And Bob’s Your Uncle!

Bobsleddding (or bobsleighing) is a winter sport in which teams of two or sometimes four foolhardy individuals, for reasons best known to themselves, try to see who can slide fastest on a gravity-powered contraption down a narrow, twisting ice track. Don’t ask me why, but they delight in reaching speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour. If you’ve been watching the Olympic games, you’ve probably seen enough of the sport to make you long for a leisurely ride in a one-horse open sleigh.  But why is the thing called a bobsled? 

Was there an early champion of the sport named Bob?  No, that was a man named Caspar—Caspar Badrutt—who owned a hotel in St. Moritz and built the first half-pipe track for racing the sleds around 1870.  That track has hosted two Olympics and is still in use today.

Dictionaries are a little skittish about asserting the origin of bobsled.  Webster’s New International (Second Edition) uncharacteristically offers no explanation at all with its perfunctory definition of “a short sled, mostly used as one of a pair.”  Webster’s Collegiate says the word dates from 1837 and hesitantly suggests, with specious logic, that it might have something to do with the kind of bob that means a “bunch or a cluster.”  The Oxford English Dictionary cites its earliest print appearance in 1848 in John Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, which regards the device as a means of carrying logs over frozen snow.

Some misguided etymologists say the name comes from the tendency of teams to “bob” their heads and bodies back and forth to gain speed.  There are two problems with this explanation.  First, any movement by the riders slows down the sled, rather than increasing its speed.  And second, the word bobsled  predates the sport of bobsled-racing by several decades.

A website called Podictionary.com speculates that the word comes from the design of the log-carrier in two sections, with a set of runners in the front section that had been “bobbed,” or cut short, and a longer set of runners in the rear section.  The reason for this design was to stabilize the sled when crossing rough terrain and prevent the logs from falling off.

And Bob’s your uncle!  That phrase, a British term meaning “and there you have it” or “it’s as easy as pie,” calls for its own bobology, which is even more elusive than bobsled.  As good as any is the suggestion that it refers to Lord Frederick Roberts, a respected nineteenth-century general known affectionately by his men as “Uncle Bobs,” and the phrase originally meant all would be well under his command.

The Bob of Buffalo Bayou came bob, bob, bobbin’ along with this ode to the Olympians.

            Dashing down the chute

            In an old two-man bobsleigh,

            O’er the ice we scoot,

            Racing all the way.

            We better win the gold,

            Or silver anyway,

            Why else would we get freezing cold    

            Atop this stupid sleigh?   

        

Last Quango in London

Winston Churchill—or was it Dylan Thomas or maybe George Bernard Shaw?—having told us that Great Britain and the United States are separated by the barrier of a common language, I was not surprised to be unable to make my way through a recent issue of The Times of London without resorting to an online dictionary—even though The Times is no longer the Keeper of the King’s English that it was before being Murdochized.  Nonetheless, three words leapt out at me in a recent perusal of the venerable Thunderer’s news pages.

First was a story about the waste of money on a quango that was unable to take action owing to delay by the government in issuing guidelines.  The headline even referred to the situation as a “Quango Tango.”

Next, I read that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a bit too frit to answer certain Parliamentary questions before the next election.

And finally, Parliament was considering new regulations relating to asbos.

Quango? Frit? Asbos? Printed lexicons were of no help, since these are all coinages too recent to make it into their pages.  The Internet, God bless its perverse little heart, came to the rescue.  I was able to ferret out the following definitions:

           

Quango – An acronym for a “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization.” In the United States I suppose you could call the Postal Service and the Federal Reserve “quangos,” although most people prefer to call them something else.

           

Frit – A colloquialism from former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s native Lincolnshire, derived from “frightened” and when used in a political sense meaning “cowardly.”  Mrs. Thatcher famously used the word in a 1983 speech about a political opponent in which she shyly asked, in her demure and dulcet tones: “The right honorable gentleman is afraid of an election, is he?  Frightened?  Frit?  Couldn’t take it?  Couldn’t stand it?”  Fraught with frit, the poor fellow froze on the spot. 

Asbo – Another acronym, for “anti-social behaviour order,” which is something like a restraining order imposed to prohibit minor objectionable actions that do not warrant criminal prosecution, such as swearing, drinking to excess, noisemaking, or possibly listening to Britney Spears CDs.  It is sometimes alleged that youthful delinquents in Britain regard having an asbo issued against them as a badge of honor (or, rather, honour). 

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has a whole drawer full of badges of honor, none of them earned by him, but nonetheless he offers these verses to memorialize these unusual words:

            I just adore the taste of satin mangos,

            And must deplore the haste in Latin tangos,

            And trust no more the waste and fat in quangos.

            Somewhere I think that it is writ

            That you must be a native Brit

            In order for you to be frit.

            The young delinquent whom they razz so

            Lives his life as though it has no           

            Rules—and so he needs an asbo.

A Brief Commentation

You’ve probably heard the old joke (which certainly does not bear repeating, but try and stop me) about the aristocratic young potato whose parents would not allow her to marry Dan Rather because he was only a common tater.  But today’s question is: does a commentator commentate?  By the same token, does an administrator administrate, does an orientation orientate, and do planes in formation formate?

The answer to all the above is yes—sort of.  All those verbs—commentate, administrate, orientate, and yes, believe it or not, formate—are back formations that were formated—oops, formed—from longer words mistakenly assumed to be derivatives of non-existent shorter ones. These back-formed –ate words derive from Latin and French and came into English without reference to the shorter English words that they resemble.  Commentator, for example, from which commentate was invented, was from the Latin commentatio (“a study or meditation”) and not from the English word comment.  Commentator was used in English from the 14^th century, and commentate as a verb came along by the end of the 18^th century. 

Most back-formed words are considered sub-standard, needless variants--comment, administer, orient, and form will usually suffice--but sometimes the back-formations, such as donate, notate, sedate, and spectate, achieve accepted status. 

Not all back-formations end in –ate. Others, of varying degrees of acceptability, include emote, enthuse, diagnose, intuit, and reune. Some are often purposely used for humorous effect, like buttle, burgle, couth, kempt, and shevelled.   P. G. Wodehouse once wrote of a man, “…if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who was in a brace for weeks after trying some back-formations, insists on trying again:

            In a creet hotel in a mid-sized urb,

            The sign on the door commands, “Do Turb.”

            The gruntled occupants are trying to coze

            So don’t surveil them, for heaven knows

            They’re still gidding from their recent marriage,

            And not one visitor will they dain or parage.

"A nibble” weird

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer wrote recently, “It is a nibble weird that a guy who describes his relationship to Christmas as ‘hostile’ runs around greater Los Angeles in a floppy red Santa hat….”  We’re not here to analyze the eccentric behavior of this reluctant St. Nick (after all, he does live in Los Angeles, where the bizarre is the norm), but rather to muse on Ms. Steinhauer’s use of the phrase “a nibble.”   She apparently means it in the same sense as “a bit,” that is “somewhat or rather.”

No other instances of “a nibble” in this sense are readily found among the trillions of words on the Internet, nor does such usage appear in any dictionary visible around here.  One must conclude, therefore, that it is a new use, so congratulations on your coinage, Ms. Steinhauer—stand up and take a lexiconic bow!

Computerese has already appropriated the word “nibble” to mean “half a byte,” although in keeping with the variant spelling of “byte,” it is often spelled “nybble.”   A “byte,” for those (like me) who did not know, is eight “bits,” and a “bit” is a unit of computer information equivalent to the result of a choice between two absolute opposites.  This kind of bit is a portmanteau word, made up of the first two and last letters of the phrase “binary digit .”     

But we digress. “Nibble” was first a verb, from the Low German nibbelen, meaning “to take little bits of something.” By the sixteenth century “nibble” was also a noun, meaning the act of nibbling, especially when done by a fish on a piece of bait.  Nowadays a nibble can also be an expression of interest in an offer to sell something.

The phrase “a bit,” meaning “somewhat,” derives from the word “bite,” so etymologically there’s no reason why “nibble” couldn’t be used in the same way. There are other nouns that have become adverbial idioms defining a quantity, such as “a tad” (from the word for a small child) and “a lot” (from the word meaning all the members of a group), as in “I like Maserati sports cars a lot, but they are a tad expensive.”

“A lot,” by the way, is two words and looks like a head-on train wreck if written “alot,” as it is by an astonishing number of people.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is not among them, however, and rather than nibbling, he suggests that you chew on this nonsense rhyme until you find some meat in it:

           

            If I choose to eat a bit,

            Then I would have a bite.

            And if I choose to sit,

            It can be upon a site.

            And then if I should spit,

            Why, it might be just for spite.

            Now it’s almost time to quit—

            But not quite.

Number, Please

Inquiring minds are so inquisitive!   One of the customers now asks whether one should say “a number of [insert items here] are” or “a number of [insert items here] is”….

Honestly, the things some people worry about!

The choice of a singular or plural verb with nouns that describe amount or quantity—such as “number” or “percentage”—is governed by a principle called "synesis," a concept developed in the 1860s by the English grammarian Henry Sweet (undoubtedly known to his intimates as “Sweetie”).  "Synesis," from the Greek for "sense" or "understanding," is a grammatical construction made according to the meaning to be expressed, rather than according to strict syntax.  

The classic example of synesis is "A number of items are...." The same principle applies to units of measure that have a collective sense: "Two quarts of Southern Comfort is all I can drink at one time."  Some grammarians take the principle of synesis so far that they will accept the construction "If anyone calls, tell them I'm out," the meaning being tell all the people who call that I am out (out cold, that is, from all that Southern Comfort).  

It is customary in the case of "a number of items" to use the plural verb; but in the case of "the number of items" the singular is more usual: "A number of people were invited to my party this year," but (since I served only Southern Comfort last year) "the number of people who accepted was small."

A number of people have requested that the Bard of Buffalo Bayou cease and desist from his quasi-poetic activity; in fact the number of such people is astronomical.  But their pleas (usually without “please”) have fallen on deaf ears. 

            Whenever “number” rhymes with “lumber,”

            It means it’s artithmetical.

            But when “number” rhymes with “dumber,”

            It’s something anesthetical.

Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis

 

Have you ever tried to write a palindrome that made sense?  You know, one of those sentences that is identical when read forward and backward. Everyone knows “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” which Napoleon would have said if he had thought of it and had been speaking in English.  My new book, Words Gone Wild (which will be at a book store or junk shop near you in the spring) has a section on palindromes, including a few of my own, which are mostly gibberish.

There are lots of nifty ones by other folks that do make sense:  “Dennis and Edna sinned”; “Madam, I’m Adam”; “I saw desserts; I’d no lemons, alas, no melon.  Distressed was I”; and the inevitable “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!” James Thurber mastered the art form with “He goddam mad dog, eh?”  One short, simple, plainspoken palindrome asks and answers a question: “Did Mom poop?  Mom did.”  (It would also work with Dad.)

Will Thomas has written a 5,000-word palindrome called “A Gassy Obese Boy’s Saga”; Lawrence Levine, penned a 37,000-word novel called “Dr. Awkward & Olson in Oslo”; and David Stephens’ “Satire: Veritas” is reputedly 50,000 words (but who counted?).

The problem with most long palindromes is that, in order to keep the letters in the right sequence, they begin to wander away from coherence. Demetri Martin, an American comedian and actor who has been seen frequently on The Daily Show and other late-night TV venues, likes to play around with palindromes.  He’s famous for his 223-word creation “Dammit, I’m mad,” which makes pretty good sense, and he also came up with this one, a mere 113 words, which borders on the fringe of intelligibility:

Wow. O.K.

A still animal sits afoot. Tones I ring.

I sing (i.e. ride it, nuts open). On or off, I riff.

Uh… I, to lasses, say, "Oh aha, hah, all!"

It's tops. It is a Tao, bro, to my baby demo.

Can one poet arise so rosy?

As "D" I star. Comedy, baby. My my, a show.

Oh say "my my," baby.

Democrats? I'd say so. (Roses irate.)

Open, on a comedy baby motorboat. As "it"

I spot still a "ha hah!" ahoy. Assess a lot.

I huff, I riff, or on one post untied, I reign.

I sign. I rise, not too fast.

I slam. In all, it's a K.O. wow.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who thinks of himself as a palindrome, since he never knows whether he’s coming or going, writes:

            To write a palindrome I fear is much too hard:

            Drab am I. Mood dim. Ah! Amid doom, I’m a bard.

Who Dat Say Who Dat?

The words “Who dat?” will resound throughout the land in the coming weekend, as the New Orleans Saints attempt to work one of their miracles on the frisky Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl.  “Who dat?—or its longer version, “Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? Who dat? Who dat?”—has for almost 30 years been the motto of the now triumphant football team that was once so bad that its fans hid their faces under paper bags.

So who dat who said “who dat” first?  It began, of course, with the phrase “Who’s that?” As you are well aware, the “th” sound in “that” is a voiced fricative, which is formed by the frictional rustling of air through narrowed passages in the oral cavity.  The substitution of a dental or “d” sound for the “th” is common in certain English speakers, including those whose native tongues are German, French, and many Asian languages, which do not have the “th” sound, and also among Irish, Irish-Americans, and African-Americans.  The “d” sound is often heard in Brooklynese, as in “dem bums” (who proved they really were by moving to Los Angeles), and in the Cajun and Creole patois of Louisiana.

The catch-phrase “Who dat?” probably originated in American minstrel shows in the 1800s.  A song of 1898 was called “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd?” (lyrics by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar).  Many minstrel show skits featured the phrase “Who dat?” answered by “Who dat say who dat?” and then the never-fail punch line, “Who dat say who dat when I say who dat?”

As a sports chant, it was used by the Jaguars of Southern University in Baton Rouge from the 1960s and then spread to New Orleans public schools and to LSU before the Saints adopted it.

The National Football League has now sent cease-and-desist letters (i.e., if you don’t stop doing whatever it is you’re doing, a highly obnoxious lawyer will make life unpleasant for you) to vendors selling T-shirts with “Who Dat?” emblazoned on them.  The NFL claims to own a trademark on those words, although a company called WhoDat, Inc. claims to have registered the trademark in 1983 for a recording of “When The Saints Go Marching In” featuring the repeated chant of “Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints?” (recorded by Aaron Neville and several Saints players). It became more or less official for the Saints after the recording was widely publicized by sportscaster Ron Swoboda.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou begs to inform you of the earliest instances that he has found of the phrase, to wit:

            When Hamlet’s guards were at their post,

            They thought they saw his father’s ghost,

            And trembling as they stood thereat,

            Their only question was, “Who dat?”

            Macbeth encountered Witches three,

            And he was nervous as could be.

            The thane politely doffed his hat,

            And asked those three old crones, “Who dat?”

           

            And when poor Desdemona heard

            A long soliloquy, she stirred,

            And, thinking that it was the cat,

            She called out sleepily, “Who dat?”

           

            And thus you see that “other” Bard

            Was clearly in the avant-garde

            And with his feather-pen begat

            That oft-repeated phrase, “Who dat?”

Agonizing Reapprisal

A BBC announcer—one of those news readers who Dylan Thomas said sound as if they “have the Elgin marbles in their mouths”—recently reported that the U. S.  Secretary of Defense had been “appraised” of a bombing in Afghanistan.  How much will you bet that’s not what was meant?

Appraise means “to set a value on, to evaluate the worth or significance of, or to give an expert judgment about.”  Its root is Anglo French appreiser, meaning  “to prize or to praise.”  Your gorgeous new home, with the cathedral ceilings, four working fireplaces, Calder mobiles, Aubusson tapestries, Jacuzzi tub, Persian carpeted walk-in closet, and Olympic-sized infinity swimming pool will certainly be appraised by appropriate taxing authorities—and when they have appraised it, they will apprise you of their appraisal, which will be much higher than you would like. Apprise means “to inform or tell, give notice to,” and its root is the French appris, past participle of apprendre, “to learn or to teach.”

There’s no question that the Secretary of Defense would have to appraise the situation in Afghanistan, but one hopes it would be only after he had been apprised of what was going on there.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou thinks such distinctions are pedantic, and he obviously went off on a tangent (a scarlet one, no doubt) before he was apprehended and appropriately sedated:

            Appraise a prize

            Then raise your eyes

            And apprise me of your praise.

            Then rise and raze

            The rows of prose

            That rose in prime arrays.

Are There Any News?

The on-screen description of the programming for BBC World News America says: “News from around the world are presented.”  Nowadays “news” are not often spoken of in the plural.

The word’s origin is the Anglo-Saxon adjective niwe, meaning “not existing before or not previously known.”  From it came the noun newes, which initially was used in the plural, meaning “new things” or “novelties,” like iPhones and chocolate Martinis. By 1500 the word came to mean the report of recent occurrences—not the happenings themselves, but Anderson Cooper’s interminable telling of them.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first instance of the word in the singular was in 1566. Thereafter it tended to be construed as a singular noun most of the time—but not always.

Shakespeare went both ways, as it were.  In Henry VI, Part 2, Queen Margaret favors the plural when she cries in despair, “Ay me!  What is this world! What news are these!” But Hamlet tells Rosencrantz, “Your news is not true.” From the sound of it, both of them were watching too much Glenn Beck.

Horace Greeley, the founding editor of the New York Tribune, always insisted that the word “news” was plural. The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who may be construed in either the plural or the singular, described this newsy exchange between Greeley and a foreign correspondent:

            When Horace Greeley looked at his New York Tribune,

            Page One, he thought, had far too little to peruse.

            He wired a correspondent: “Must hear from you soon—          

            Let me know at once if there are any news.”

            
            The correspondent answered Greeley right away:

            “Last week you may recall that we had quite a few,

            But when I looked around again the other day,

            I must report I couldn’t find a single new.”

Yahoo, Bing, and That Whole Crowd

Since a recent entry on this blog about the origins of the name of the search engine Google, equal time has been demanded for rivals Yahoo, Bing, and several others.  No sooner said than done!

Yahoo, which entered the fray in 1994, started as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” named by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who devised the system while they were graduate students in electrical engineering at Stanford.  That must have seemed a bit too homey--like Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery in Lake Wobegon, or Billie Jo and Myrtle’s Bank and Trust Company in Cut and Shoot, Texas. It was eventually changed to Yahoo, which is reputed to be an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”  Yahoo also means “a filthy, degraded, vicious lout,” from the human-like creatures that are contrasted with the more civilized, horse-like Houynhmns in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  Why this seems to be an appropriate name for a search engine is a mystery.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine launched in 2009, is a lot easier to grasp. Originally known as MSN Search—not a very catchy name, you have to admit—the new Bing is an onomatapoeia, a word that imitates the sound it represents.  It’s supposed to remind you of the sound made by certain machines at the moment of the completion of a task (like a cash register ringing up a sale?) and also to suggest “Bingo!”, a word of triumph derived from the game played on cruise ships and in parish halls.  Bing Crosby, Bing cherries, and Sir Rudolf Bing do not seem to enter into it.

Alta Vista (“high view”), which has been around since 1995, was chosen in reference to the surroundings of the Digital Equipment Corp. at Palo Alto (“tall tree”), California.

Ask.Com is pretty straightforward, but you have to know it was originally Ask Jeeves, an allusion to Bertie Wooster’s infallibly helpful valet in the stories by P. G. Wodehouse.  

Yelp, another new alternative (2004) that specializes in local searches, is a word that means a sharp, shrill cry, from the Old English gielpan, meaning “boast.”

No one seems to have thought of naming a search engine Eureka (“I have found it”), the word uttered by Archimedes when he discovered a method for determining the purity of gold. 

Bottom-feeding on the World Wide Web, The Bard of Buffalo Bayou came up with this bit of detritus:

           

            I feel extremely sorry for my Ma and Pa, who

            Had no Alta Vista, Google, Bing, Ask, or Yahoo.

            You can very easily do the most difficult task

            With Alta Vista, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.

            Yes, indeed, you can discover every little thing

            On Google, Alta Vista, Ask, Yahoo, or Bing—

            There’s no need to be intellectually frugal

            With Ask, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Bing and Google.

           
            As for me, I never will be able to resist a

            Chance to learn why grain grows an arista,

            Or how the ancient Romans employed a ballista,

            Or what I could do if I had a nice, fresh genista,

            Or what Wikipedia says about Flockhart, Calista—   
            On Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Google, and Alta Vista.

The Greengrocers’ Apostrophe

The Oxford Companion to the English Language cautions strongly against the use of what it calls the illiterate “Greengrocer’s Apostrophe.”  What that means is an apostrophe needlessly inserted to make the plural of a word—a practice for which British greengrocers (and maybe a few elsewhere) seem to have a penchant, as in:

   FRESH PEA’S AND BEAN’S   

Lynne Truss in her inexplicably best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves, has made a virtual career of ferreting out needless apostrophes, citing such horrific instances as:

   CD’S, DVD’S, VIDEO’S, BOOK’S

The most egregious example surely must be the BBC web page announcement of a program about grammar for children, which read:

   NEXT WEEK: NOUNS AND APOSTROPHE’S!

To be perfectly fair to those beleaguered greengrocers, I must point out that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the Mrs. Grundys of grammar started making hard-and-fast rules, there was a perfectly respectable tradition of using apostrophes for plurals, especially for words ending in vowels--“We doe confess Errata’s” (Leonard Lichfield, 1641), “Comma’s are used” (Philip Luckcombe, 1771)--and for words ending s, z, ch, sh, tz (“waltz’s and cotillions”).  In these rule-ridden days, however, using an apostrophe for plurals other than numbers (7's), letters (W's), initials (B.L.T.'s) and a few oddities like “do’s and don’ts,” is definitely among the don’ts. 

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who has apostrophized quite a bit in his time, is indebted to the rhythmic genius of the immortal Joyce Kilmer for the following:

                        I think that I would rather be

                        A dash than an apostrophe.

                        A dash is simple, strong, and firm,

                        Apostrophes just make you squirm.

                        But if somehow I had to be

                        A stupid old apostrophe,

                        I’d keep things strictly intramural

                        And never show up in a plural.

Outside the Box

We all like to believe that we can “think outside the box”—that is come up with imaginative solutions to problems, unconstrained by conventional wisdom.  But what is that “box” outside of which we like to think? A recent “Says You!” radio show (heard nationwide on many public stations) asked its panel if they knew the origin of the phrase.  The panel opined valiantly, trying to relate it to the box-like cubicles standard in offices today.

Host Richard Sher, however, provided the answer: the term relates to the imaginary square formed by nine dots lined up in three rows in a puzzle known, not surprisingly, as “the nine-dot puzzle.”  The challenge is to connect all nine dots with four straight lines, without lifting your pencil (or pen, if you’re really sure of yourself).  The only way to accomplish the feat is to draw the lines beyond the boundaries of the imaginary “box.”

The question of who first used the term “think outside the box” is not so easy to pin down.  The puzzle itself has been around at least since 1914, when it appeared in Cyclopedia of 5,000 Puzzles by Sam Lloyd, an American chess champion. It may have been devised by Lloyd’s frequent collaborator, Henry Dudeney, an English puzzle wonk.  Lots of hotshot management consultants now claim to have originated the phrase “thinking outside the box” (to describe their own genius compared to their hopelessly dopey clients) sometime in the 1970s, but no one can really say for sure who thought of it first.

 The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who does most of his thinking inside a large packing crate filled with excelsior, reacts as follows:

            Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

            Liked to think outside the box.

            And then for lunch he’d munch a bagel

            Smeared with cream cheese and some lox.
 

Puttin’ on Those White Shoes

Whenever I hear someone refer to a “white-shoe law firm,” I get this mental picture of a group of lawyers in their dark-blue pin-stripe Armani suits, Countess Mara power ties, starched Turnbull & Asser dress shirts--and white tennis shoes. In fact, the white shoes in question are not tennis shoes at all. The phrase refers to important old law firms, mostly in New York or Boston, whose members do not, as a rule, wear white shoes of any sort while actually practicing law, although they are fully shod in darker hues. 

As the late word maven William Safire explained it, the phrase derives from "white bucks," a type of laced suede or buckskin shoes with dark red soles that have been popular for more than half a century among moneyed New Englanders, especially fraternity men at Ivy League colleges. “White-shoe” is defined by Wordnet as "denoting a company or law firm owned and run by members of the WASP elite."

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, whose modest legal affairs are tended by an equally modest lawyer in scuffed brown loafers, filed this brief as amicus curiae.

          SONG OF A WHITE-SHOE LAWYER

I’m puttin’ on my white shoes,

           Snappin’ shut my briefcase,

           Thinkin’ of my fee.

           I’m polishin’ those white shoes,

           Sittin’ here admirin’

           My Ivy League degree.           

           

           I'm off to court today

           And there is no delay 

           To plead my client’s case 

           And I must

           Be sure the verdict’s just-- 

           ‘Cause there’s no second place!

          

           I’m dressed for power, 

           In my Armani outfit

           And my fancy white shoes, 

           Billin’ every hour!

Go, Go, Google

You might think that Google is a shiny new word, right out of the box, since it refers to a computer search engine that came into being only in 1996. On the contrary, google has a long, long history—so long, in fact, that it is listed by some dictionaries as “obsolete.” 

Google is a variant of goggle, which dates at least to the sixteenth century, and is an adjective meaning “protuberant, prominent, or rolling,” or a verb meaning “to turn the eyes, to look sidelong, or to squint.”  A googly (probably adapted from either goggle or google) is a cricket ball thrown to curve in one direction and break in the other.  Googly-eyed is the same as goggle-eyed, “having bulging or rolling eyes.”

Fast forward to the turn of the twentieth century, when English music-hall performer Fanny Wentworth and Carl Smith wrote a song called “The Goo-Goo Song,” giving rise to goo-goo eyes, meaning “loving or enticing looks.”

We’re still a long way from the search engine, but bear up! In the wake of “The Goo-Goo Song,” the word google was resurrected in 1913 in The Google Book, a children's book about an imaginary creature called the Google (think “Grinch”) who lives in Googleland.  To capitalize on the word’s popularity, Billy DeBeck in 1919 started a comic strip called “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.”  This gave rise to a 1923 song by Con Conrad and Billy Rose about “Barney Google, with His Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes.”

Okay, we’re getting there.  In the late 1930s Columbia University mathematician Edward Kasner wanted to devise a name for a number equal to the number “1” followed by one hundred zeroes, which is more than even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can count.  His nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, a fan of the Barney Google comic strip, suggested google.  Kasner liked the sound of it, but decided to change the spelling, and he introduced the word googol in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination.

This is the term Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in mind when they named their company in 1996—but they misspelled it (presumably intentionally), thus reintroducing with a new meaning a 500-year-old word that had served many purposes.  Now google has made it back into the dictionaries, obsolete no more, not only as a trademarked noun, with a capital G, but also as a lower-case verb meaning “to search for on the Internet.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who invites you to google him at any time, mused as follows:

           My eyes start to goggle, my nose starts to wriggle,

My brain starts to boggle, and soon I may giggle, 

I’ll play on my bugle a tune that’s quite fugal

And make goo-goo-googly eyes while I google.

The Bee and All That Buzz

The first U. S. National Spelling Bee was in 1925, and Frank Neuhauser of Louisville, Kentucky, won it by correctly spelling gladiolus.  Every year, glassy-eyed, word-weary students up to the eighth grade compete in the event, which offers prizes of cash, gold medals, trips to Washington and New York, and the chance to get your picture, either gleefully smiling or joyfully tearful, in your hometown newspaper.

Since 1925, other winning words (or losing words, depending on your point of view) have included: sacrilegious, chlorophyll, insouciant, soubrette, catamaran, eudaemonic, smaragdine, esquamulose, shalloon, hydrophyte, maculature, elucubrate, psoriasis, milieu, odontalgia, antipyretic, spoliator, fibranne, elegiacal, staphylococci, antediluvian, xanthosis, vivisepulture, chiaroscurist, logorrhea, succedaneum, autochthonous, Ursprache, serrefine, guerdon, and Laodicean­—a few of which are actually in real people’s vocabularies.  Don’t you just love it when those autochthonous Laodiceans in their eudaemonic shalloon bring out their smaragdine serrefines and want to start elucubrating about antipyretic vivisepulture? 

No one really knows (or perhaps cares) why a spelling bee is called a “bee.” The Oxford English Dictionary thinks that quilting bees, husking bees, and other such events that bring people together for a common purpose derive from the activity of the humble bumblebee. Other scholars, however, say fie upon the busy buzzing bees, believing instead that the word is related to the Middle English bene, meaning a favor, and, by extension, a group of volunteers getting together to help a neighbor.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who, as runner-up of the 1950 National Spelling Bee, misspelled the word haruspex (a Roman soothsayer who reads animal entrails), offers his apologia somewhat more than half a century late.

I’d be as great as Julius Caesar,

Or any other Roman geezer,

And the populus would think I was a wizard,

If I were an old haruspex

Who tracked down wicked, evil suspects

By studying the liver of a lizard.

Blue Moon

Nothing in recent memory has enchanted the weather forecasters so much as the blue moon observed over the New Year holiday.  None could resist pointing out its rarity by telling us it came only “once in a blue moon.”  Okay, so what is a “blue moon”?

It’s a full moon that occurs outside the regular monthly pattern.  Most years have one full moon each month, but each solar calendar year has roughly eleven days more than a lunar year, so the extra days accumulate and once every two or three years there’s an extra full moon, which is called a “blue moon.” So  actually it’s not all that rare, and it’s probably a mistake to say that something truly unusual—like a friendly post card from the IRS—comes once in a blue moon. 

Is it so-called because it looks blue?  Maybe, or maybe not.  If you had a look at our recent blue moon, it was difficult to see any color in it.  The term goes back to the sixteenth century, when church officials, in using a full moon to calculate the date for Easter, noticed that every few years there was an extra full moon, which threw their calculations awry, and so they referred to this moon as a “false moon” or a “betrayer,” using the Old English word belewe, meaning “to betray.”  There was a reference to a “belewe moon” in a 1528 pamphlet. 

Other stubborn people insist that the phrase refers to an infrequent moon that visibly appears to be bluish in color, a phenomenon that might be caused by dust particles or smoke.  After the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the moon looked blue for two years.

Rodgers and Hart’s ballad “Blue Moon” refers to a stroke of romantic luck in which the beloved is seen “standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own,” an occurrence that was so rare that it must have happened under a blue moon. (The first lyric was quite different, written for Jean Harlow in a 1933 movie, in which she was saying her prayers and sang, to the same melody, “O, Lord, if you’re not busy up there, I ask for help with a prayer, so please don’t give me the air.”  Later, lyricist Lorenz Hart resurrected the tune for another movie, with new lyrics: “Act One, you gulp your coffee and run, into the subway you crowd, don’t breathe—it isn’t allowed.”  Hart came up with still another set of lyrics in 1934: “Oh, Lord, I could be good to a lover, but then I always discover the bad in every man.”  None of the previous versions having become hits, by 1935 the song was recycled yet again, with the lyrics it now sports, all of which just proves that you should never give up on anything, even the Houston Texans and the Chicago Cubs.) 

Once in a blue moon the Bard of Buffalo Bayou tries to spin out some romantic verse, and this is his most recent billet-doux:

            I recall an event that was one in a million:

            A pale lustrous moon in the somber gray skies,

            Then through the mist I saw something vermilion:

            The two glowing dots of your little red eyes.

When They Begin the Begging

Have you ever begged a question?  You probably have and perhaps didn’t even know it at the time.  It is a technical term in logic, also known as petitio principii, meaning “a fallacy in which a premise is assumed to be true without warrant.” You could also call it circular reasoning, as in the following unsuccessful attempt to prove a statement:

            

            Dick (accusingly): Jane committed perjury!

            Perry Mason (with aplomb): How do you know Jane committed perjury?

            Dick (sputteringly): Because...she wasn’t telling the truth!

                       

If that’s all the testimony Dick can muster, Perry will win yet another case, and Jane will get off scot-free.

In recent years, however, some people—even some who possess college degrees and unabridged dictionaries—have begun to use “beg the question” to mean “avoid asking the proper a question, or fail to provide an answer.” After providing the technically correct definition (i.e. the logical fallacy), The Oxford Companion to the English Language adds this second definition--with a caveat:  "Avoiding giving an answer or facing an issue.  Henry Fowler in Modern English Usage calls the second sense 'a misapprehension of which many writers need to disabuse themselves.'”  

A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is absolutely dogmatic: "'Begging the question' does not mean 'evading the issue' or 'inviting the obvious questions,' as some mistakenly believe. The proper meaning is 'basing a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof as the conclusion itself.'"

All this suggests rather conclusively that using "beg the question" to mean "avoid answering a question" is sub-standard.  

But wait!  Help for the sub-standard among us is on the way!

In Webster's  Collegiate Dictionary"  (2007) this is the entire definition for "beg the question": "1. to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled. 2. to elicit a question logically as a reaction or response."  

  

The meaning of the term has evolved, and linguistic purists, kicking, screaming and pulling their thinning hair, must forgo attempts to put this wayward genie back into the bottle.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, whose unerring logic beggars all description, begged that this meretricious bit of doggerel be appended to this otherwise scholarly monograph:

I tried to beg the question,

But you said “Not a chance.”

And then I begged to differ,

As you just looked askance.

I asked to beg a favor,

Then I was double-crossed.

And when I begged your pardon, 

You told me to get lost.

A Bouquet of Crash Blossoms

The New York Times calls attention to a new phrase added to the language during 2009—“crash blossom.”  This neologism is used to refer to infelicitously expressed newspaper headlines that produce double entendres that might be interpreted in more than one way.  The example in the Times is SHARK ATTACKS PUZZLE EXPERTS, with assurances that it doesn’t mean Will Shortz and his confreres are in danger.

What the Times article does not explain is how the phrase “crash blossom” originated.  Your intrepid blogger delved deep into the files to unearth the headline responsible: VIOLINIST LINKED TO JAL CRASH BLOSSOMS.  It appeared in the online edition of Japan Today over a story about the musician Diana Yukawa, whose father had been killed in a Japanese airline crash and whose career was now flourishing. Subsequent comment on this headline on the website testycopyeditors.org resulted in the coinage of the phrase. 

Newspaper headlines lend themselves to unintended ambiguity since the people who write them, even though they may have summa cum laude Harvard English degrees, have to cram a lot of information into a rigidly restricted space on a tight deadline. A few of the more provocative “crash blossoms” that I have encountered are:

JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT

MINERS REFUSE TO WORK AFTER DEATH

CHEF PUTS HIS HEART INTO MEALS FOR NEEDY

DEVOUT NUN TELLS HOW POPE TOUCHED HER

OLD SECRETARY GIVES COLLECTORS A THRILL

CEO MAKES OFFER TO SCREW COMPANY SHAREHOLDERS

NFL ASKS PLAYERS TO DONATE BRAINS FOR RESEARCH

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who whiled away many halcyon hours on the rim of a newspaper copydesk writing his share of crash blossoms, phoned in this late-breaking bulletin for the final edition:

            Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

            CONGRESSMAN CAUGHT IN COZY LOVE NEST!

            If it’s in print, there’s no doubt about it.

            COSTUME MALFUNCTION EXPOSES ONE BREAST!

            Here is the news you really don’t need:

            SUPER BOWL HERO IN MESSY DIVORCE!

            Here is the news you’re dying to read:

            TRANSVESTITE COPS ARE FOUND ON THE FORCE!

            All of the news that’s not fit to print,

            About matters medical, sordid, or phallic,

            Takes on an air of importance by dint

            OF NINETY-SIX-POINT GOTHIC CAPS, BOLD AND ITALIC!