21:23 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 13) (leg pulling)

Why do we say . . . that somebody who is playfully trying to make us believe something that is not true is pulling our leg?

Once again, as with so many expressions that have become engrained in the language, the answer to this question is that nobody knows for sure. It is just something we say, and since everybody knows what we mean when we say it, we go on saying it.

As with most expressions in this category, however, the mere fact that nobody can say for certain why we use the expression has not prevented a host of theories from arising and from sometimes being taken as fact. One of these alludes to the time when capital punishment was still widespread and the preferred means of dispatching miscreants was the gallows. Apparently it was not an unusual occurrence for the noose to fail to break the miscreant's neck, thus delaying his death and submitting him to "cruel and unusual punishment" as the much lengthier process of asphyxiation took its toll. In some such cases, we are told, it was not unusual for family members and friends to grab on to the hanged person's legs and pull, in an effort to hasten death and shorten agony. This "explanation" is often supported by quoting a Scottish rhyme (1867) in which the expression appears (but substituting the word drew for the word pulled) in reference to the rather grim practice: "He preached, and at last drew the auld body's leg, / Sae the Kirk got the gatherins o' our Aunty Meg." Among other places, this rhyme is cited in the Answerbag (http://www.answerbag.com/q-view/449905), which offers this exegesis: "The suggestion [. . .] is that Aunty Meg was hung [sic] for a crime and, at the end, the preacher pulled on her legs to ensure that she was dead." In a variation to this grisly explanation another Answerbag contributor posits that the legs of hanged criminals were pulled not by sympathizers in an act of humanitarianism but by poor children, in an effort "to get something of value to pop out"!

These explanations are colourful, if nothing else. And execution by hanging was indeed widespread at the time when the expression first made it into print, some time in the late nineteenth century: the OED dates the earliest printed appearance as 1888, in Blackbirding, by W. B. Churchward: "Then I shall be able to pull the leg of that chap Mike. He is always trying to do me." But there is where the problem with the explanation lies: there is nothing at all gruesome about the 1888 usage. Rather it suggests an activity that is a mixture of deception and good-humoured mockery, which mirrors the modern usage precisely. It is very difficult to imagine how the expression could evolve from an allusion to swinging on a hanged person's legs to a meaning of playfully taking the mickey out of someone. But gallows humour is not unknown, and it is possible that the expression first gained popularity in a work (perhaps a stage production) in which the ghoulish practice was used to comic effect. Until such a source is discovered and produced, however, the explanation must, I think, be classified as unlikely.

Slightly more likely is the explanation that the expression refers to the practice of street thieves of tripping their victims to make them fall down or at least lose their balance, whereupon they are easier to rob. Certainly there is the element of deception here that is present in the modern use of the expression; what is missing, however, is the sense of light-hearted fun that the modern usage encompasses. There was an early-twentieth-century Scottish idiom, to draw somebody's leg, which no doubt sprang from that practice, but it meant to make a fool of somebody by cheating: not quite so innocent and occupation as we now take it to be.

It seems most likely that the idiom as we now use it stems from a similar practice, but one that is a form of foolery rather than a prelude to crime: the practical joker and the slapstick comic both regularly try to make people stumble or even fall with no intent other than to raise a laugh at their expense. I have found only one authority that advances this explanation, the anonymous Why Do We Say It? (Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1985), and their explanation is very short, but it is, on the whole, the one to which I give most credence: "The allusion is to tripping up a man by catching at his foot or 'pulling his leg.' This, of course, makes the man fall—and to see a person fall is considered comic by all mankind."

And I'm not pulling your leg when I say that!

My thanks to Sally Noonan of Perth, Ontario for suggesting this question. If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!

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17:13 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 012) (dressed to the nines)

Why do we say that a person who is flamboyantly or impressively dressed is dressed to the nines?

This is yet another of those common expressions that everybody has heard and many have used, and yet nobody can say for certain where it comes from. What we do know is that did not make it first appearance in print until the late nineteenth century. This fact alone is enough to discount two frequently advanced explanations. The first of these was originally propounded by no less an authority than Walter Skeat, editor of the Oxford Etymological Dictionary and the very first secretary of the English Dialect Society, who suggested that the phrase may once have been "dressed ’to then eyen,’" which is "to the eyes" in mediaeval English. An attractive explanation (it follows the pattern of "dressed to the teeth" which one occasionally hears), which, however has two insurmountable drawbacks: no record of the phrase has ever been found in a mediaeval document and even if one were to be found, what explanation could possibly be advanced for the several centuries between the mediaeval period and our own during which there is no record whatsoever of the phrase? The same objections can be raised against the similar suggestion made by the Online Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=n&p=5): "No one seems to consider that it might be a corruption of to then anes, lit. ’for the one (purpose or occasion),’ a construction similar to the one that yielded nonce. . . ." Indeed: there seem to be good reasons for not considering it.

Another explanation that sounds almost convincing is that the expression comes from the uniforms worn by the British Army’s 99^th Foot Regiment, also known as the Wiltshire or the Duke of Edinburgh’s Regiment. Their uniforms, so the story goes, were so dapper that other regiments who served with them strove to rival them in sartorial splendour: they to wanted to be "dressed to the [standard set by the] Nines." A picture of these uniforms can be seen at http://www.directart.co.uk/mall/images/un286.jpg. The problems with this story are twofold: first, there is no evidence that the 99^th Regiment was ever referred to as "the Nines" (an equivalent would be referring to Canada’s famed Royal 22^nd Regiment as "the Twos"!), and second, there is an unexplained (nd unexplainable) time gap between the period to which this story supposedly alludes and the appearance of the expression in recorded speech (with no reference to military attire whatsoever).

A much more likely explanation, although not entirely satisfactory, is to be found in the phrase "to the nines" or sometimes "to the nine," which at one time was quite common in English (Robert Burns used it in several poems, the earliest of which is dated 1787). The OED gives several examples: "pleased to the nine," "painted to the nines" (both from Burns), "touched off to the nines," "praised to the nines," and "japanned [i.e., lacquered; varnished] to the nines," culminating in "dressed up to the nines," which appears in Thomas Hardy’s Ethelberta in the late nineteenth century. In all of these occurrences of the expression it clearly means to perfection, to the highest possible degree or point, and it is clear that the expression so used derives from the much older idea, derived from Christian symbolism but popularized by such pseudo-sciences as numerology, that nine is the perfect number: the number three represents the Holy Trinity, and nine is a trinity of trinities. Thus there are nine orders of angels, nine cardinal virtues, nine levels of Hell, nine articles of chivalry, the Nine Worthies (notable figures chosen from classical mythology, the Bible, and history), the nine lives of a cat, the cat-o’-nine-tails, etc. Fitting the pattern and also suggesting completeness or perfection were such nonaries or nonets as the nine Muses, and (between Pluto’s admission to that august body in 1930 and its expulsion from it in 2006) the nine planetary spheres.

The problem with this derivation is that in contemporary English "to the nines" is used only with the past participle dressed, and there its meaning is not so much to perfection as in a very showy and attention-grabbing manner. What were the circumstances that caused the expression to become obsolete when applied to all but one circumstance, and how did the shift in meaning occur? We simply do not know, and without that knowledge we cannot say for sure that "dressed to the nines" is a continuation (or, more precisely, the continuation) in modern English of "to the nines." But that would seem to be a better guess than either of the two explanations discussed at the beginning of this essay, or than any of the explanations I have rejected as being just too far-fetched or preposterous to even merit consideration, such as the suggestion that nine yards of cloth was the measure once required to fashion a suit of clothes, which, in the words of one Web site (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/dress-to-the-nines.html), "seems generous even for a fop"!

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17:17 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 011) (donnybrook)
Current mood: hopeful

Why do we say . . . that an all-out fight, a no-holds-barred knock-’em-down-drag-’em-out free-for-all, is a donnybrook?

I had a vague recollection of having once heard that the word was somehow Irish, and I suppose what brought it to mind was last week’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, although nothing connected to the celebrations of this wearer of the green (my mother’s family were O’Haras) could even remotely be described as a donnybrook! Because of the present use of its name, I had assumed that Donnybrook was perhaps the site of a famous battle or massacre in Irish history. Well, as they say, close, but no cigar!

Donnybrook is the name of what is now a southeastern suburb of Dublin. Back in the thirteenth century it was a small village, close enough to Dublin to be visited easily by city-dwellers but nevertheless separated from it by some distance. In the year 1204 King John of England (the same man who occasioned Magna Carta) granted a licence to the village to hold an eight-day fair (presumably beginning on a Saturday and ending on the following Saturday: many modern events still follow the same schedule). This began a very long tradition: the fair was held every August for well over six centuries, until it was finally suppressed in 1855 (one source gives the year as 1885, but that is clearly a misprint).

In the beginning, it seems, the Donnybrook Fair attracted no more attention or notoriety than any of the countless other fairs that were sprinkled throughout the British Isles. By the seventeenth century, however, it had become known for the riotous brawling to which it gave rise. In those days, it seems, the brawls were between members of the various trade guilds that displayed their wares at the fair, but before long these brawlers were joined by conflicting gangs of Protestant and Catholic hooligans: the fair was a perfect venue for the sectarian violence that for so long has been the pastime and the shame of the Irish population. By the early nineteenth century Donnybrook Fair was so well known for its wild, drunken brawls that its name became an eponym for any such outbreak of public disorder. A movement to discontinue the fair began in the 1830s and finally reached success in 1855, when permission to hold the fair was withdrawn.

It did not die quietly. The Irish love a good fight, and there were numerous efforts to rivive the Donnybrook Fair over the next decade. Dorothy Aucher describes the fair’s final demise as follows: "The last attempt to hold the Donnybrook fair was in 1868, when police reported that 120 people ’of the lowest class’ gathered on a Sunday afternoon to be entertained by a handful of tumblers. After this demoralizing turnout, the fair passed into memory" (Dictionary of Historical Allusions & Eponyms (1998), 71).

It also passed into the language, of course, where it will probably continue to do service as long as certain elements of society consider good times and high spirits to be synonymous with beating each other to a pulp!

Again, apologies for the delay in postings: this is a particularly busy time of year for teachers! If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!

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16:52 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 10) (on the ball)
Current mood: content

Why do we say that somebody who is with it, has a keen sense of what is going on, is competent and up to date, etc. is on the ball or has a lot on the ball?

In consulting my usual sources for this, I discovered that only one of them has written anything about it: Evan Morris, otherwise known as the Word Detective (see http://www.word-detective.com/090304.htmlon%20the%20ball. And yet the origin of the expression is not that easy to discern and there is at least one explanation circulating that is completely without founding.

To begin with where the expression does not come from. Visitors to the Royal Observatory and National Marine Museum at Greenwich, England, are sometimes regaled with this story, which is passed on as fact by some of the tour guides there. One of the buildings on that site, Flamsteed House, is adorned with two towers on the front facing of the central block (see http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/nav.3483). One of these towers is surmounted by a mast, which in turn is topped with a weather vane. At 12:55 P.M. every day (except when it is too windy), ever since 1883, a large red ball rises to a point halfway up the mast. At 12:58 it rises to the top of the mast, and at precisely 1:00 o'clock it falls. Nearby residents and ships on the Thames used to set their clocks and watches by it, if they owned clocks or watches. According to the faulty etymology, this is the ball referred to in the expression: to be on the ball originally meant, so the story goes, to be exactly on time, and was subsequently extended to mean to have the very latest information, to be up to date. Presumably the meaning sometimes given to the expression, to be alert, can also be derived from the Flamsteed House ball: in order to know that it is precisely 1:00 o'clock one has to "keep one's eye on the ball": one has to see it actually fall. If the ball is in its normal position, at the bottom of the mast, it could be any time between 1:00 PM and 12:58 PM!

Unfortunately, as is the case with so many plausible explanations, the facts do no bear this explanation out. The first appearance in print of the expression did not occur, according to the OED, until 1912, and it occurred on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USA. And indeed, although the expression is now used on both sides of the Atlantic, the British perceived it as American for several decades. It derives from that most American of sports, baseball. Especially successful pitchers, those who were able to outwit and bamboozle the batters who came up against them, were said by commentators to have or to be putting a lot on the ball, "a lot" referring to what we now call spin, "English," etc. So said of a pitcher "He has a lot on the ball" meant that he is able to handle anything that comes up, he's on top of any situation that confronts him. And that's what it still means, even though the expression has now escaped the baseball stadium (and indeed, crossed the Atlantic)!

One of the morals of this story is: don't believe everything that tour guides tell you!

Apologies for the delay in postings: last week was spent marking essays and midterm examinations! If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!

Currently reading : Cat Crimes 3 By Martin H. Greenberg Release date: 01 June, 1994

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16:05 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 9)
Current mood: exasperated

Why do we say it's raining cats and dogs? The meaning is obvious—it is raining very hard—but why cats and dogs in particular?

As with many common English expressions, there is no simple and universally accepted explanation. We know that the expression entered the language in the seventeenth century, but we cannot say for certain what was in the minds of those who first used and popularized it. At any rate, the first recorded use of a variation of this expression appears in a work of the English Playwright Richard Brome, City Wit, which appeared in 1653. "It shall raine," he wrote, "Dogs and Polecats." Polecats? A polecat is a North American name for a skunk, but in Europe was applied to various members of the weasel family.

It was the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift who turned both members of the pair into domestic animals, or at least it was he who first recorded this transformation, in a 1738 work called A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation, where the following sentence appears: "I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs." And we have been using the expression in that form ever since.

But why? What do cats and dogs (or weasels, for that matter) have to do with rain? As usual, where there is no certainty, theories abound, some of them more fanciful than others. To deal with some of the more hare-brained ones first:

In the Middle Ages cats were often identified as the companions, or familiar spirits, of witches, and it has been said that in the popular imagination these cats were able to fly through the air. It is further posited that in Norse mythology dogs were attendants on Odin, the god of storms, and that sailors used to associate cats with wind and dogs with rain, so that if it were raining cats and dogs there would a heavy rainstorm with lots of wind.

The problem with this is that there is no evidence to support any of it: if people ever thought that witches' cats could fly or sailors ever associated cats with wind and dogs with rain, there is absolutely no contemporary record of it. And there is no way to explain the centuries that intervened between the days when belief in witches and the Scandinavian gods was current and the seventeenth century, when the expression suddenly appears in English. Nor is there an explanation for the appearance of the expression only in English: why not in at least one of the Scandinavian languages? why not in any of the other languages of Europe, where belief in witchcraft flourished?

Then there is the explanation that was popularised by one of those humorous e-mail messages that people read and then forward to all of their friends: In 1999 there was one called "Life in the 1500s" (it is reproduced at the following site: http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hoaxes/hoaxDetails.asp?HName=Life+in+the+1500s+Hoax or http://...com/2myys6), which gives the following explanation for the expression:

I'll describe their houses a little. You've heard of thatch roofs, well that's all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, "it's raining cats and dogs."

Again, some evidence would be nice. No self-respecting cat (or even a dog, for that matter) would remain on a rooftop during a rainstorm, particularly not on top of the thatch, where it would have to be in order to slip off! An imaginative explanation, in other words, but one that has no connection whatsoever with reality! And again, what could account for the century or so between the time when life was supposedly like this and the first appearance of the expression in English?

The next explanation is somewhat more plausible. According to it, "cats and dogs" is a corruption of the obscure French word catadoupe, a waterfall, itself derived from a similar Greek word with the same meaning. It is true that in some French dialects an s sound can be heard following a t, and it is not inconceivable that the syllable –doupe might be pronounced –doppe in some of the same dialects, so that an unsuspecting anglophone might think he was hearing "cats and dog"—but it is unlikely. The trouble is that the word is obscure: it does not appear, for instance, in either of the desk-size (each between 1500 and 2000 pages long) French-only dictionaries that I regularly consult, even as an obsolete or archaic word. There is no evidence that the word was ever familiar enough, even in France, to get corrupted into a popular English expression

An explanation that I like and one that I find almost persuasive is that the expression comes from the sounds made by the two animals in question when they are fighting with each other: the cat's hisses and yowls might easily be heard in the sound of the howling wind by an imaginative person, and a dog's growls and barks might be heard in the sound of thunder. I would be totally convinced that this was the origin of the expression if I could find even one other language in which this asociation is made, but alas! I cannot. In other languages it rains a great many things (wheelbarrows in Czech, chair legs in Greek, and husbands in Spanish, for example: there is an entertaining list at http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/rain/htm), but only in English does it rain cats and dogs!

All of which brings us to the explanation most favoured by those who have looked into the question, one which takes as its point of departure the fact that it entered the language in the seventeenth century. Rain. England. The 1600s. Well, we do know that in large English cities, particularly in London, during the seventeenth century the drainage systems were very rudimentary and particularly inefficient, so that a great downpour of rain sent a flood of water surging through the cobblestone streets, and there are contemporary accounts of small animals, such as cats and dogs, being drowned in these floods and carried along on the coursing waters, their corpses scattered around the streets when things dried up again. It is highly doubtful that anyone ever believed that these animals had actually fallen out of the sky during a rainstorm, but one can very easily imagine people coming out of their houses the morning after a storm, seeing the streets littered with the bodies of drowned domestic animals, and exclaiming "I see it rained cats and dogs last night!" Or words to that effect.

Indeed, the first recorded use of the modern form of the expression, in the Swift quotation given above, could very well be a reference by Swift to a poem he had himself written twenty-eight years earlier, in 1710. Written in four unequal stanzas and titled "A Description of a City Shower," it contains the following lines:

Now from all Parts the swelling kennels flow,

And bear their Trophies with them as they go:

Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell

What streets they sailed from, by the sight and smell.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sweepings from butchers stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,

Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.

The full poem can be found at http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Swift/DescriptionCity.htm or http://...com/ytmecd. It is well worth reading.

This, then, is the most probable explanation of the expression, but nobody can say for sure. Perhaps, after all, it is no more than an exaggeration of the rain of frogs described in the Bible and indeed observed in nature on several subsequent occasions.

And what of the polecats in the 1653 reference? Well, so far nobody has managed to weasel out an explanation for them!

This posting was suggested by a question asked by ELOF Jean-Philippe Barrette, of the Royal Military College St-Jean, where I teach. If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!

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17:19 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 8) (shit-la-marde)
Current mood: cautiously optimistic

Why do we (or at least those of use who live in Quebec) say . . . shit-la-marde, a fairly common cuss word? Why marde instead of merde, and why the English-French combination? What kind of an oath is it? Mild? Strong? Somewhere in between?

            I was pretty sure I knew the answer, as a good Quebecer—it has been part of my own repertoire of cuss words for years—but just to be on the safe side I checked with one of my colleagues, Alain Biage, who is a specialist in Quebec French.

            I had thought that only anglophone Quebecers used the expression, but he assures me that it is equally popular among francos. According to him the "correct" expression is "shit de marde", literally shit of shit. The French word for shit, of course, is la merde, but marde is the Quebec variation. A European Frenchman might say "Merde!" if he were upset, but in Quebec this is not considered powerful enough to express a strong emotion: in Quebec French all the really good swear words are sacrilegious, and merde doesn't qualify. Marde, although it means exactly the same thing, is considered much more vulgar, much as in North American English the word arse is considered more vulgar than the word ass--and the Québecois intensifies marde even further by adding the English word shit, which everyone knows is a very bad thing to say in English.

Alain tells me that it is very common in Quebec French, ranking perhaps fifth in popularity among all cuss words. It is somewhat less common in Quebec English, but if you were born here or have lived here long enough, you will eventually find yourself using it! It is a medium-strength oath: stronger that just "Shit!" in English or "Merde!" in French, but not quite as strong as, say, the F-word in English or one of the sacrilegious words in French—and it is nice to have a term that the two linguistic communities—Quebec's "two solitudes"—can and do agree upon!

This article was suggested by a question from Geoff Hart of Pointe-Clare, Quebec. If you have a word or expression that you would like me to research, please do leave me a message, and I'll have a go at it! All suggestions are most gratefully received!

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16:11 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 7) (petard)
Current mood: cautiously optimistic

Why do we say . . . that a person who gets caught in his own trap or falls victim to a nefarious scheme he has devised to bring others down is hoist with his own petard? Why hoist instead of hoisted, and what is a petard anyway?

Unlike many, if not most, common expressions, we know exactly where this one came from and what it means. A petard was once (the earliest recorded use of the word dates from 1598, so the device was contemporary with Elizabeth I and Shakespeare) to a type of explosive device. I cite the definition given by Michael Quinion on his World Wide Words Web site (): "A petard was a bell-shaped metal grenade typically filled with five or six pounds of gunpowder and set off by a fuse. Sappers dug a tunnel or covered trench up to a building and fixed the device to a door, barricade, drawbridge or the like to break it open. The bomb was held in place with a heavy beam called a madrier." "Unfortunately," Quinion continues, "the devices were unreliable and often went off unexpectedly." When such an accident occurred, the unlucky sapper carrying the petard was blown sky-high instead of the obstacle it was meant to remove: he was lifted into the air, or hoisted, by his own petard!

So why do we say hoist instead of using the past-participle –ed form, which we would expect in such a construction (in the previous sentence, for example, I wrote "the . . . sapper was blown sky-high" and "he was lifted into the air," not "he was blow" or "he was lift")? It is because the expression comes to us directly from the pen of Shakespeare. At the end of Act 3 of Hamlet, the prince learns that his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to accompany him to England, bearing instructions that he is to be put to death by the English king when he gets there, and we learn that he has devised a plot whereby the messengers will themselves be the victims of the instructions they carry:

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petard, and 't shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines

And blow them at the moon.

So the expression is a quotation, and as such we retain Shakespeare's odd (to our ears) sense of the word hoist as well as his lack of adherence to the rules of modern English grammar. The expression is, in other words, what grammarians call a set phrase: one that is not subject to the ordinary laws of grammar. Curious that we should treat hoist in this manner, but are not always so respectful when it comes to the rest of the phrase: one often hears "hoist on or by his own petard" when Shakespeare clearly wrote with!

Amusingly, the word petard derives from the French verb péter, which in turn comes from the Latin petar, to break wind (fart). Presumably the explosive device was so named because of the muffled sound made by an explosive that is detonated at the end of a long tunnel! Language can be scatological at times, often in the most unexpected places!

Please submit suggestions for future postings!

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17:20 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 6) (tenterhooks)
Current mood: mellow

Why do we say . . . that a person who is in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, suspense, or mental agitation is on tenterhooks?

Yes, it is tenterhooks, not, as one sometimes hears, tender hooks!

The term comes from the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth has been woven, it still contains impurities, such as oil from the fleece, pieces of grass or other plants, and some dirt. To remove these impurities, the cloth is cleaned, a process that was previously carried out in a fulling mill, where the cloth was washed with a material designed to absorb or dissipate the oils, such as fuller's earth or soap, then rinsed with water and beaten with wooden hammers to make the fibres mat together and give the cloth strength. It then had to be dried, but carefully, in order to prevent or minimize shrinking.

This was done by stretching the wet cloth on a large wooden frame that has been known in English since at least the fourteenth century as a tenter, a word that ultimately derives from the Latin word tendere, to stretch: a fourteenth-century manuscript cited by the OED tells us that Christ was nailed to the cross as men stretch cloth upon a tenter (spelled teyntur). This was a large wooden frame with a row of nails (each driven part-way into the frame and then bent at a ninety-degree angle) all around its perimeter. The edges of the length of cloth were secured to the frame with these bent nails, or tenterhooks, and the tenters were then set outside so the cloth could dry but would still retain its size and shape. The earliest recorded use of the word tenterhooks in this sense was in 1480, when it appeared with the spelling Tentourhokes.

What an apt image for a person who is full of anxiety or expectation: it is as if his nerves have been pulled taut, putting his entire being in tension, as he hangs suspended awaiting the outcome! This figurative sense is also quite old: in 1532 Sir Thomas More wrote, in The Confutation of Barnes, "The churche . . . is stretched out in the stretcher or tenter hooks of the crosse, as a churche well washed and cleansed." Here, however, while the use is figurative, it is still firmly connected to the original meaning of the word. The modern sense of the word, completely divorced, in the minds of most people, from the image which it conveys, seems to have been established in the language by the time of the English novelist Tobias Smollett, who wrote in 1748 "I left him upon the tenter-hooks of impatient uncertainty," and by 1812 it was no longer thought necessary to specify the state of mind that results in being so distressed: in that year Sir Robert T. Wilson wrote in his diary "Until I reach the imperial headquarters I shall be on tenter-hooks." The word assumed its modern form, without the hyphen, in the issue of The Saturday Review for December 25, 1897, where a reviewer notes "The author keeps . . . the reader . . . on tenterhooks."

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17:12 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 5) (green)
Current mood: quiet

Why do we say . . . that a jealous person is green with envy, and that jealousy is the green-eyed monster?

In art and in the Christian liturgy green is the symbol of rebirth, resurrection, and hope. Indeed, in Catholic ritual green vestments are worn on more days than vestments of any other colour, so green might be said to express the normal, everyday state of the Christian, who lives in "sure and certain hope of the resurrection." So how does it happen that in English-speaking cultures (among others) the colour green has also come to signify jealousy or envy?

            The answer seems to go back to ancient Greece, where a pale or greenish colour was associated with illness. The seventh-century Greek poet Sappho used to it somewhat figuratively to describe the complexion of the rejected suitor in one of her poems. As time went by green came to be particularly associated with illnesses thought to have been caused by an excess of bile, an excess that was also thought to be responsible for the emotion of jealousy. In Book I of his Confessions Saint Augustine speaks of a child being green with jealousy at the sight of his sibling nursing at their mother's breast.

This belief survived until relatively modern times, and was certainly current during the age of Shakespeare, who coined the expression "green-eyed monster." Shakespeare equated green with jealousy three times, the earliest being in The Merchant of Venice (1596): "How all the other passions fleet to air,/as doubtful thoughts and rash-embraced despair,/and shuddering fear and green-eyed jealousy!" (act 3, scene 2). Jealousy is green-eyed, presumably, because the eyes are windows of the soul and the soul of a jealous person is coloured by an excess of bile. When Shakespeare next uses this image, however, he chooses to play with it. What else has green eyes? Why, cats, of course, and so jealously becomes a green-eyed cat, torturing its victim before destroying it utterly: "O beware, my lord, of jealousy;/ it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/the meat it feeds on." (Othello, 3,3). Othello is possibly the most famous investigation of the operation and effects of jealousy in any language. Shakespeare's third use of the conceit is in Antony and Cleopatra, where he refers to jealousy as the green sickness.

Germans turn yellow with jealousy rather than green, and the Swedish word for jealousy is svartsjuka, literally black sickness, but thanks to Shakespeare the speaker of English will always view jealousy as the "green-eyed monster" and we will no doubt continue to turn green with envy.

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16:46 - Why do we say . . . (new series, 4) (blue movies)
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Why do we say . . . that an off-colour, indecent, obscene, or even pornographic story, joke, song, or movie is blue?

In the symbolism of art and literature, blue has always signified the soul, or spirituality, and in religious iconography, as in heraldry, the colour blue denotes faith or fidelity. This is why, for instance, representations of the Virgin Mary always show her wearing a blue mantle or cloak, and the expression "true blue" means loyal or faithful even to death. And then there is the concept of blue blood, a supposed characteristic of the nobility or aristocracy: European aristocrats, particularly aristocratic women, were seldom exposed to the full strength of the sun and consequently had very pale skin, through which the blue veins were much more apparent than in the ruddier complexions of the common people. But what does any of this have to do with the defining characteristic of blue jokes and blue movies?

The standard dictionaries, even the illustrious OED, all tell us what blue means in such expressions, but they do not tell us why. And at this date, almost two centuries after the first recorded use of blue in this context, it is impossible to say for sure where the meaning came from. It seems, however, to have come into currency in the early nineteeth century: on his Website (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-blu2.htm), highly respected word sleuth Michael Quinion notes what is probably its earliest appearance in print, in an 1824 publication called The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, by John McTaggart, which defines "thread o' blue" as "any little smutty touch in song-singing, chatting, or piece of writing." At the end of that century, in 1898, E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests a possible origin: apparently there existed in France a series of pornographic books called la Bibliothèque bleu (the Blue Library), so called because they contained the type of stories that could be heard in bordellos, from the lips of prostitutes. In those days in France, apparently, the customary attire for women who were imprisoned for prostitution was a blue gown; hence, a prostitute came to be known as a blue, and stories typical of prostitutes as blue stories. If based on verifiable facts, this meaning of "blue story" is particularly apposite: the word pornography itself comes from two Greek works meaning the depiction in writing of harlots.

We no longer restrict the word pornography to the written media, applying it with equal ease to drawing, painting, photography, and the cinema, so it is logical to assume that a thread o' blue progressed easily from blue talk, blue songs, and blue stories to blue movies, which certainly did not exist is the 1820s. But Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue) suggests another origin for the last term: "Blue movie" it says, is "a term used for a pornographic film because early pornographic films in black and white were often shot on inferior grade film which made them look bluish." This sentence is flagged on the Wikipedia site as one that needs documentation, and indeed it does; otherwise the meaning of blue here is too similar to its meaning in older expressions to make a separate derivation seem likely.

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