British established the New Police, a more general organization of crime-fighters. Thereafter other bodies of peace-keepers began organizing as police forces, and the term police was incorporated into various languages worldwide. 

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou tries to avoid the police whenever possible, and, having once dealt with him, the police try equally hard to avoid the Bard.

            The police had to work overtime
            On the day they arrested a mime.
                        Though the mime remained silent,
                        He became rather vi’lent,
            When accused of unspeakable crime.

Chiller-Diller

     

On Memorial Day many people choose to chillax—a portmanteau word formed from chill and relax.  Chillax is actually a bit redundant, since chill, or sometimes chill out, first used in the 1970s, by itself means to “calm down, relax, take it easy.”

The earliest citation of chill in that sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is 1979, in a hip-hop song called “Rapper’s Delight,” recorded by the Sugarhill Gang. A whole gang of what must be writers is credited with those lyrics—including Sylvia Robinson, Big Bank Hank, Wonder Mike, Master Gee, Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers, and Alan Hawkshaw, so it’s impossible to know who actually came up with the line “A time to break and a time to chill, To act civilized or act real ill.”

In 1983 Time Magazine ran a piece that observed, “It’d be nice to just chill out all the time and hunt and fish.”

By 1985, chill also meant to “hang out,” that is, to “spend time in idleness or non-specific activity, especially with other members of a group.”

A versatile word through the ages, chill derives from Old English ciele, which means “cold or coolness.”  In the 16^th century to chill meant to “lower the spirits or to make sad,” and by the 18^th century, it was used to mean almost the opposite, to “quiver with excitement, to thrill.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is an old hand at chilling, especially when bottles and ice-chests are involved. 

                        A hopped-up but happy hip-hopper

                        Took a sight-seeing ride on a chopper,

                                    But while he was rapping,

                                    The pilot was napping,

                        Which the hip-hopper thought was improper.

            

                        So the hip-hopper summoned a copper,

                        Who proved to be not a crime-stopper:           

                                    The cop thought it amusing

                                    That the pilot was snoozing,

                        And the chopper soon came a cropper.           

                       

                        Now you may think this tale is a whopper,

                        But I heard from a trusted eavesdropper

                                    That the pilot, the copper,

                                    And the hapless hip-hopper

                        All met the fate of Big Bopper.                       

What’ll You Have?

One of the customers was speculating the other day about the origin of the word cocktail.  It’s a subject I have not previously dealt with because cocktail is one of those words whose etymology ought to be very straightforward, but, in fact, is cloaked in such an enigmatic miasma of wispy supposition that tracking it down becomes frustrating.

The first recorded use of the word (actually two words) to mean a beverage was in the May 6, 1806 edition of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, NY. A reader was so puzzled by this usage, that he asked for an explanation, and the editor (whose reply betrays his Federalist political preference) obliged the following week: “As I make it a point, never to publish anything but which I can explain, I shall not hesitate to gratify the curiosity of my inquisitive correspondent: Cock tail, then is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters; it is vulgarly called a bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said also, to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because, a person having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.”

Originally, most pundits agree, the word was an adjective describing a “creature with a tail resembling that of a cock, or rooster,” specifically a horse with a “docked” tail—one from which the hair has been trimmed down to the fleshy part of the tail.  This was a customary treatment for hunting and coach horses. A non-thoroughbred racehorse, descended from such cock-tailed horses, became known disparagingly as a cocktail.  Later, a person trying to pass as a gentleman, but lacking proper breeding, was called a cocktail. Such an adulteration of pedigree, some linguists suggest, was analogous to the adulteration of liquors in the drink that took on the name cocktail sometime around the turn of the nineteenth-century.

This is a pretty circuitous chain of reasoning, and the acerbic H. L. Mencken, who was known to lift a few cocktails in his prime, was not convinced by such far-fetched explanations. In The American Language Mencken wrote, “The etymology of the cocktail has long engaged the learned, but without persuasive result.” 

He went on to cite William Henry Nugent in an article about cock fighting that surmised that cocktail derived from a mixture of stale bread, beer, wine, and spirits, as well as herbs and seeds, that was prepared by nineteenth-century Irish and English gamecock trainers to condition the birds for fighting.  The trainers began to sample this concoction (before adding the stale bread) and found it to their liking. They called it cock-bread ale, or cock ale, and in the spelling of the time, it became cock ail, and somehow a t was added. 

Another theory suggested by Mencken came from a 1926 article by Marcel Boulenger arguing that cocktail was derived from coquetel, the name of a drink known for centuries in the vicinity of Bordeaux. No explanation is given for the etymology of coquetel.

Yet another version of the word’s origin traces it back to coquetier, which is French for “egg-cup.” Supposedly around 1795 Antoine Peychaud, a New Orleans apothecary (who invented Peychaud bitters), mixed toddies with his bitters and brandy and served them to fellow Masons in an egg cup—and the drink took on the name coquetier, or cocktay and later cocktail in English.

Some other ideas that have been put forth are:

 • Bartenders would drain the dregs of all the barrels and mix them together to serve at a reduced price.  A spigot was called a “cock” and the dregs were “tailings,” so this drink was known as “cock-tailings” or later simply cocktail.

• These leftovers were served from a ceramic vessel shaped like a rooster, with a tap in the tail.

• Doctors treated throat problems with a pleasant-tasting medicine applied to the tip of a feather from a cock's tail.

• The word refers to the fact that a potent drink will "cock your tail," i.e., get your spirits up.

• The word derives from a sixteenth-century drink known as “cock-ale,” whose ingredients included a ground-up boiled rooster.

• There was an Aztec princess named Xochitl (anglicized as Coctel) who was fond of fermented beverages to which she gave her name.

Such confusion is enough to drive you to drink straight gin, as the Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been known to do. The incoherence caused by such overindulgence persists in his surviving works, like the following:      

             

              A florist walked into a bar,

            And said, “I’ll have two Buds.”

            A laundress right behind him asked,

            “Could I just have some suds?”

            “On second thought,” the laundress said,

            “Make that a cup of Cheer.”

            And then an undertaker croaked,

            “I think I’ll have a bier.”           

            An optician walked into the bar

            And said, “I’d like two glasses.”

            A fisherman declared, “I want

            Some ale—make that two Basses.”

            A milkman walked into the bar,

            And said, “I’ll take a quart.”

            A sailor right behind him piped,

            “Just let me drown in port.”

            A cotton-farmer in the bar

            Remarked, “I need a gin.”

            A census-taker then appeared

            And asked for Mickey Finn.

            A contortionist squeezed in

            And called out, “Bottom’s up!”

            Omar Khayyam came in then

            And wrote, “Come fill the cup.”

            A gunman walked into the bar

            And said, “I’ll take a shot.”

            A realtor scanned the drink list and

            Declared, “Give me the lot.”

While You’re Up, Mix Me A Metaphor

The attempt to write vividly carries many inherent verbal pitfalls, one of which is the mixed metaphor. That is an expression in which two or more figurative idioms are used together without considering how their juxtaposition may suggest improbable images.  A classic example, from a 1790 speech in the Irish Parliament:

            Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat.  I see him floating in the air.

     But mark me, sir, I will nip him in the bud. 

A scientist once described a new subject of research as “a virgin field pregnant with possibilities.”

The New Yorker magazine has an occasional filler item called “Block That Metaphor!”, from which came this example:

            So now what we are dealing with is the rubber 

     meeting the road, and, instead of biting the bullet on 

     these issues, we just want to punt.

The estimable columnist Frank Rich once wrote in The New York Times:

            Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about 

     where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten 

     apples at the bottom of the military's barrel may not be a 

     slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

Another metaphorical stew quoted in The New York Times:

            As I look at it with a broad brush, there are a lot of 

     things going south at the same time. There’s no silver 

     bullet out there.

The Tulsa World attempted to get cute in a rhyming headline:

            STEP UP TO THE PLATE

            AND FISH OR CUT BAIT

The champion metaphor-mixer, in my view, is Curtis Sliwa, the anti-crime activist who founded the Guardian Angels.  He was quoted as saying rather graphically:

            I’ve spent a lot of time in the subways. It’s a dark and 

     dank experience….The moment that you walk into the 

     bowels of the armpit of the cesspool of crime, you 

     immediately cringe.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou likes to mix metaphors almost as much as he likes to mix gin and vermouth.  But not quite.

            Your horse is of another color,

            And your pig is in a poke.

            Than dishwater you could not be duller,

            And where there’s fire, there’s smoke.

            You let the cat out of the bag,

            And also spilled the beans.

            And now you want to chew the rag--

            Tell that to the Marines.

            You’ve got your knickers in a twist,

            And you waved the bloody shirt,

            For someone’s mill you’ll just be grist,

            Yes, grist that’s old as dirt.

Much Brouhaha About Nothing

A recent news story observed, “The Republican brouhaha over how to go about repealing Obamacare is never-ending.”  Setting aside the foolishness of wanting to get rid of this country’s first halting step toward civilized medical care, let’s first consider the word brouhaha, meaning “noise, uproar, hubbub, confusion.”

First seen in English around 1890, it apparently was not yet respectable enough to be admitted to either the 1928 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary or the 1934 Webster’s New International.

Etymologists are a little wishy-washy about where brouhaha originated.  It was supposedly a phrase used in medieval French drama as a cry of the devil when disguised as a clergyman. (Nowadays such a cry is more along the lines of “Send a contribution today.”) It is speculated that brouhaha may be a corruption of the Hebrew barukh habba’, which means “blessed be the one who comes.”  Or it could be a modification of the stereotypical evil laugh bwahaha, an indispensable attribute of villains in amateur theatrical productions.

One nice thing about pronouncing the word: according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (to which brouhaha has now gained admission), you can put the accent on any syllable you like—BROO-ha-ha, broo-HA-ha, or broo-ha-HA, or even give equal stress to them all.

About that brouhaha over Obamacare: the Bard of Buffalo Bayou thinks that anyone who wants to repeal it suffers from a pre-existing condition of mental illness (which, of course, is covered by insurance under the Affordable Care Act). 

            It shouldn’t take a Thomas Edison

            To invent a means to access medicine.           

            Fifty million uninsured

            Means fifty million won’t be cured.

            I hope a medal is awardable

            To those who keep health care affordable.

            For better health and trauma care,

            Bring on the Obamacare.

            If Obamacare makes you a fretter,

            Then you come up with something better.

Cat In A Box

The New York Times recently had a clever puzzle in which the final answer could be either HEADS or TAILS, depending on how you solved the clues for the crossing words.  There were four clues that could have been answered either H or T, E or A, A or I, and D or L, to provide the alternate solutions.  For example, “Improves, in a way” could have been answered with either HONES or TONES, “Diner menu item” could be either MELT or MALT, and so on.

Conundrums of this sort are known as Schrödinger puzzles, named for the logical paradox known as Schrödinger’s Cat. A response to what is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, it was devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The paradox posits a cat in a sealed container that will die if poison is released by a decaying subatomic particle. As there is no way to know whether the particle has decayed without opening the box, and therefore whether the cat is dead or alive, logical theory (says Schrödinger) demands that we conclude the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

Understood?  Well, not by me.

The most acclaimed Schrödinger puzzle was created by Jeremiah Farrell and ran in The New York Times on Election Day 1996.  Depending on whether you answered BAT or CAT to the clue “Black Halloween animal”) and similarly for six other possibilities, the answer came out either CLINTON or BOB DOLE.  I guess you know which answer proved correct.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has no problem with grasping Schrödinger’s principle, since he has been simultaneously lucid and incoherent all his life.  See for yourself:

            Old Bob Dole

            Fell in a hole

            And landed on his tush,

            But his rescue crew

            Did not have a clue

            Whether to pull or to push.

            So he stayed in the gorge,

            And his saviors, by George,

            Wandered off under a Bush.

True Blue

Many states have what are known as “Blue Laws”—legislation forbidding certain activities on Sundays and holidays. The rationale, a holdover from Puritan colonists, is that everyone ought to be in church for most of Sunday—not shopping or, especially, not drinking alcoholic beverages. 

Though most of the strictures have been greatly relaxed over the years Blue Laws still exist to some degree almost everywhere.  But why is such a law “blue”? 

Theories abound.  Some say it’s because the first such laws in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1656, were printed on blue paper or bound in books with blue covers. There’s no reliable evidence, however, that this is true.

And, anyway, the term “blue law” is not seen until the eighteenth century, first in 1755 in the New-York Mercury, and then again in 1781, when the Rev. Samuel Peters wrote in The General History of Connecticut, “Blue laws, i.e. bloody laws, for they were all sanctified with whipping, cutting off the ears, burning the tongue, and death.”  From Peters’ comment, blue law is thus thought by some to be a corruption of blood law.

Other theories point to a contemptuous reference to strict moralists as “bluebloods” who imposed their prohibitions on the rest of the populace.  Another etymologist speculates that blue was used because it represents the notion of coldness.

Bluestocking was a term used to refer to Oliver Cromwell’s moralistic Puritan supporters in 1653.

Curiously, in the nineteenth century, blue acquired an almost opposite meaning—“lewd, profane, or obscene.’’ An 1824 Scottish encyclopedia refers to Thread o’Blue  as meaning “any little smutty touch in song-singing, chatting, or piece of writing.”  Thomas Carlyle refers to blueness as meaning “indecent or indelicate” in an 1840 essay.

This meaning is said to originate in the blue dresses that were issued to prostitutes in French houses of correction. To “go into the blue” meant to “go astray.” 

But another slang authority suggests the term comes from the Bibliothèque Bleue, a series of almanacs in blue covers published in France from the early seventeenth century and often containing popular literature with a lurid touch. Blue is also associated with devils and flames of hell—a blue flame indicates a devil is present (or, maybe, just natural gas).  From this concept we get the term blue blazes.

Blue has also been associated since the sixteenth century with sadness and despondency, as in feeling blue or having the blues, probably originating in the concept of a blue devil, as Satan was sometimes depicted in medieval art, which supposedly brought on unhappiness.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou thinks blue is an overworked color. He feels that puce and taupe have never been given their due, and he would like to see a lot more of them in the future.

            After waiting some while in a queue

            To use an unoccupied loo,

                        I lacked the small pittance

                        Required for admittance,

            And that made me terribly blue.

            Oh, oh, how I needed to go!

            But I couldn’t come up with the dough,

                        I hopped on one leg

                        And started to beg,

            But the people around me said, “No.”

            To help me out of this pickle

            Some strangers advanced me a nickel,

                        I copiously thanked ‘em

                        And entered the sanctum,

            But by this time just managed a trickle.

                       

Maundy Morning Quarterback

Later this week is Maundy Thursday, which is the Thursday before Easter, the day of the Last Supper, traditionally celebrated by Christians with the blessing of chrism oil, the ceremonial washing of feet, and the distribution to the poor of alms known as “Maundy money.”

Opinion differs about where the name Maundy comes from. Most linguists say it’s derived from Middle English and Old French mandé, from the Latin mandatum, the first word of the phrase "Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos" ("A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another as I have loved you"), the statement by Jesus in the Gospel of John 13:34, in which he explained significance of washing his apostles’ feet. The phrase is used during the "Mandatum" ceremony at which a priest or bishop washes the feet of 12 persons chosen as a cross-section of the community. (You’ll recall Pope Francis kicked up a controversy last year when he included women and Muslims among his washees.)

But there is another theory: that Maundy arose from "maundsor baskets" or "maundy purses" of alms that the king of England distributed at Whitehall on that day. In this view "Maundy" is related to the Latin mendicare, and French mendier, “to beg.” 

In some countries there is a custom of eating various foods on Maundy Thursday, including sugared almonds, green salads, and pancakes, which, if taken together, make a rather odd meal.

In Scandinavian tradition the day is known as “Sheer (or clean) Thursday” (Skaer torsdag) from the custom of washing the feet.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou washes his feet (religiously) every month, whether they need it or not.

            Jesus and the twelve apostles

            Broke some bread and drank some wassails,

            Gathered in an upper room,

            Where one last supper they’d consume.

            When food was left from supper there,

            They wished they’d had some Tupperware.  

         

        

Nine-Yard Dash

I have been reluctant to tackle the subject of the whole nine yards because there is such a welter of varying opinion about its origin that I hardly know where to begin—or to end.  One of my avidly curious readers, however, has raised the question, and in order to maintain my stellar reputation for customer satisfaction, it behooves me to attempt some disquisition of this enigmatic subject.           

The whole nine yards—meaning “everything, completely, to the maximum, the full extent”—is a surprisingly recent arrival on the idiomatic scene.  The earliest anyone claims to have seen it in print was July 1956, in Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, a magazine devoted to hunting and fishing in the Bluegrass State.  The magazine listed some fishing prizes to be awarded and concluded, “So that’s the whole nine-yards.”

A satisfactory explanation of the phrase has eluded the most dedicated word sleuths. Ben Zimmer, who writes about language for The New York Times, likens the search to the quest for the Holy Grail.

Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, listed the most popular theories about its origin as the amount of cloth in a Scottish kilt, the capacity of a concrete truck, and the length of aircraft machine gun belts in World War II. The late New York Times pundit William Safire devoted nine different columns to the whole nine yards, before concluding firmly in favor of the cement mixer—as expressed in cubic yards.

Michael Quinion, who writes the blog World Wide Words, puts forward several other possibilities: the length of a standard bolt of cloth, the amount of fabric needed for a three-piece suit, the size of a nun’s habit, the length of a maharajah’s sash, the capacity of a West Virginia ore wagon, the volume of rubbish in a standard garbage truck, the length of a hangman’s noose, how far you would have to sprint from the cellblock to the outer wall in a jailbreak, the length of a shroud, the size of a soldier’s pack, a reference to a group of nine shipyards in the World War II, or a distance in football.

Earlier examples—the first in 1912—have been found of the phrase whole six yards, leading to the conclusion that none of the explanations is correct and that the number nine is merely arbitrary, not referring to anything in particular. Jesse Sheidlower, an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, is of this opinion.  “The existence of a six-yard variant,” he says, “shows pretty clearly that it’s not about yards of anything”

Several terms similar in meaning are equally obscure in origin, namely whole hog (1828), whole shebang (1869), and whole ball of wax (1882).  If you’re really interested in this, see my earlier blog on shebang at: http://wordsgoingwild.blogspot.com/search?q=shebang

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou insists that the phrase refers to nine yards of ale, the amount he regularly consumes on his visits to a nearby pub, before scrawling claptrap like the following on the men’s room wall:    

            A daring young Captain of Guards

            Was intent on advancing nine yards,

                        The first eight were fine,

                        But he hit a land mine

            At the ninth—please send sympathy cards.