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Caution is a virtue, but, like every other virtue, it can be practiced with excessive zeal and become a vice (like parsimony turning into stinginess). The negative extreme of caution is cowardice.

The post The origin of the word SLANG is known! appeared first on OUPblog.

Last week some space was devoted to the crawling, scratching crab, so that perhaps enlarging on the topic “Crab in Idioms” may not be quite out of place. The plural in the previous sentence is an overstatement, for I have only one idiom in view. The rest is not worthy of mention: no certain meaning and no explanation. But my database is omnivorous and absorbs a lot of rubbish. Bibliographers cannot be choosers.

The post Sticking my oar in, or catching and letting go of the crab appeared first on OUPblog.

As I have observed in the past, the best way for me to make sure that I have an audience is to say something deemed prejudicial or wrong. Then one or more readers will break their silence, and I’ll get the recognition I deserve (that is, my comeuppance).

The post Etymology gleanings for July 2016 appeared first on OUPblog.

Here is a phrase whose origin seems to be known, but, as this does not mean that everybody knows it, a short discussion may not be out of place. I have such a huge database of idioms that once in six weeks or so I am seized with a desire to share my treasures with the public.

The post By hook or by crook appeared first on OUPblog.

We know even less about the origin of idioms than about the origin of individual words. This is natural: words have tangible components: roots, suffixes, consonants, vowels, and so forth, while idioms spring from customs, rites, and general experience. Yet both are apt to travel from land to land and be borrowed. Who was the first to suggest that beating (or flogging) a willing horse is a silly occupation, and who countered it with the idea that beating a dead horse is equally stupid?

The post Between language and folklore: “To hang out the broom” appeared first on OUPblog.

Terms for bullshit in the English language have grown so vast it has now become a lexicon itself. We talked to Mark Peters, author of Bullshit: A Lexicon, about where the next set of new terms will come from, why most of the words are farm related, and bullshit in politics.

The post What a load of BS: Q&A with Mark Peters appeared first on OUPblog.

I keep receiving comments and questions about idioms. One of our correspondents enjoys the phrase drunk as Cooter Brown. This is a well-known simile, current mostly or exclusively in the American south. I can add nothing to the poor stock of legends connected with Mr. Brown. Those who claim that they know where such characters came from should be treated with healthy distrust.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for October 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.

Fowl Play
Written & Illustrated By Travis Nichols
Chronicle Books        8/04/2015
978-1-4521-3182-5
40 pages         Age 7—12

“Just what kind of monkey business has befallen Mr. Hound’s shop? Who has broken his window? And most importantly: why?

“Luckily, our team of plucky detectives has been chomping at the bit to take on their first case. When Mr. Hound hires them to investigate, they hoof it to his shop. And once they get sleuthing, wild horses couldn’t drag them away from the scent of a clue. But is it all just a dog and pony show to distract them from the truth

“Idioms are everywhere in the Gumshoe Zoo detective agency’s hilarious first case as they attempt to get to the bottom of Mr. Hound’s mystery.” [inside jacket]

Review
The Gumshoe Zoo Detective Agency has finally received their first case: someone has broken Mr. Hound’s shop window. But why? Each member of the detective agency is on the case, each having something to say:

“Hmm . . . Yes. There’s something fishy going on around here.”

This is said by Quentin, a goat. All of the Gumshoe Zoo detectives are animals. But Quentin’s fishy statement was overheard by Reggie, who happens to be a fish. Quentin quickly saves face.

“”Oh! No offense, Reggie.”
“None taken. But you are right. There is some definite monkey business at hand, my friend.”

Reggie agrees with Quentin, but makes his assessment within earshot of Steve, a monkey. And so it goes through the line-up of detectives, each one making a clichéd remark that indicts a fellow detective, yet none take offense at the off-handed remarks. The detectives are too glued to the case to become offended at these idioms. Then a clue is found that opens up the case and makes an unexpected turn. The detectives are not confused. They immediately figure out what happened at Mr. Hound’s shop. They quickly deduce who threw a can of tomatoes through the shop window. The answer is not a pretty picture.

Fowl Play is the first of a series that will have children quickly understanding parts of speech, such as the idioms used in Mr. Hound’s case of the broken window. The story is hilarious, not just because of the witty idioms, but also because the comic book illustrations are terrific. Fowl Play is one unusual book but it does its job. Teachers will have loads of fun integrating this series into their lesson plans. Kids will love the humor and the illustrations of the detectives.

The Gumshoe Zoo detectives are: Josie (a rat), Morgan (a chicken), Sharon (a duck), and Mike (a bull), in addition to the detectives referenced above. Of course, the victim, Mr. Hound, is a dog. The case does not end as one would expect. In the middle of an interview for W-IDM Channel 4, an urgent situation develops downtown . The Mayor, a cat, wants the Gumshoe Zoo detectives on the case. This case will not be as easy as Fowl Play and Mr. Hound’s idiom filled broken window. According to the final page, this case will be a “beast of oxymoronic proportions.” This is one case I am anxious to read and one new series I think will be an educational blast.

After the Fowl Play mystery is solved, the definition of “idioms” and the meaning of each idiom used in the story is given in a mish-mash style perfect for this comically fowl story. This section is worth reading for the humor and the explanations. Kids will love the references and may just find themselves using an idiom or two in their speech.

Fowl Play is No Sweat for this Author!

FOWL PLAY. Text & illustrations copyright © 2015 by Travis Nichols. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Mighty Media Kids, an imprint of Mighty Media Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Buy Fowl Play at Amazon—Book Depository—iTunes Books—IndieBound Books—Chronicle Books.

Learn more about Fowl Play HERE.

Meet the author/illustrator, Travis Nichols, at his website:  http://iamtravisnichols.com/
Find more children’s books at the Chronicle Books website:  http://www.chroniclebooks.com/

ALSO BY TRAVIS NICHOLS
Monstrous Fun: A Doodle and Activity Book
Uglydoll: My Hero?
The Totally Awesome Book of Useless Information
. . . any many more

Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved

Full Disclosure: Fowl Play by Travis Nichols, and received from Chronicle Books, is in exchange NOT for a positive review, but for an HONEST review. The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Written with a strong narrative drive, and featuring a compelling female protagonist, Perla Garcia and the Mystery of La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, is also a very well-crafted bilingual text that will introduce children to Spanish vocabulary and idioms.

As every student of etymology knows, today, after at least five centuries of European historical linguistics, it is hard and often impossible to discover what has been said about the origin of any word of such well-researched languages as Classical Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, or English. Hence my fight for updated analytic etymological dictionaries that survey the entire field and leave little (and sometimes nothing) to glean. They describe the state of the art and invite the reader to pick up where older scholars and amateurs have left off. Fortunately, the goal of retracing the steps of one’s predecessors results in more than amassing footnotes and providing an impressive apparatus. In the process of reading old — and sometimes very old — articles and books we follow the paths of human thought with its victories and defeats. Few things are more interesting than finding out how people, in their wisdom, arrive at and, in their foolishness, reject the truth. If we agree that a drop of water reflects the whole world, we may also agree that a look at the history of the smallest problem may be important and instructive.

The origin of the idiom that’s the cheese is certainly a very small problem. At least as early as 1865 someone who revealed to the readership only his first initials — and whom, on the analogy of Mr. W. H., the famous “begetter” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, we will call Mr. W. S. (for this is how he signed the lettter) — wrote: “A friend of mine who has just returned from India has suggested that it is derived from a word very common in Bengalee [sic] as spoken in Calcutta.” Some wits, he added, say: “That’s the Stilton” or “That’s the Cheshire.” Another letter writer, also in 1865, confirmed W. S.’s opinion and stated that he had been familiar with this usage thirty years earlier. In 1853 still another correspondent remarked in Notes and Queries: “This phrase is only some ten or twelve years old.” His memory takes us to the beginning of the eighteen-forties.

A better etymology of cheese “the real thing” has not been found, though the OED was able to provide 1818 as the date of the first citation. Considering how many words reached Standard English from India, the Hindustani etymology is not improbable. All the serious later dictionaries, unless they say “origin unknown,” accepted it, which does not mean that we can celebrate the result, have a group photo featuring our happy faces, and say cheese, because cheese occurs in other, sometimes more, sometimes less, obscure idioms and metaphors. For example,

• cheese “nonsense”
• get one’s cheese “to attain one’ goal”
• cheese it “stop it; let’s get out of here” (an exclamation of alarm and a warning at the approach of police or other authorities, once—or still?— common among British and American schoolboys)
• make the cheese more binding “snarl the matter”
• hard cheese “too bad”
• big cheese (the latter probably an extension of that’s the cheese)
• cheesy “vulgar, shabby, shoddy”

It is hard to understand why cheese has been victimized to such a degree. Even the moon is said to be made of green (that is, fresh) cheese.

Who knows? Perhaps that’s the cheese had its origin in British regional slang, coincided with the Hindustani noun, and was appropriated by English speakers in India. In bilingual jargons, puns of this type occur all the time. However unproductive such fantasies may be, they explain why some people tried to find other solutions. The following suggestion, borrowed from Vizetelly and De Bakker’s A Desk-Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases in English Speech and Literature (one never knows where etymological hypotheses may turn up, which makes them almost impossible to find) was quoted in 1923 in a note titled “The Cheese, the Whole Cheese, and Nothing but the Cheese”:

“A low courtesy made by whirling the gown or petticoats around until they are inflated like a balloon or resemble a large cheese, then sinking to the ground. To this deep ceremonial courtesy has been traced the use of cheese meaning the correct thing; as ‘quite the cheese’, but it may also be traced to the Hindustani chiz, which means thing.”

Regrettably (especially so because Vizetelly was an experienced lexicographer and editor), the authors did not say who traced cheese in our idiom to a low courtesy and where. Also, it was pointed out at the beginning of the 1865 discussion that the correct pronunciation of the Hindustani word is cheeze, not chiz.

A hopeless derivation traced that’s the cheese to French.

“Some desperate witty fellows by way of giving a comic turn to the phrase c’est une autre chose [‘that’s another matter’] used to translate it ‘that is another cheese’, and after a while these words became household words.”

The cheese ~ chose connection enjoyed some popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, though the nasty wags responsible for the introduction of the phrase in question have not been found. This derivation is reminiscent of the desperate attempt to explain the idiom to sleep like a top by referring top to French taupe “mole” (animal).

Still another bold guesser was “disposed to think that it [the phrase] is a corruption of good Saxon, thus:—The word choice was formerly written chose, from ceosan [I have corrected two typos in the form] = to choose…. When one says ‘that the cheese’, I understand it to mean ‘that’s the proper thing—that’s what I would have chosen…’.” It is true that the infinitives of the verbs belonging to the choose/lose class have doublets with ee in the root, but an etymology connecting cheese “choose” and cheese “milk product” will strike every sober researcher as bizarre, to say the least. The moral is: never be “disposed” to think that you know the origin of a word or an idiom unless you have investigated the problem in depth. Look before you leap into the hot water of etymology.

Even if the facetious idiom that’s the cheese goes back to the usage of Englishmen who resided in India, it remains unclear when under what circumstances it gained currency. Linguists who study borrowings sometimes forget to ask the question about the reception of this or that loanword. I will finish this post with still another quotation:

“The late David Rees, an eminent comedian, well known in London and Dublin, was celebrated for original bon mots on the stage. The above phrase [that’s the cheese] was first introduced into Dublin by him, in a piece called The Red Eye, the scene of which was laid in the Morea. The phrase became very popular, and was used when a person wanted to impress on another that something very important had been said or done in reference to something in hand. I have a clear recollection of having asked Mr. Rees what was the origin of the term, and he replied it arose in consequence of a half-witted boy having eaten a piece of soap and then told his grandmother what a nice piece of cheese he had eaten. ‘It was soap’, cried the old lady. ‘Oh, no’, cried the boy, ‘that was the cheese’. Such is the story as it was told to me” (S. Redmond. Notes and Queries, Series 3, vol. VII, p. 465 for June 10, 1865).

The story of the boy (sometimes even his name—naturally, Paddy—is given) is of course sheer nonsense, regardless of how many people repeated it in both Ireland and England, but the connection or part of it with David Rees may be real. As to the Hindustani origin of the idiom, nothing militates against it. Cheese, along with the word for it, came to Anglo-Saxon England from the Romans. Why then couldn’t the idiom that’s the cheese come to Great Britain from India?

Image credits: (1) Dark Cherry Cheesecake. Photo by jpellgen. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via jpellgen Flickr. (2) Sir Henry Yule, from the Preface to The Book of Ser Marco Polo. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Season’s greetings, or “That’s the cheese” appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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One of the dialogues in Jonathan Swift’s work titled A complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation­ (1738) runs as follows:

Neverout: Why, Miss, you are in a brown study, what’s the matter? Methinks you look like mumchance, that was hanged for saying nothing.

Miss: I’d have you know, I scorn your words.

Neverout: Well, but scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings.

Miss: My comfort is, your tongue is no slander. What! you would not have one be always on the high grin?

Neverout: Cry, Mapsticks, Madam; no Offence, I hope.

This is a delightfully polite conversation and a treasure house of idioms. To be in a brown study occupies a place of honor in my database of proverbial sayings (see a recent post on it). I am also familiar with scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings, but high grin made me think only of the high beam (and just for the record: mumchance is an old game of dice or “a dull silent person”). But what was Neverout trying to say at the end of the genteel exchange (see the italicized phrase)?

The first correspondent to Notes and Queries who wrote on the subject—and the problem was being thrashed out in the pages of Notes and Queries—suggested that it means “I ask pardon, I apologize for what I have said” (4 October 1856). Two weeks later, it was pointed out that mapsticks is a variant of mop-sticks, but no explanation followed this gloss. When fourteen years, rather than fourteen days, passed, someone sent another query to the same journal (8 May 1880), which ran as follows: “Like death on a mop-stick. How did this saying originate? I have heard it used by an old lady to describe her appearance on recovery from a long illness.” Joseph Wright did not miss the phrase and included it in his English Dialect Dictionary. His gloss was “to look very miserable.” Although the letter writer who used the pseudonym Mervarid and asked the question did not indicate where she lived, Wright located the saying in Warwickshire (the West Midlands). We will try to decipher the idiom and find out whether there is any connection between it and Swift’s mapsticks ~ mopsticks.

As could be expected, the OED has an entry on mopstick. The first citation is dated 1710 (from Swift!). In it the hyphenated mop-sticks means exactly what it should (a stick for a mop). The next one is from Genteel Conversation. Swift’s use of the word in 1738 received this comment: “Prob[ably] a humorous alteration of ‘I cry your mercy’.” This repeats the 1856 suggestion. After the Second World War, a four-volume supplement to the OED was published. The updated version of the entry contains references to the dialectal use of mopstick, a synonym for “leap-frog,” and includes such words pertaining to the game as Jack upon the mopstick and Johnny on the mopstick (the mopstick is evidently the player over whose back the other player is jumping), along with a single 1886 example of mopstick “idiot” (slang). The supplement did not discuss the derivation of the words included in the first edition. By contrast, the OED online pays great attention to etymology; yet mopstick has not been revised. I assume that no new information on its origin has come to light. In 1915 mopstick was used for “one who loafs around a cheap or barrel house and cleans the place for drinks” (US). This is a rather transparent metaphor. Mop would have been easier to understand than mopstick, but mopstick “idiot” makes it clear that despised people could always be called this. Johnny on the mopstick also refers to the inferior status of the player bending down. The numerous annotated editions of Swift’s works contain no new hypotheses; at most, they quote the OED.

I cannot explain the sentence in Genteel Conversation, but a few ideas occurred to me while I was reading the entries in the dictionaries. To begin with, I agree that Swift’s mapsticks is a variant of mopsticks, though it would be good to understand why Swift, who had acquired such a strong liking for mopsticks and first used the form with an o, chose a less obvious dialectal variant with an a. Second, I notice that the 1738 text has a comma between cry and mapsticks (Cry, Map-sticks, Madam…). Nearly all later editions probably take this comma for a misprint and therefore expunge it. Once the strange punctuation disappears, we begin to worry about the idiom cry mopsticks. However, there is no certainty that it ever existed, the more so because the sentence in the text does not end with an exclamation mark. Third, mopstick, for which we have no written evidence before 1710, is current in children’s regional names of leapfrog, and this is a sure sign of its antiquity (games tend to preserve local and archaic words for centuries). A mopstick is not a particularly interesting object, yet in 1886 it turned up with the sense “idiot” in a dictionary of dialectal slang. Finally, to return to the question asked above, to look like death on a mopstick means “to look miserable,” and we have to decide whether it sheds light on Swift’s usage or whether Swift’s usage tells us something about the idiom.

I think Swift’s bizarre predilection for mopsticks goes back to the early years of the eighteenth century. In 1701 he wrote a parody called A Meditation upon a Broomstick (the manuscript was stolen, and an authorized edition could be brought out only in 1711). It seems that after Swift embarked on his “meditation” and the restitution of the manuscript broomsticks never stopped troubling him. At some time, he may have learned either the word mopstick “idiot” (perhaps in its dialectal form mapstick) and substituted mopstick ~ mapstick for broomstick; a broomstick became to him a symbol of human stupidity. To be sure, mopstick “idiot” surfaced only in 1886, but such words are often recorded late and more or less by chance, in glossaries and in “low literature.”

Swift hated contemporary slang. The last sentence in the quotation given above (Cry, mapsticks, Madam; no offence, I hope) seems to mean “I cry—d–n my foolishness!—Madam…”). The form mapsticks is reminiscent of fiddlesticks, another plural and also an exclamation. The dialectal (rustic) variant with a different vowel (map for mop) could have been meant as an additional insult. If I am right, the comma after cry remains, while the idiom cry mapsticks, along with its reference to cry mercy, joins many other ingenious but unprovable conjectures.

The phrase to look like death on a mopstick has, I believe, nothing to do with Swift’s usage. In some areas, mopstick probably served as a synonym of broomstick, and broomsticks are indelibly connected in our mind with witches and all kinds of horrors. Here a passage from still another letter to Notes and Queries deserves our attention.

“Fifty years ago [that is, in 1830] I recollect an amusement of our boyish days was scooping out a turnip, cutting three holes for eyes and mouth, and putting a lighted candle-end inside from behind. A stake or old mop-stick was then pointed with a knife and stuck into the bottom of the turnip, and a death’s head [hear! hear!] with eyes of fire was complete. Sometimes a stick was tied across it, to make it ghostly and ghastly….”

Those who have observed decorations at Halloween will feel quite at home. The recovering lady looked like death on a mopstick, and we now understand exactly what she meant. In 1880 the letter writer (Mr. Gibbes Rigaud) resided in Oxford. Oxfordshire is next door to Warwickshire, and of course we do not know where our “heroes” spent their childhood.

Image credits: Witch, CC0 via Pixabay. Kittens, public domain via Project Gutenberg.

The post Moping on a broomstick appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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From time to time I receive letters encouraging me to discuss not only words but also idioms. I would be happy to do so if I were better equipped. The origin of proverbial sayings (unless they go back to so-called familiar quotations) and idioms is usually lost beyond recovery. I may once have mentioned how, while working on the etymology of oats in my analytic dictionary, I desperately tried (and failed) to discover the source of the phrase to sow one’s wild oats. All I found were a few paragraphs on agriculture and the earliest recorded citation. Those who use the OED know that it seldom indicates where idioms come from. Rather long ago, I wrote a post on the phrase to pay through one’s nose, and it caused some profitable discussion, though it still remains debatable whose nose is meant and how one pays through it. My attack on it rains cats and dogs seems to have been more successful. I have a respectable database of proverbs and local phrases from Notes and Queries and other old periodicals. Most of those do not occur in Brewer or later dictionaries. In the future, I may use (educated people now say utilize) my home resources and even squeeze a few drops from this stone.

Before I embark on my today’s subject, I should observe that dictionaries explaining “why we say so” are numerous. The problem with even the best of them is that they avoid references, and without references they cannot be trusted. For example, the origin of hell for leather and to go to hell in a hand basket has been explained reasonably well, but the authors of popular books (and here they differ from scholars who deal with such subjects) prefer statements like it has been suggested that, but do not explain whose proposal they cite and whether the proposer deserves credence. This practice is particularly disappointing when it comes to idioms trodden to death, for example, the whole nine yards. Thanks to digitization, our dates and conclusions are becoming more and more reliable, but the origin of the enigmatic phrase and the numeral nine in it (at one time, it seems to have been six) remains unknown, and the formulas it has been suggested and some people think arouse only irritation. Who cares what “some people” think or suggest unless we know why they do so?

So why is the churchyard (or graveyard) called God’s acre? In 1913 a volume presented on the completion of George Lyman Kittredge’s twenty-fifth year of teaching at Harvard University appeared in New York. One of the contributors to it was Professor J. A. Walz, a fellow philologist. Kittredge’s name is known to many from the book Words and their Ways in English Speech by Greenough and Kittredge (at that time, George B. Geenough was a senior colleague, and his name stood first on the title page; anyway, G precedes K in the English alphabet). Walz did exactly what I so often do: he provided a background for his search, looked through multiple dictionaries, collected the publications on God’s acre in Notes and Queries, “that unique meeting place of British ignorance and scholarship,” as he called it, and summarized what he found. I can only retell his publication written a century ago, though I would have encountered those notes myself, inasmuch as my assistants and I have looked through the entire run of that invaluable journal and licked the plate almost clean. (Walz made such extensive use of Notes and Queries, because no other periodical showed any interest in the idiom he set out to research.)

The contributors to Notes and Queries, among whom we notice such erudite people as James Main Dixon and Frank Chance, discovered everything, including the earliest mention of the phrase in William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain (1605, published in 1617). Even Murray’s OED could offer no antedating. They also dug up the relevant quotations from the New Testament. Several biblical texts, most pointedly one of the epistles, explain that the dead are “sown” and sleep awaiting resurrection. Finally, they, of course, asked the question about the originator of the phrase. At that time, in the fifties and the seventies of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had numerous admirers on both sides of the Atlantic, and his early short lyric “God’s-Acre” was known everywhere. Today he seems to be forgotten or looked down upon. Only his name has survived, and, in the United States, one occasionally dines at restaurants with Longfellow in their names. In similar fashion, numerous towns in Italy have hotels called “Byron.” Perhaps this is real immortality.

Be that as it may be, but even in Minneapolis, where I live and where there is Hiawatha Avenue, Nokomis Avenue, and a statue of Hiawatha carrying his bride over Minnehaha Falls, I have not met a single student who has read The Song of Hiawatha (to say nothing of Longfellow’s short poems). But in Longfellow’s lifetime, “God’s-Acre” became an anthologized piece. It begins so:

“I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls
The burial ground God’s-Acre! It is just;
It consecrates each grave within its walls,
And breathes a benison o’er the sleeping dust.”

The poem goes on for three more stanzas before it reaches the conclusion:

“With thy rude ploughshares, Death, turn up the sod,
And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;
This is the field and Acre of our God,
This is the place where human harvests grow.”

What is “the ancient Saxon phrase” that Longfellow liked? It did not elude the discussants in Notes and Queries that German has the word Gottesacker “churchyard,” while its English equivalent has not been attested. Let us not forget that the first volume of the OED, with the word acre in it, became available many years later. Some writers missed the point when they said that German Acker and Engl. acre are related, so that there is no problem. Of course, they are, but cognates don’t have to mean the same. Thanks to the citations in the OED and the material supplied by Walz, we now know that, before Longfellow, God’s Acre occurred almost only in descriptions of Germany and with reference to the German idiom. The meaning of almost in the previous sentence will be made clear below. German Acker means “field” (like Latin ager). The “ancient Saxon phrase” did not exist (even in German it appeared only in the sixteenth century), but thanks to Longfellow God’s Acre it is now part of the English vocabulary. How he came to know it is not a secret.

Albert Matthews, an outstanding researcher of American English, provided some facts he did not know when Walz had asked him about God’s Acre, the burial place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It turned out that this name was already current at the end of the seventeenth century. It is again met with in 1827. We can conclude that the equivalent of the German compound had some currency in Cambridge quite early. There is no way of ascertaining how it reached the East Coast, but reach it did, most probably via German speakers. As Matthews pointed out, Longfellow did not come to Cambridge before 1836. He loved the town (see his lyric “To the River Charles”) and could not help hearing the name of the burial place in it. It struck him as poetic, so he assumed that the name was very old, even ancient, and used it in his lyric. (Longfellow knew several languages, as, among other things, his translations from German, Italian, and Old English show.) Without it, God’s Acre (or God’s-acre) would not have become a familiar phrase in English. However, as far as etymology is concerned, it remains a borrowing from German, and Longfellow knew it. The Century Dictionary, quite aptly, quotes from his Hyperion (II. 9): “A green terrace or platform on which the church stands, and which in ancient times was the churchyard, or, as the Germans more devoutly say, God’s-acre.”

Headline image credit: St Giles Church in Stoke Poges. Photo by UKgeofan at English Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post On idioms in general and on “God’s-Acre” in particular appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Folks using the above saying have obviously never met Fiona Dorsal.

Fiona, unlike many of her species, may not NEED but absolutely prefers a bicycle as her main means of transportation.

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Because of abject laziness I am re-posting this lil gal from way back in 2007. In fact, I’m actually re-re-posting for about the third time.

You know, Fiona has evolved, not in a Darwinian way but as a drawing a few times since then.

RACE AGAINST TIME

Despite strenuous training and conditioning, Murgatroid found it difficult to beat the clock.

The Illustration Friday theme for this week is “Time.” So, since it is 11:00 pm on Thursday, with only an hour  left to post… time is running out!

“DOG AND PONY SHOW”

When all other ideas fail me I can always depend on my trusty animal idioms!

It’s really been fun and the SkADaMo list continues to grow. There are some really kick-butt sketches going on! Check out the list of participants (at least the ones who sent me their links) here.

Make your writing more interesting by using these idioms based on fruits and vegetables. 

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/50-idioms-about-fruits-and-vegetables/

 5 Stars Out of the Blue—Something that happens suddenly and without any warning, totally unexpectedly. ..It was a beautiful day when a .........................storm came up out of the blue. ......................... Out of the Blue helps young children understand the concept of idioms.  Idioms are words that have one obvious meaning, but can also describe something [...]

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This idiom only works for those who have never met Finola Dorsal. She, unlike many of her species, may not need, but prefers a bicycle to other means of transportation.

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So, upon hearing of this week’s Illustration Friday theme, “bicycle”, who could help but think of a fish riding a bike. Who I ask you?

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By Anatoly Liberman

Why indeed?  But despite our financial woes, I am interested in the origin of the idiom, not in exorbitant prices.  On the face of it (and the nose cannot be separated from the face), the idiom pay through the nose makes no sense.  Current since the second half of the 17^th century and probably transparent to the contemporaries, it later joined such puzzling phrases as kick the bucket and bees’ knees.

Idioms are harder to trace to their “roots” than words.  Etymology, though not an exact science, is governed by certain regularities (sound correspondences, patterns of semantic change, and so forth), but a search for the origin of idioms rarely needs the expertise of historical linguists.  They will offer good advice only when words have changed their meaning, as happened, for example, in curry favor (where curry means “brush, groom” and favor once referred to a donkey and later to a horse) or forlorn hope (from Dutch), in which hope meant “group, detachment of soldiers” (a cognate of Engl. heap) and forlorn had the sense of “lost” (a cognate of Engl. lorn and German verloren).  It is possible that nose in pay through the nose did have a meaning different from the one we now ascribe to it, but, other than that, we cannot account for the odd phrase unless we succeed in reconstructing the circumstances in which it was coined.  A product of popular culture?  An obscene joke from a Restoration comedy?  A borrowing from the language of thieves?  In the 13^th century, the famous Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson explained to his countrymen the meaning of numerous phrases that originated in ancient myths.  By his time, more than two hundred years after the Christianization of Iceland, those myths had either fallen or were falling into oblivion.  I wish we had someone like him who would be capable of solving our puzzles.  But this is a forlorn hope.  So to business.

The Internet supplies those who look for the history of pay through the nose with four or five explanations from books bearing the generic title Phrase Origins.  All of them, regardless of their reliability, have a fatal flaw: they do not cite their sources.  At best, they say it is usually believed or according to legend, but never add where they found the legend, who wrote what they repeat, or even approximately where the gossip originated.  Only dictionaries of quotations try to discover the authors of famous lines, and their efforts have been crowned with great success.

This is what we can find. “If you were caught stealing in medieval times, they sliced a slit in your nose.” Anywhere (or only in England?) in the Middle Ages at any time?  “In medieval times, when the Jews were being bled for money, any objection by them to paying was greeted with a slitting of their noses.” Again the Middle Ages (which, incidentally, lasted more than a thousand years), but now it is the Jews, rather than the Swedes.  The allusion to bleeding noses will recur below.  “Odin laid a tax of a penny a nose upon every Swede.” However, Odin (or Othinn) was the greatest god of the Scandinavian pantheon, and it is hard to understand what he could have done with such a tax, for he neither sold nor bought anything.  Some time ago, I explained (in this blog) the origin of the idiom it rains cats and dogs.  According to one of the nonsensical articles I had consulted, Odin was surrounded by cats and dogs, and they caused rain.  This is a lie bordering on blasphemy.  Odin stayed away from cats and dogs, and those ani

When I was a first-grader, there was a TV anthology show my parents watched on Sunday nights called Chiller that specialized in Grade-Z monster movies. I was not allowed to join in the fun. I did, however, sometimes sneak down the hall, barefooted, and listen to the roars, screams, sound effects and near-Shakespearean dialogue. Once I listened to a movie called Attack of the 50-ft. Woman. I wondered: How scary, really, is a woman with fifty feet? What could she possibly do? Kick you? Steal your shoes?

I obviously didn’t grasp the reality of the title, but I did make some creative connections of my own. It reminded me that while children may be terrific observers, they are often terrible interpreters. And they need help when it comes to parsing out words with two or more meanings. Or when confronted by those phrases that adults use so easily, yet stumble against a child’s limited vocabulary and experience. Like the idiom “In one ear and out the other.” I used to think grown-ups were discussing flying insects. How about “having cold feet”? Sounds like a Chiller movie about the abominable snowman to me.

I had a lot of fun writing the new picture book series called Monster Street, because it involved making up stories to explain those idioms. And because I could remember how it felt to be confused about words and their tricks and twists. I think my favorite in the series is Two Heads Are Better Than One. I love how the illustrator, Migy, has portrayed the spunky, but sometimes sad, little monster George as he faces life with only one head in a family whose members all sport two. Poor George. Faces life? There’s another idiom. We’re surrounded by them! It’s raining cats and dogs with them! I think of Monster Street as a safe, cozy haven for those young listeners (and readers) like me who were afraid of “another mouth to feed” or the chilling possibility of real butterflies taking up residence in your stomach.

Michael Dahl

& Other Strange Things Adults Tell You   written by Catherine Rondina illustrated by Kevin Sylvester Kids Can Press  2010 A collection of superstitions and folklore passed down by adults, refuted and supported, and an attempt to arm kids with the facts behind the phrases.  Entertaining, but it's no snopes.com. I like the idea of arming kids with the truth as a way of disarming the myths kids

Confucius once said, "Where ever you go, go with all your heart." With this in mind, I have selected the following books based on their ability to inspire.

By Anatoly Liberman

The Speed of Semantic Change. I am well aware of akimbo being used about legs and fingers, though I have no way of ascertaining whether Tom Wolfe is responsible for this extended usage. Mollymooly’s comment addresses the well-known fact that despite all the recorded intermediate stages in the development of meaning, the end result following hence in historical dictionaries often comes as a surprise. Language historians face two models: incremental change versus change “by a leap.” On the one hand, at any given moment we have either entity X or entity Y; on the other, observation shows that the movement from X to Y is nearly always gradual. The resolution of this paradox lies in the coexistence of the conservative and the avant-garde styles. In the vocabulary, individual authors (especially poets) and children sometimes effect leaps. A five-year old has heard the phrase full tilt, generalized it with the vague meaning “very much,” and explains that he hates mosquitoes full tilt. Numerous changes of meaning are of a similar nature. Others are more puzzling. For example, it is clear from the inner form of the adjective handsome that at one time it referred to things (and people) handy, serviceable, dexterous; its development to “convenient, becoming,” and “decorous” (handsome manners, handsome style) seems natural. We may not object to the next step (“generous, liberal”: a handsome present, apology; handsome is that handsome does), for bounty depends on the hand of the giver, and “ample” (a handsome sum of money), but then we are confronted by the fateful hence “(graciously) generous,” hence “pleasing to the eye, good-looking.” Hence? Really? No development in language is predetermined: if something has occurred, the provisos for the event should be taken for granted, but the change is seldom, if ever, inevitable: in a neighboring language and even in a neighboring dialect X becomes Z, rather than Y, or stays intact.

Words and Idioms. Coat: Why is it not spelled cote? A more difficult question is why cote is not spelled coat. Middle English had two long o’s, that is, two distinct vowels with the approximate value of non-Midwestern aw in today’s awning: one was closed, the other open (pronounced with the mouth opened more widely). Closed o, the continuation of Old Engl. long o, was usually designated by the letter o. The wider vowel developed from short o lengthened in native and French words, and, to mark its open character, scribes used the digraph oa. Coat, from French, had an originally short vowel; consequently, the spelling oa is justified. However, cote also has a lengthened vowel and should therefore have ended up with oa. Modern English spelling is an unreliable guide to etymology. Float has a history similar to that of coat, but roam should have been spelled like home. Such inconsistencies are numerous. That is why people who fight Spelling Reform for fear of losing ties with history usually do not know what they are talking about. Camshaft. The question was asked in connection with my remark that -kim- in akimbo can hardly be traced to Gaelic cam “crooked.” Our correspondent wonders why the origin of cam in camshaft is said to be unknown, for at least here it must be from Gaelic. None of the dictionaries I consulted doubts the origin of camshaft. A camshaft is a shaft supplied with cams, and cam “projection on a wheel” goes back to Dutch kam “comb.” So here too there is no need to refer to Gaelic. Fit as the past tense of fight. This form has been widely attested in both British and American dialect speech. Joseph Wright (The English Dialect Dictionary) mentions it among about a dozen others (Old Engl. feaht “fought” has spawned amazingly many forms), and so does DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English). The OED calls it dialectal or vulgar (in this context, vulgar means “popular; in the manner of vulgus “people”).

Jaywalk. Dr. Douglas G. Wilson, a member of the American Dialect Society, sent me an instructive letter and a link to his database, for both of which I am grateful. In my previous “gleanings,” I noted that jaywalk cannot be a sum of jay and walk because in Modern English there is no model for deriving such verbs: jaywalk must be a back formation from jaywalker. But Dr. Douglas is right that, once such a verb has been coined, it may begin to serve as a model for other verbs and cites to duck-walk. (I would add that “functional change” should also be reckoned with: if the noun duck-walk had any currency, the emergence of the verb duck-walk can be expected. Compare the noun phone, from telephone, and the verb to phone derived from it.) His citations include several nouns like jay rider, jay driver, and jay cyclist. In his opinion, jay driver was the first of them. Like his predecessors, he believes that jay in those words means “hick.” Yet if the old suggestion to the effect that jaywalker originated in Kansas is right, the problem of origins is solved, for Jayhawk and Jayhawker are the traditional nicknames of an inhabitant of Kansas. Only then the whole is based on a pun: from the bird name (as in jay hawk) to jay “hick.”

Straight as the crow flies. I mentioned in passing that crows do not fly in a straight line, and the question was where the idiom comes from. This I do not know, and, characteristically, with a single exception, none of the numerous books devoted to the etymology of idioms features it. According to a current explanation, crows, highly intelligent birds, fly to their food in a straight line. Crows are not birds of prey and look for carrion (compare ravens, the birds of battle in Old Germanic poetry). As a rule, they do not attack, and why should any hungry beast or bird, regardless of its intelligence, meander before coming to the point? The French speak about the flight of a bird, without specifying the oiseau. In any case, the idiom does not seem to have popular roots. Dialect dictionaries mention neither the idiom nor the compound crow flight, and the earliest citation in the OED is unexpectedly late (1800).

Calf rope “surrender.” Calf ~ holler rope, an exclamation known to children in many regions of the United States, but especially in the South, is well documented in DARE, which calls the origin of the phrase uncertain. Instead of solid data on calf rope, I have a few ideas, a dangerous development in etymological studies. In Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, Act 1, Scene 3, we witness an altercation between the Protector (Gloucester) and the Bishop (Winchester). Winchester defies the Protector, but his men are beaten. Win. Gloucester, thou’lt answer this before the pope. Glo. Winchester goose! I cry a rope! a rope! Rope in this line is cited in the OED and has been explained as a derisive cry attributed to a parrot. However, every word in Gloucester’s reply contains a multilayered insult. Winchester goose was a proverbial name for a syphilitic swelling in the groin. Besides, goose meant “prostitute,” and here it echoes Gloucester’s earlier taunt that Winchester sells indulgences to whores. Parrots were indeed taught to cry rope, presumably, an allusion to a hangman’s halter. Some scholars believe that rope in the Protector’s speech means “a dysfunctional penis.” This interpretation cannot be excluded, but there is a danger to out-Gloucester Gloucester. Now comes my first fanciful idea. Is it not possible that in the 1590’s, when Shakespeare’s play was written, cry rope already meant “to give up, surrender”? (Holler rope is, obviously, a later substitution.) The pun would then be on cry “a rope!” and cry rope. If so, Gloucester, in addition to everything else, exclaims in mock despair: “I give up! What an awful threat!” True, no one thought of this nuance, but then none of the commentators, as far as I can judge, grew up Tom Sawyer-like, fighting other children and occasionally crying rope in humiliation and tears. Some of our idioms with the word rope (for example, to know the ropes) go back to the days of sailboats. Couldn’t cry rope also have originated in sailors’ language? From a syntactic point of view, cry rope resembles cry wolf and cry uncle. I believe that rope! belongs with exclamations like boatmen’s westward-ho! land-ho! Yet, contrary to westward-ho, it must have been a signal of a particularly dangerous situation.

My second fanciful idea concerns calf. It is known from the history of the verb to cave in that cave in it stands for calve. The original form was calve ~ cauve. After the sound l was lost in calve, calve and cave became (near) homophones. A piece of the wall was said to fall down like a calf “dropped” by a cow (“to calve in”). The collocation cave in was presumably borrowed from Low (= northern) German or Frisian, but to cave (without in) looks like a continuation of a form with l; it was a cognate of the continental verb. Cave can be intransitive (“fall”) and transitive (“let fall, tilt”). Although its earliest attestations are from American books, its home seems to be British dialects, supposedly East Anglia. I assume that calf rope goes back to calve rope (that is, cave rope) and meant “drop rope” in the situations in which sailors cried “rope!” Cry rope and calf ~ calve ~ cave rope coexisted as synonyms. The weak points of my reconstruction are obvious: an imposing structure has been erected upon the sand, but our correspondent (whose early years were spent in the state of Mississippi) asked whether I had any thoughts on the idiom, and here they are. An idiom with such a meaning does not augur well.

On this self-effacing note (which in a moment will turn into a self-congratulatory one) I will finish this post and see off the third year of my blog. It came into being in the early spring of 2005. Many happy returns of the day!