About TWD
Early on in my apprenticeship, I came across a series of word origin books by the poet and lexicographer John Ciardi (A Browser’s Dictionary, A Second Browser’s Dictionary, and Good Words to You, now all, sadly, out of print). The more words I traced back through time for our readers, the more I appreciated Ciardi’s observation that each word, no matter how humble, was “a miniature fossilized poem written by the human race.” The evolution of words, in many ways, is an organic process akin to the evolution of animal and plant species. Words grow and prosper for a time, often spawning new little words, but eventually age, and even become extinct in many cases. Now that English is in many senses a global language, words travel from country to country, and mutate in both their forms and meanings, often changing their connotations entirely, or combining in idiomatic uses that would have struck listeners just a century earlier as nonsensical. I would not, for instance, wish to be the one to try to explain “rock and roll” or “pushing the envelope” to Noah Webster.
Words don’t do all this on their own, of course. The words and language we speak today are the product (more of a work in progress, actually) of an enormous committee consisting of nearly every person who ever lived, most of whom never spoke our modern English, and it shows. If our words, metaphors and idioms sometimes make no sense to a logical mind, or if it seems as though there ought to be a happy “gruntled” to accompany the cranky “disgruntled,” we have only ourselves to blame. (There actually used to be a “gruntled,” but it meant “grunting like a pig” or “cranky,” and it faded away as “disgruntled,” which simply added the intensifier “dis” and meant exactly the same thing, became popular.)
The good news about our unruly, intensely democratic way of making and using words is that the lack of any central planning and administration authority, the absence of a Ministry of Proper English, makes our language one of the most energetic, flexible, and just plain fun tongues on Earth. This vitality and unpredictability of English as it is actually spoken drives the prissy Language Cops of the world absolutely bananas, of course, but it warms the cockles of any true word lover’s heart.
Soon after I began writing the column, I discovered that I possessed another tool that would prove immensely valuable in untangling the histories of words and phrases — a healthy skepticism. Many of the questions my father and I received from readers asked about the truth of a story the reader had heard about the origin of a word or phrase. Was “cop” actually an acronym for “Constable on Patrol”? Did “hooker” really spring from the fondness of Civil War General Joseph Hooker and his men for camp followers? (The answer being a resounding “no” in both cases.) I quickly came to regard every “remarkable” word origin story I encountered with the jaundiced eye and prove-it-buddy attitude I had honed on the streets of New York City, and I was rarely disappointed in my quest for linguistic balderdash to debunk. One of the lessons I have learned over the last decade is that the more interesting or heartwarming or unusual or “cool” a word origin story is, the less likely it is to reside in the same ballpark as the truth. And I have learned the hard way that entertaining but unsubstantiated etymologies have a distressing tendency to make their way into print, so I do my best to never to accept and promulgate popular word stories without making darn sure that I either solidly verify them or label them as only “possibilities.”
Unfortunately, my determination not to endorse etymological fables has sometimes been distressingly at odds with the apparent prevailing public desire to believe all sorts of nonsense about word origins, and some of my readers are not shy about making their wishes, and delusions, quite clear. “You say that the origin of ‘the whole nine yards’ is unknown,” goes a typical letter of a certain sort, “but some simple research conducted even by a boob such as yourself would reveal that the phrase was invented by my Uncle Floyd in 1957, when he successfully escaped from a Venusian spacecraft using a ladder exactly nine yards long constructed from dental floss. Somewhere in my attic I have a letter from Ed Sullivan confirming this fact. Why won’t you print the truth?”
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