The Word Wide Web

Check back here frequently for the Word of the Day. But not EVERY day...that would be too much like work.

[thewordwideweb]

Flabbergasted!

I can’t believe I’ve never written about today’s Word of the Day. How can that be? I’m totally gobsmacked. In fact, I’m flabbergasted.

The Word of the Day is, of course, “flabbergasted.”

It could have been “gobsmacked,” I suppose, but that’s too easy. It’s exactly what is says on the box. You’ve experienced shock akin to being smacked in the gob. “Gob,” as I’m sure you know, is British and Australian slang for “mouth,” as in “Shut yer gob, you numpty git.”

Flabbergasted is far more mysterious. In fact, various respected linguistic authorities put it into the category “of uncertain origin.”  But the prevailing theory is that it’s either from some British dialect, or a mashup of flabby (or flap) and aghast. In other words, perhaps you’ve just seen a ghost and you’re so astonished you go limp or flabby. Or maybe start flapping around like a fish out of water. There is also, according to some sources, a Scottish word, “flabrigastit,” that’s supposed to mean “worn out with exertion,” and it could be related to that.

Flabbergasted has been around since at least the 1770’s, so the fact that even now no one is sure of its history leaves me totally flab…um, surprised.

[thewordwideweb]

"Mind Your Business"

Today I learned… the very first coin minted in the United States was a copper penny that, instead of bearing a motto like “In God We Trust,” or even “E Pluribus Unum,” had the motto “Mind Your Business.”

The 1787 coin was designed by Benjamin Franklin, and became known as “the Fugio Cent,” because one face of the coin had the Latin word “Fugio,” meaning “I fly” on it, next to a sundial (time flies?) and just below, the motto, “Mind Your Business.”

The other side had the words “We Are One” and 13 interlocked circles, representing the original 13 states.

For the record, “Mind Your Business” was not a rebuke, which it would have been had it said “mind your own business.” Instead, it was Franklin’s way of encouraging newly-minted Americans to be diligent, work hard, and take personal responsibility for making the new nation prosperous.

Oh, and contrary to popular belief, Ben Franklin did not actually say, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” What he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanack was “A penny saved is two pence clear. A pin a day’s a groat a year.” (A groat was worth four pence in those days.)

And now you know.

[thewordwideweb]

Driving at night - I'm stoked!

I’m sure many of my friends will be able to relate to this. As I grow, um, more mature in years, I find driving at night to be increasingly a chore to be avoided. My driving skills are as good (or bad) as ever, but my eyesight is not what it once was (and what it once was, was not that great to begin with).   

I am fortunate to have a good friend who doesn’t mind acting as my chauffeur after dark (Thanks, Greg!). The Word of the Day is “chauffeur.”

Chauffeur comes, pretty obviously, from French, and a verb that means “to heat.” The original chauffeur was literally “one who heats,” or a “stoker.” The chauffeur would stoke a steam engine to keep the boiler going and keep the engine running. The name stuck, even after steam engines gave way to internal combustion, gasoline powered vehicles. And the chauffeur became anyone employed to drive the vehicle.

By the way, the word “chafe” comes from the same roots. I’m lucky my buddy Greg doesn’t chafe when we’re heading somewhere and I tell him, “You’re driving.”  

[thewordwideweb]

I’ve got a brand new Word of the Day for you today!

Have you ever wondered why advertisers touting a new product (or perhaps writers touting a new Word of the Day) describe it as not simply “new” but “brand new?” Of course you haven’t.

But now that I’ve brought it up, you’re wondering about it.

“Brand new” dates back to the mid-16th century. The “brand” in brand new refers to a firebrand, a piece of burning wood. Something that was “brand” new had just come out of the fire, forge or furnace and was freshly made. One might even say it was “hot stuff” (I wouldn’t say that, but “one” might).  

Instead of “brand” new, William Shakespeare and others would occasionally substitute the term “fire-new.”  For example, in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare referred to “…some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint.”

What brand of coffee do you drink? What brand of jeans do you wear? It all goes back to that same fire in the forge. An iron rod would be heated until it was glowing, and then pressed onto casks of wine, or animal hides, or even (yikes!) the skin of criminals to leave an identifying mark. In that sense, much better to be brand-new than newly-branded.  

Full disclosure: After a bit of research, it turns out I had written a blog post about the origin of “brand new” way back in 2017. I had forgotten all about it (as I immediately forget most of the stuff I write about). So I guess this particular post is “brand old.” Sorry about that.

[thewordwideweb]

Happy Canada Day!

Today, July 1st, is Canada Day. So, in honor of all our Canuckian friends to the north, the Word of the Day is “Canada.”

How countries get their names can be interesting. “America,” as you probably know, was named for Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. We might just as easily be living in “Vespucciland.” (And yes, Columbus got there first, but he was an evil bastard, and doesn’t deserve to have much of anything named for him.)

Anyway, in 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier was mapping the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and he asked some indigenous tribesmen what they called the big settlement along the river. They reportedly said, “kanata,” which is the Saint Lawrence (Huron) Iroquois word for “village” or “settlement.”

Call it a linguistic misunderstanding. The village actually had the Iroquois name, “Stadacona,” which is now Quebec City. But Cartier decided to call that area and “Hochelaga” (now the Island of Montreal) the “country of Canadas.” (Spelling was optional in the 1500’s.) And the name stuck. That’s probably a good thing; otherwise, everyone up north might be singing “Oh, Hochelaga” at the start of hockey games.

British colonizers eventually pushed out the French, and in 1867, the British provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were “confederated” as one unified “Dominion of Canada.” The “Canada Act 1982” gave Canadians control of their own Constitution, and basically dropped the “Dominion” from the name of the country. That was also the year the national holiday formerly called “Dominion Day” was changed to “Canada Day.”

And now you know. Happy Canada Day!

[thewordwideweb]

TV Producer's Nightmare

This one is for my TV buds. I had the TV news producer’s recurring nightmare last night, but with a new twist at the end.

You know the dream – the show is about to go on and absolutely nothing is ready. I tried to be everywhere at once, banging out scripts, reviewing video and graphics, barking instructions left and right.

Slowly, we began to impose Order upon the chaos. The bird of Hope started fluttering its wings. We just might make it! I realized we didn’t have a rundown, so I sat down at the typewriter to create one. (Why a typewriter and not a newsroom computer system? I guess this was an Old School nightmare.)

I grabbed a sheet of paper, but it already had typewritten marks all over it. In fact, every sheet I picked up was already used. I started cussing like a sailor’s parrot. F-bombs were bursting in air. I finally yanked open the door of a printer and found one clean sheet. I rolled it into the typewriter and started typing furiously.

And here’s the little twist: every word I typed came out in French! That was new. Time was up. I remember saying, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to wing it.” And then I woke up.

Sacré bleu! Merde!

[thewordwideweb]

Welcome to skid row

The Word (okay, Phrase) of the Day is “skid row,” but we’re going to take a roundabout route to get there, so please bear with me.

I’ve been reading an interesting book about William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea” through Georgia in the Civil War. General Sherman’s troops often had to cope with swampy terrain and roads made nearly impassable by rain and mud, so they spent a lot of time and energy “corduroying” the roads to get from one place to another.

Now, all I knew about “corduroy” was that it was a thick cotton fabric with soft raised parallel ribs or wales (don’t get me started on wales). When I was a kid – and had no choice in the matter – I often wore corduroy trousers. If you were walking someplace in corduroy pants, the distinctive swish-swish sound of the ribs rubbing together would let everyone know you were coming long before you arrived.

But I digress.

When I looked up “corduroy roads,” I found that what the soldiers were doing was laying logs or planks across the muddy roads closely together, side-by-side to make a surface that the troops and their horses and wagons could travel over. Traveling on a corduroy road was not necessarily a pleasant experience, but this was war, and if you stayed in one place too long, Johnny Reb was likely to show up and start shooting at you.

All right, now let’s move from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest, where loggers made frequent use of corduroy roads. They would lay a road of (often greased) logs together to enable them to slide huge cut timbers from the forest to the local sawmill. They would “skid” the timbers along the corduroy highway, and it wasn’t long before they were calling the path they made “skid road.”

Those lumberjacks and loggers were not, as a rule, a refined bunch. They were, in general, a bunch of rowdy tough guys. The areas where they hung out when the work day was done often featured bars, cheap hotels and other establishments catering to a certain rough-and-ready element. Those areas themselves got the nickname “skid road.” And over time, especially during the Great Depression, “skid road” became “skid row,” and referred to any part of a city marked by poverty and inhabited by the jobless, the homeless and similar unfortunates. We sometimes still hear old-timers say those downtrodden folks are “on the skids.”

Today, “skid row” often has another name: “tent city.”

[thewordwideweb]

Mace

The English language has a word for just about everything. The problem is, there are only twenty-six letters in English, so if you have to name everything, well, you’re going to end up using the same letters and sounds for a bunch of different words.

Take the word “mace.” It’s our Word of the Day. Mace can refer to the spiky club used as a weapon in the Middle Ages to shatter armor. Or it can mean the ceremonial rod, staff or scepter carried by public officials or academics as a symbol of authority. Both those “maces” have their roots in Old French “masse,” meaning a large hammer.

Then you’ve got the mace you’ll find in your spice rack. That’s the dried, ground-up seed covering of the nutmeg, used in everything from stews and sauces to cookies and cakes. No one is quite sure where that spicy version of the word originated, although it seems to have come into English from another Old French word, “macis,” meaning, um, mace.

Then there’s the self-defense chemical spray Mace, which gets a capital “M,” unless you’ve been sprayed with it (“maced”) in which case it gets a lower-case “m” – and you get burning eyes. Mace was invented in the 1960’s by Allan Lee Litman, who sold the formula to Smith & Wesson. Today it’s owned by Mace Security International. Mace (the chemical spray) has become a “generic trademark,” like Kleenex for tissues or Xerox for copies. Why did they call it Mace? Apparently because when you’re sprayed with it, you feel like you’ve been hit in the head with a heavy spiked club. And we call that club a mace because…oh wait, we’ve already done that.

[thewordwideweb]

Dibs!

“Dibs on the last slice of pizza!”

“Ed is retiring? I call dibs on his office!”

“I was going to sell it on eBay, but if you want, you can have first dibs on it.”

What the heck are “dibs,” anyway? That’s an easy one: “dibs” are (is?) the Word of the Day!

To call “dibs,” of course, means to claim first and exclusive rights to the ownership or use of something.

I got a message the other day from my daughter-in-law Becky, who told me she had often used the phrase, “I have dibs” on one thing or another, but she didn’t actually know what a “dib” was. Chances are you’ve called “dibs” yourself without knowing where the word came from.

There are two generally accepted theories. The most widely accepted story is that “dibs” came from an old children’s game called “dibstones.” (Really, really old, like hundreds of years.) Over time, “disbtones” was shortened to “dibs.”

“Dibstones,” it seems, was somewhat similar to the more modern game of “jacks.” A child would toss pebbles (or “dibstones”) into the air and try to catch as many of them as possible on the back of his or her hand. In another variation, the player would toss up a dibstone and catch it in his palm, then toss it again and catch it on the back of the hand, and on and on. It also appears that knuckle-bones from sheep sometimes substituted for the stones. Yet, for some reason, we didn’t end up shouting “I’ve got sheep’s knuckles on that last slice of pizza!” Life is a mystery. And how “dibs” went from pebbles and sheep’s knuckles to mean, “mine, mine, mine”…well, that’s a mystery, too.

Which brings us to the second theory about “dibs,” which is not as widely accepted, but seems pretty plausible to me. It revolves around another children’s game: marbles. A shooter who managed to knock two marbles out of the circle with a single shot could claim “doubles” - or “dubs” for short - and get to keep both his opponent’s marbles. And it’s a short jump from “I got dubs” to “I got dibs.” At least in that theory, we have the sense of possessing something. “I got dibs”…I got your marbles.

And if you lose your marbles, I suppose you don’t have dibs on much of anything.  

[thewordwideweb]

Sharktopus!

I considered making today’s Word of the Day “sharktopus” but, since that’s not a real word, I decided to go with “pelagic.”

Did you see the story about the researchers off the coast of New Zealand who were using a drone to take pictures of a mako shark – the fastest swimmer among all sharks – when they saw what looked like an orange blob on top of the shark? One researcher wrote, “…what was that orange patch on its head? A buoy? An injury?”

Nope. It was an octopus, clinging on to old sharky and getting a free ride. (By the way, this all happened in December, 2023, but apparently is just getting publicized now). This was all pretty puzzling to the researchers, because octopuses (or octopi or octopodes, depending on your preference) tend to live on or near the ocean floor, while sharks are pelagic (Hey, there’s our Word of the Day!)

“Pelagic,” from the Greek “pelagikos,” means “pertaining to or relating to the open sea.” That’s also where we get the word “archipelago,” referring to a chain or group of islands scattered in the ocean (or in a river or even a big lake). The “archi-” part meant principal or chief, and the “pelago” part, as we’ve already established, referred to the open sea. “Archipelago” originally referred specifically to the Aegean Sea, because it was chock full of island chains.

So how did a bottom-dwelling octopus end up hitching a ride on a pelagic shark? It’s a mystery. As the researcher said, “The ocean is filled with unexpected things.” Like the sharktopus.

[thewordwideweb]

Chairman of the board

The Board of Finance in my tiny town will be meeting tonight. Because I forgot to duck, I'm the chairman of the finance board. The Word (okay, Phrase) of the Day is “chairman of the board.” Today, of course, the chairman of the board usually refers to the top executive in a company, the head honcho (“Honcho” is from Japanese, meaning “group leader.” Han = squad, team or group + cho = head, chief. That’s a bonus Word of the Day for you).

But way, way back – in the Middle Ages – the phrase referred to actual chairs, and men, and boards.

Imagine it is - or, since we’re in the Middle Ages here, “hark back to” - dinner time, and the servants (yes, you’ve got servants. You’re pretty well off, and there are a lot of poor folks around, so servants come pretty cheaply) have pulled a great big flat hunk of wood (a “board,” from the Old English “bord,” meaning a plank or flat surface. There’s another Word of the Day freebie for ya) from the wall where it was leaning or hanging. They place the board on some trestles and now it’s a table! Poorer families just rest the board on their knees. It’s still a table, more or less.

That last paragraph had way too many detours. Let’s keep it simple: a board is put on trestles to make a table. Food is laid out on the board. Over time, the board comes to mean not just the table, but the food itself. That’s where we get terms like “room and board.”

The common folk, which is just about everyone other than you, sit on benches at the table. (Here’s another freebie: “Bench” comes mostly from Germanic languages and went through a number of variations, including benc, banc, bynk, bennche and so on. It’s where we get both “banquet” and “bankrupt.”)

You, on the other hand, being the lord of the manor or head of the household at the very least, get to sit at the head of the table in a chair – literally a seat of power, a position of authority and high status. (Okay, one last freebie: “chair” is derived from the Latin “cathedra,” meaning “seat” as well as Old French “chaiere,” meaning “throne.”) There were lots of benches, but relatively few chairs.

By the mid-1600’s, that exalted chair-man became a “chairman,” the occupier of a seat of authority, the leader of group meetings, and eventually the chief authority of a corporate or governmental group (board) of directors. And probably the person who gets to decide when they can break for lunch and what’s on the menu.

I won't be bringing any of that up at tonight's finance board meeting. We've got too much work to do. Have to come up with a new budget for the next fiscal year.

[thewordwideweb]

Rain Sauce

Dreams are weird. In my latest one, I found myself at the butcher’s counter in a grocery store, looking for something for dinner. The butcher was putting twine around a beautiful filet for the woman ahead of me in line. When it was my turn, I asked for something similar. The butcher grabbed a huge hunk of meat – my apologies to all the vegetarians and vegans out there – and a sharp knife and started slicing.

I asked the best way to prepare it, and a young guy, the butcher’s apprentice, I guess, told me to sear it on both sides and finish it in the oven. He said the absolute best way to serve it was to make a rain sauce to put over the top.

I told him I had never heard of “rain sauce.” I figured a rain sauce would just be, well, water. They handed me my package, shrink-wrapped in plastic (I thought butchers used butcher paper, but what do I know?) and the apprentice said, “the recipe is inside,” and I saw a folded up piece of paper with the words “Rain Sauce” inside the plastic, but I couldn’t read any of the ingredients.

I woke up before I could get the package home and open it, but the last thing I remember thinking was, “I hope this isn’t a horsemeat filet, and they really meant “rein” sauce.

For the record, when I woke up I went online to search “rain sauce.” Turns out there’s a company called Hatari Brothers based in Calgary, Alberta that makes “Acid Rain Hot Sauce.” The ingredients include habañero, piquin, ring-of-fire, peri-peri, tepin and jalapeño peppers, garlic, ginger, spices, salt, lemon, lime and orange juices and vinegar. You can buy it on Amazon.com. Will I try it? Well, maybe in my dreams.

[thewordwideweb]

"You've got cooties!"

When I was a kid (yes, I can remember back that far. Shuddup!) just about the worst insult you could throw at someone was telling them they had “cooties.” It meant they were infested with invisible bugs, but more than that, it meant they were simply unbearably icky.

But what, exactly, are “cooties,” and where did that word come from? You guessed it…”cooties” is the Word of the Day.

Cooties - the word, not the bugs – probably originated with British and American soldiers who fought in the trenches in World War I. The warriors were beset by nasty little biting bugs, whose technical name was “Pediculus humanus corporis,” which they called “cooties,” possibly derived from the Malay word “kutu,” meaning a parasitic biting insect. (Another theory says “cooties” is derived from the sea-bird known as a “coot,” which was often plagued by parasites.)

Pediculus humanus corporis is the technical term for the human body louse. So if someone accuses you of having cooties, they’re saying you really are “lousy” in the most literal sense of that word.

Despite the word apparently originating with the Brits, my UK mate Brian says he never heard the word “cooties” until I mentioned it to him. He did confirm, however, that there is a similar made-up malady in his country, known as “the dreaded lurgi.” Everybody’s got something, I guess.

Back in the US, as my friend Michael reminded me, “The Game of Cootie” was a very popular toy in the 1950’s. The object of the game was to be the first to collect enough plastic cootie parts to build an entire three-dimensional cootie. Yes, we children of the ‘50s were easily amused. 

As a little kid, you could “catch” cooties by touching someone of the opposite sex. Happily, we grew out of that by the time we reached puberty. And fortunately, as was demonstrated on the TV comedy The Big Bang Theory, cooties could be cured by grabbing and inoculating the infested person with your index finger while reciting the incantation, “Circle, circle, dot, dot…now you’ve had a cootie shot!”  

Who says vaccines don’t work?

[thewordwideweb]

Interjection of the day

My friend Paul lives in Ohio and recently posted photos of the aftermath of a lake-effect snowstorm that blanketed his town. I responded to his post with a single word: Ugh.

“Ugh” is the Word of the Day.

“Ugh,” used to express strong feelings of disgust, annoyance, distaste or horror (or merely a cough or a grunt), is an “imitative” word. That means we’ve translated the sound we make into a written form. And what exactly is the sound of “ugh?” Well, what do you want it to be? I prefer the ever-popular “uhkh” or “uckhhh” – an “uh” followed by the throaty “ch” sound in the word “challah.” But “ugg” and “uhh” are also perfectly acceptable.

Synonyms for ugh, we’re told, would include yuck, yecch, faugh, fie and phooey.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, typically the recognized authority on such things, the first known use of the interjection “ugh” came in 1765, in the writings of playwright and actor Samuel Foote. But Merriam-Webster says “ugh” was around nearly a hundred years earlier.

Who’s right? Ugh, I don’t know!

[thewordwideweb]

Just average

I hope you’ll think this post is above average, but that may be tough, since the Word of the Day is just plain “average.”

Like many words in English, the origin of “average” is nautical (but nice). “Average” came into English from the French “avarie,” meaning damage to a ship or its cargo. Once upon a time – all good stories start with “once upon a time” – let’s say you (and your partners, because this was expensive) had merchandise you wanted to sell in a foreign land, you (and your partners, because…etc.) would pay a fee (charge, tax, duty) to the master of the ship to make sure he took good care of your stuff.

But way back when, a ship was just as likely to be lost or damaged at sea as it was to reach its destination safely. And the financial liability for the damage or loss of the cargo – that “avarie” – would be shared equally among the owners, insurers, etc. They, ahem, “averaged” out the cost and shared it.

From there, it was a short jump from the “equitable apportionment” of a loss to the modern sense of taking the sum of all the numbers or quantities in a set (e.g., the value of the cargo) and dividing by the number of members in the set (e.g., the number of owners). The average is neither dramatically more nor dramatically less than a fair distribution. And that’s why someone whose work is merely average doesn’t stand out; he is not dramatically better or worse than anyone else.

Kinda like this post. Average at best.

[thewordwideweb]

Making waves

The Word of the Day is “seiche.” (Say it with me. It’s pronounced “saysh.”)

I had never encountered the word until yesterday, when I read a story about a massive landslide in Greenland that caused “a 200-meter-high mega-tsunami and a nine-day seiche.” I knew what a landslide was (and those are two words – “land” and “slide” - that should never go together) and I knew what a tsunami was (a big-ass ocean wave, from Japanese “tsu,” meaning “harbor” and “nami,” meaning “wave”), but “seiche” was entirely new to me.  

It’s pretty simple, actually. A “seiche” is a standing wave, a temporary disturbance or oscillation in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water, such as a lake, harbor, reservoir or even a swimming pool. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says a seiche is typically caused when strong winds and atmospheric pressure push water from one end of the lake to the other. The water sloshing back and forth is a seiche, and it can last for hours – or, in the case of a tsunami, for days.

The word was used by Swiss hydrologist Francois-Alphonse Forel more than a hundred years ago to describe his scientific observations of Lake Geneva. “Seiche” is generally said to be a Swiss-French dialect word that meant “to sway back and forth,” and it may also have roots in the Latin “siccus,” meaning “dry” (As the water sloshes away from one end of the lake, it leaves the other end temporarily dry).

I’m pretty sure you won’t have any occasion to use the word “seiche” anytime soon, but I will. In my aqua-fit gym class next week, when the instructor makes us run from one end of the pool to the other over and over again, we’ll be setting up a seiche that may end up knocking over some of the older folks in the class. Man overboard!

[thewordwideweb]

Sport: A pleasant diversion

The Word of the Day is *not* “career” (even though it has an interesting history. In short, “career” comes from a Latin word that meant a track or course for wheeled vehicles, like chariots. “Chariot“ and “career” share the same roots. And just as a chariot followed its course along Roman roads, and the sun follows its course across the sky, a “career” follows the course of a person’s professional life. Neat, huh?)

Anyway, I had a long career (which, as I said, is not the Word of the Day) in television and radio. The first half was spent primarily in News, the second half primarily in Sports. And in the two-plus decades I spent in sports, it never once occurred to me to wonder where the word “sport” originated. “Sport” is the Word of the Day. (I’m sure you are much relieved that we finally got around to it.)

Turns out, it’s ridiculously simple. “Sport” is just a shortened form of “disport,” meaning to divert, amuse, engage in activity that offers amusement, pleasure or recreation; also, a pleasant pastime or diversion. And “disport” came to English from the French “desporter” or “déporter,” to divert, amuse, play. Literally, it means “to carry away,” as in carrying us away from work or other serious matters.

What do you think of that, Old Sport?