Impressed

"I'm impressed."

With snark being our default reaction to everything, perhaps we don't say it often enough.

The verb impress, meaning "to have a strong effect on the mind," entered English in the 14th century.

Its root was the Latin impressus, meaning "stamped," "indented," or "imprinted."

A marvelous event impressed you, stamping its mark on your mind.

A second, less joyous meaning of the verb arose two centuries later.

During wars in the 16th century, when the king needed to fill the ranks of the Royal Navy, he would press seafarers—usually sailors with the merchant fleet—into naval service. 

The king in fact claimed the permanent right to impress sailors any time he chose.

To do so, he would dispatch "press gangs" to roam the coastal towns. The press gangs were little more than bands of brutal thugs, led by ruthless naval officers. Often they'd snatch any man they spotted—regardless of seafaring experience.

To be "impressed"—a fearsome event—meant to be "kidnapped into the service."

The practice of impressing men into the Royal Navy lasted well into the 19th century, when crown service was made voluntary.

Mystery

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

— Sherlock Holmes

There are mysteries and there are mysteries.

Mystery (meaning a "puzzle") is a Middle English word derived from the Latin mysterium, meaning a "secret rite" or "initiation."

The medieval Catholic Church taught—and still teaches—that Jesus' life was an amalgam of mysteries, inexplicable to mortals, but worthy of contemplation. It used the Rosary to catalog these puzzles. A mystery meant an event in the life of Christ.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, mysteries was the term used to name the Seven Sacraments. So, for example, marriage was a mystery. (I can buy that.)

But mystery had a secular meaning, too, at the time.

A mystery meant an occupation, a trade, or a guild.

So, for example, the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, the guild for the retailers of fish in medieval London, were referred to as a "mystery."

Thanks to their royal charters, these mysteries were powerful monopolies, plying their might through arcane regulations.

They dictated who could sell fish in London and who couldn't; set all prices for their goods; and ran their own courts of law to settle disputes between sellers and suppliers.

The fishmongers, for example, fixed the prices for soles, turbots, herrings, oysters, and eels. They also forbid wholesalers from selling fish directly to the public; outlawed the selling of fish indoors; and prohibited the sale of any fish except salted ones after they were two days old.

The mysteries were also inordinately wealthy. They owned and ran their own apprentice programs, private schools, hospitals, poorhouses, and colonial plantations.

The mysteries' grip on commerce only ended with the rise of capitalism in the 19th century.

We echo the medieval mysteries' power today whenever we speak of guarding "trade secrets."

Supply Chain Problem

The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.

— Louis de Bernieres

Novelist Louis de Bernieres' marvelous notion of civility as "surplus kindness" arrived in my inbox today thanks to photographer Peter Ralston. 

The word kind, meaning "doing good for another," derives from the Old English word kynn, meaning "family." 

Kynn was borrowed from kunją the ancient German word for "kinfolk." (Kunją survives today in the German words Kind, meaning "child," and Kinder, meaning "children.") 

Just as telling, the word kindness in Old English (kyndnes) also meant "surplus."
 

So "surplus kindness" is a redundancy. 

Except that there's a shortage of kindness in our nation today. 

We need to fix our supply chain problem. 

Quickly.

Red Tape

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

— Honoré de Balzac

It took me five trips to Delaware's DMV recently to get a new driver's license and registration.

Five.

At every step in the months-long process, the clerks provided verbal and printed instructions to follow, both of which were always—always—wrong.

The procedures were Byzantine and no one I encountered knew what he was doing.

Complexity and frightening incompetence prolonged my agony—although I must admit I grew fond of the hot dogs. 

(There was a long queue at the entrance to the building, where a vendor sold Polish dogs from a cart. Two dollars bought you a hot dog, chips, and a soda; by my third trip, I’d become a regular. Mo and I were on a first-name basis.)

My ordeal's origins were evident from the start.

Although the DMV used yellow tape to demarcate the queue, the underlying problem was red tape.

"Red tape has killed more people than bullets," novelist Ben Bova once said.

It almost killed me. (The hot dogs didn't help.)

The expression red tape enjoys a six-century history.

It originated in the 1600s, when nobles and lawyers began—literally—to bind batches of paperwork with red tape.

To open a batch, you had to "cut through the red tape."

Red tape went from literal to metaphorical use three centuries later.

Dickens, Carlyle, Longfellow and other writers all used the expression in the 19th century to deride bureaucracies.

During the American Civil War, bureaucrats in Washington, DC, took red tape to new lengths, using roll after roll after roll of it to seal envelopes and bundle documents, according to the National Archives.

In fiscal year 1864 alone, the War Department purchased 154 miles of the stuff—nearly twice the length of Delaware.

HAT TIP: Ann Ramsey, no friend of red tape, suggested this post. 

Fire the Writer

Well, that's putting your foot in your mouth. Or your toe in your mouth.

On its website, the amateur-league baseball team Savannah Bananas boasts that "we toe the line."

We are not your typical baseball team. We are different. We take chances. We toe the line. We test the rules. We challenge the way things are suppose to be.

The writer doesn't know the meaning of "toe the line." 

The idiom means do what is expected or act according to another's rules.

You can't both be a maverick and toe the line.

Dear Writer: strike one, you're out! 

NOTE: Toe the line comes not from baseball, but track and field. Officials used to shout, "Toe the line!" Now they shout, "On your mark!"

Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt is the only thing free in the modern era.

— Ugwu Kelvin

Before there was water-cooler talk, there was scuttlebutt.

An 18th-century nautical term, a scuttlebutt was a cask of drinking water kept on deck for the crew.

Scuttlebutts had a gaping hole, so sailors could dip a cup into them. They would often gather around the ship's scuttlebutt to gossip.

The word compounded scuttle, meaning a "hole in a ship," and butt, meaning a "barrel."

Scuttle was a 15th-century term derived from the Spanish escotilla, meaning "hatch."

In battle, when a captain preferred to sink rather than surrender his vessel, he would order sailors to "scuttle the ship" by cutting holes in the hull.

The nautical term bore no relationship to the inland scuttle, meaning "dish," "cup," or "bucket." The inland word was a 14th-century borrowing from the Latin scutella, meaning "platter."

By the 19th century, shipboard rumors came to be known collectively as scuttlebutt, the maritime version of fake news—the lies rival newspaper publishers accused each other of printing in the 19th century.   

Inland rumors, on the other hand, when they didn't appear in newspapers were spread through the grapevine in the 19th century. In America, at least.

No sooner than Samuel Morse invented the telegraph (1844) did a company named Western Union string thousands upon thousands of miles of telegraph wire across the country. 

Americans thought the company's labyrinthine handiwork resembled a grapevine, and telegraph messages were said to arrive "through the grapevine."

During the Civil War, when a soldier wanted to vouch for a suspect rumor, he'd say, "I heard it through the grapevine," meaning "it must be true." 

Rumors themselves soon came to be known collectively as grapevine (or what the British would call humbug).

Now that you've heard them, be sure to share these facts with colleagues—on line or at the water cooler.

Flailing About

Johnson has been flailing about desperately.

— New York Magazine

The cognitive dissonance Republican Senator Ron Johnson suffers would pain an intelligent man, according to New York Magazine. Nonetheless, Johnson must wonder how he can call the louts who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 "tourists."

"Johnson has been flailing about desperately in search of a resolution to this contradiction," the magazine says.

The verb flail, meaning to "whip," is an 11th-century word that originally meant to "thresh" or "winnow." 

Knight wielding a "flail"

A flail was a Mediaeval farm tool made of wood and leather. Its name was borrowed from the Latin name for the same tool, flagellum, from which we also get the verb flagellate, meaning to "flog."

When we see a flail today, we think of knights doing battle, but the flail was never a weapon. 

Mediaeval artists merely convinced us it was.

By depicting flail-wielding knights in illuminated manuscripts, medieval artists led later viewers to imagine that these wily cavalrymen must have used flails to terrorize foes. 

But, the "flails" wielded by knights were actually goads—wood-and-rope cattle prods that somewhat resemble flails. Knights used goads to prod their horses.

Medieval flail

The spiked iron "flails" in museum collections today are in fact simulacra: 19-century copies of a 10-century weapon that never existed.

So when you read that Johnson is "flailing about," don't think of knights of old. 

To flail about means to "whip around," to "engage in erratic movements."

Fossils

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson famously called language "fossil poetry."

Like a seaside cliff, he said, language comprises fossilized images—out-of-date tropes that have "long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

Some words are obsolete except when we use them in idioms. 

Linguists, too, call these words "fossils."

We'd never use them otherwise—and don't even know what the words mean.

A bumper

A few examples include:

Bumper. We're comfortable saying, "Farmers enjoyed a bumper crop last season," but we'd never say, "Everyone, raise your bumper!" A bumper was a 17th-century tavern glass, so called because a drinker would bump it down on the bar when offering a toast. First, however, the barkeep had to fill it to the brim with grog. The word eventually became synonymous with "voluminous."

A spiked horseshoe

Roughshod. We say, "The backfield ran roughshod over the defense," but we'd never say, "The players were roughshod in Adidas." In the 16th century, roughshod referred to spiked horseshoes. The spikes improved traction, but were brutal on fallen infantry when the cavalry overran them. With the addition of "run," the word came to mean to "clobber" or "punish."

A pinking

Pinking. We're comfortable saying, "My pinking shears have orange handles," but we'd never say, "I was pretty drunk when I got this pinking." A 17-century word, a pinking was a decoration on a body part—in other words, a tattoo (to pink someone meant to "pierce" him). To prevent bad luck, sailors in the British navy would cover themselves with "pinkings," but the word over time came to refer only to the tool we use to add decorative edges to cloth.

Wend. We say, "I'll wend my way home," but we'd never say, "I'll wend to the office on Monday." The verb wend, meaning to "go," dates to the 13th century, when people wended everywhere—the field, the barn, the privy, the square, the church, the market, the castle, the theater—but today we only "wend our way." We never just wend.

Full of sleight

Sleight. We'd readily say, "McConnell performed a sleight of hand this week," but we'd never say, "McConnell is full of sleight." Sleight is a 14th-century word that meant "cleverness," "nimbleness," "cunning," or "trickery." It was the latter sense from which we got the idiom sleight of hand.

Lots of words that grow obsolete never fossilize; they merely fade. A few examples are:

Sockdolager. We'd say an incomparable person was an "original," but in the 19th century she'd be a sockdolager. (Sockdolager was the last word Lincoln ever heard spoken.)

Pumblechook

Pumblechook. We'd call Bernie Madoff a "crook," but in the 19th century he'd be a pumblechook. The word came from Great Expectations, where Dickens described the despicable character Uncle Pumblechook as the "basest of swindlers."

Shoddyocracy. We'd say, "Champlain Towers is shoddy," but we'd never say, "Florida is home to the shoddyocracy." In the 19th century, an entire class of people enriched themselves by selling shoddy merchandise. Newspapers gave these pumblechooks a collective name: the shoddyocracy.

Shrift. Before they were executed, 14th-century felons were permitted a shrift—a confession to a priest. But it had to be brief, so the mob's entertainment wasn't delayed. We still know the word from the idiom short shrift, which means "little to no consideration." But the word has otherwise faded from use.

Morphiated. Cocaine and morphine abuse were common in the 19th century (think of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes). A user who we'd say is "stoned" was in the 19th century morphiated. I would not feel so all alone: everybody must get morphiated.

Linguists used to believe words had a shelf-life of from 8,000 to 9,000 years; but, as they have recently discovered, 23 fossil words are truly ancient—more than 15,000 years old. One study calls these words, preserved for millennia with "remarkable fidelity," ultraconserved.

Deriving from "Proto-Eurasiatic"—humanity's first language—the ultraconserved words include mother, brother, man, fire, ashes, and worm.

That last word sounds fishy to me.

Free Lunch

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

— Milton Friedman

Pioneers of the "loss leader," late-19th-century saloonkeepers offered thirsty customers "free lunch."

Economist Milton Friedman popularized the term a century later by propounding that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." (He didn't coin the expression. He swiped it from critics of the New Deal.)

But when it comes to tasty business clichés, Friedman was wrong. 

Below is a free smorgasboard of them.

We use them every day. 

Who'd have thought what these terms originally meant?

Across the board. In the 19th century, racehorses' odds were displayed on "tote boards" (huge calculators) at the track. When a gambler wanted to back a horse to win, place or show, he placed a bet "across the board."'

The Big Cheese himself,
William Howard Taft

Big cheese. In colonial India, Hindus used the word chiz to mean "thing." British soldiers simply added "big" when a thing was important. The term wasn't applied to people until 1911, when President William Howard Taft appeared at the National Dairy Show in Chicago, where he was invited to slice up and sample an enormous wheel of cheese. As a result, the 350-pound Taft became the world's first "big cheese."

Coach. In the 19th century, you took a coach when you wanted to get somewhere fast. Schools began to use the term to denote tutors, who accelerated students' learning.

Dead wood. Shipbuilders in the 16th century often placed loose timber blocks in the keel of a ship as ballast. Sailors called the excess cargo, which slowed the ship down, "dead wood."

Even steven. The first Afrikaners called an English penny a "steven." When they settled a debt, they would say they were "even steven."

Facilitate. In the 13th century, English speakers borrowed the French verb faciliter, which means to "ease," and turned it into a noun. Facility meant "gentleness." If you're gentle, you don't boss people around. You coax them.

Guinea pig. When a Brit volunteered for jury duty in the 18th century, he received the nominal sum of a guinea a day for his time. If he longed for better pay, he'd join the King's Navy, where a "Guinea pig" was a novice sailor.

Hard and fast. An 18th-century ship that was stuck was "hard." A ship in dry dock was "hard and fast."

Irons in the fire. To do the job right, a 14th-century plumber had to keep several hot irons at the ready all the time. How else can you connect lead pipes?

Draco

Kill with kindness. The Ancient Greek lawmaker Draco was beloved by Athenians. To prove their adoration, they showered him with their cloaks—too many cloaks—when he appeared at the Aeginetan theater in 590 BC. Poor Draco was smothered. What a way to go! (I almost said "What a way toga.")

Lame duck. An 18th-century member of the London stock exchange who couldn't meet his obligations on settlement day was said to "waddle" out of Exchange Alley, mortified.

Mentor. Before he left home for the Trojan War, Ulysses chose his friend Mentor as an advisor to his son Telemachus.

The naked truth. An ancient fable holds that Truth and Falsehood went for a swim. Falsehood stole Truth's clothes. Truth refused to take Falsehood's clothes, and so went naked.

Okay. Like President Trump, Andrew Jackson couldn't spell. On day he spelled "all correct" as "oll korrect." The misspelling became an acronym that political enemies seized on, in order to mock Jackson. The gag worked, because "OK" rhymed with the Scottish expression "Och aye," meaning "Oh, yes."

9th-century taxpayer

Pay through the nose. In the 9th century, Ireland was occuoied by Danish invaders. The invaders placed a much-hated real estate tax on the Irish that was known as the "Nose Tax." If you failed to pay the ounce of gold due, the Danes slit your nose.

Take a rain check. Baseball first became popular to watch in America in the late 19th century. You received a voucher, good for future admission, any time a game was called on account of rain.

Skin in the game. Australians called an English pound a "skin" in the early 20th century. Gamblers liked to "put skin in the game." In a so-called "skin game," innocent players were cheated by sharpers.

Tip. In the 17th century, English speakers borrowed the German verb tippen, meaning to "touch," to denote a "gift." Your could make a gift of money (a "tip") or a gift of information (also a "tip"). The story about signs over tip-jars reading "To Insure Promptness" is pure baloney, invented by cartoonist Robert Ripley.

Upper crust. Pies were symbols of society in the Middle Ages. The top crust represented the aristocracy.

Wild Alpine Burdock

Velcro. Swiss engineer George de Mestrel invented Velcro in 1941, after noticing that the burrs of the wild Alpine burdock stuck to his pants. He named his invention after velours crochet, French for "velvet hook."

Worth your salt. Ancient Roman soldiers were paid monthly, sometimes in money and sometimes in salt. Their allowance was called a salarium. Sal is Latin for "salt."

Yahoo. Before the search engine, Yahoo was the name of a race of louts, "the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced." The novelist Jonathan Swift dreamed them up when penning Gulliver's Travels in 1726. In 1995, the search engine's inventors borrowed the name, because they thought Swift's description of the Yahoos also described them.

Goodly. "Goodly" combines good with -ly. It was coined by yours truly in 2016 ("Bigly" was already taken). So now you know.

19th-century racetrack "tote board"

Kick the Bucket

Bucket: an open-topped, roughly cylindrical container.

Gambrel: a frame used by butchers for hanging carcasses.

— Collins Dictionary

When KFC founder Colonel Harlan Sanders died 40 years ago, a pal of mine joked, "He must have kicked the bucket."

Kick the bucket comes not from American chickens, but British pigs.

According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a bucket is 18th-century British slang for a gambrel.

"When pigs are killed," Brewer's says, "they are hung by their hind-legs on a bucket, with their heads downwards. To kick the bucket is to be hung on the bucket by the heels."

Farmers (and city folk) would soon apply the gruesome expression to anyone who died.

The first known appearance of kick the bucket can be found in the August 1775 edition of The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer.

"My old mess-mate, Tom Bowline, met me at the gangway, and with a salute as hearty as honest, damned his eyes, but he was glad that I had not kicked the bucket."

Pictured above: A bucket. A gambrel.

A Mulligan Mashup

Everyone's entitled to a mulligan.

— Sen. Mike Lee

Utah's Mike Lee told Fox News this week that Donald Trump should be forgiven for inciting violent insurrection. "Everyone's entitled to a mulligan," he said. 

Sen. Lee's reprieve isn't Trump's first. Evangelical leader Tony Perkins also gave the former president a "mulligan" for porking porn star Stormy Daniels.

A mulligan—meaning a "second chance"—comes from golf.

Called by Sports Illustrated "the most significant innovation in the lowering of golf scores this side of cheating," the mulligan is named after Buddy Mulligan, a legendary Depression-Era golfer from New Jersey who demanded a warmup shot whenever he teed off.

Anti-immigrant sentiment among Wasps—whose exclusive clubs were being "invaded" by Irish-American golfers at the time—assured mulligan stuck. They relished the name, because, in their minds, all Irishmen cheated. (The term for a second chance could just have well been a cohen.)

Off the green as well, mulligan has a storied past, beginning in the 19th century.

In that century, barkeeps would place a bottle of whiskey on the bar for customers to sample. They called the bottle of free booze a mulligan.

Inmates called a prison guard a mulligan.

And hobos called the meat-and-potatoes stew they made mulligan. 

The hobos' mulligan derived from the name the nation's newspaper reporters gave to the dinners whipped up by Coxey's Army, a ragtag militia of 10,000 unemployed men who stormed the US Capitol in 1894, demanding federal jobs.

In labeling the marchers' meals mulligan, those reporters were recalling, of course, "Irish stew," a cheap chowder made from leftovers; but they were also recalling "The Mulligan Guard," a pop hit of the day written by the comedy team Harrigan and Hart. 

"The Mulligan Guard" mocked the low-class Irishmen who gathered in mobs to parade the streets of New York whenever they felt the urge to look tough. 

The song was based in part on an actual militia group run by James Mulligan, a horseshoer and ward-heeler active in Tammany Hall throughout the Gilded Age, and parodied the antics of the same militias Martin Scorsese depicted a century later in Gangs of New York.

Harrigan and Hart, alas, bear no relation to 20th century songwriters Rodgers and Hart, even though the latter mentioned mulligan stew in the first line of their classic "The Lady is a Tramp."