Don’t hunker, hanker!

Dear Word Detective:  I’ve been learning to tie knots in my old age just for fun. My wife is learning knitting and I realized that that craft is essentially serial knot tying. Are “knit” and “knot” versions of the same word? — Bruce Brantley.

That sounds like fun. Good, cheap fun, which is, of course, not what this economy needs. I want you two to put down your ropes and yarn this instant and go buy something you don’t want or need. How about a couple of those blanket things you wear, the ones that make you look like a giant Ewok? Home doughnut makers are big this year, and several companies are offering vacuum cleaner attachments for dogs. Dogs just love being vacuumed. Velcro denture tape? Solar-powered beer maker? Talking screwdriver? I bought five of those, and they’re awesome.

Never mind. You guys just keep knitting and knotting, and I’ll sit here musing over what a weird word “vacuum” is. OK, back to work. “Knot” and “knit” aren’t exactly versions of the same word, but they are closely related.

“Knot” is the more basic of the words, although it’s not really possible to say it came first because both words are so old. “Knot” first appeared in Old English with the meaning, still the primary one today, of “an intertwining of cords, ropes, etc., made in order to fasten something together or attach something to another object.” In Old English “knot” was “cnotta,” which came from Old Germanic roots, specifically “knutton,” to which we will return shortly. The general meanings of these words was “knot” as we use it today, but there are indications that a bit further back the word may have originally meant “lump” or “knob,” which makes sense since, if you tie a knot in a rope, you have indeed created a sort of lump.

Apart from its literal uses, especially in the names of the dizzying variety of knots invented over the centuries, “knot” has been used in a variety of extended and figurative uses. One biggie is described by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) thus: “A piece of knotted string fastened to the log-line, one of a series fixed at such intervals that the number of them that run out while the sand-glass is running indicates the ship’s speed in nautical miles per hour; hence, each of the divisions so marked on the log-line, as a measure of the rate of motion of the ship (or of a current, etc.).” Modern ships do not, of course, carry sand-glasses or actual log lines (a rope attached to a small log of wood), but their speed (and that of the wind at sea) is still measured in “knots” (and “knots per hour” is, of course, redundant).

We also use “knot” to mean “a lump,” especially in a muscle or the like, a stressful situation is said to “tie us up in knots,” and the “knot” of a problem is the central point of contention. The most famous “knot” in historical mythology was the Gordian Knot, tied by King Gordius of Phrygia. Legend had it that whoever untied the complex knot would conquer Asia; Alexander the Great supposedly took a bold shortcut and cut through it with his sword. To “cut the Gordian knot” thus means to solve a problem with creative, decisive (and possibly not quite sporting) action.

“Knit,” as I mentioned above, also first appeared in Old English (as “cnyttan”), and also comes from Germanic roots, the same that produced “knot,” branching off from “knot” somewhere back around that Old Germanic “knutton.” The original meaning of “knit” in English was “to tie in or with a knot,” and people would say “knit a knot” as we say “tie a knot.” The modern sense of “form a close texture by interweaving loops of yarn or twine” dates back to the early 16th century. The tight weave of knitted fabric led to the use of “knit” to mean “draw closely together, make firm; concentrate or make compact” or “to grow closely together” as a broken bone eventually “knits” as it heals. “Knit” can also mean “to mend,” as Shakespeare famously noted in Macbeth (“Sleepe that knits up the ravel’d Sleeve of Care,” 1616). Bees clustering in a tight mass are said to “knit,” and when we are worried or angry, we “knit our brows” as our facial muscles tense. Personally, I’ve found that happens mostly when I watch TV news or read the internet. Or think too much.

Of course “knitting” with yarn is famous for its calming effects, so perhaps I just need to follow your wife’s example and knit a few mittens and scarves for the cats. But I’m still gonna keep my talking screwdrivers for company.

Buckets of hogwash?

One of the things that make this column fun to write is the nearly instantaneous responses I get from readers. (The other things that make it fun are the cookies that come down the chute in my cage when I finish a column.) Anyway, when I first started writing this column back in the early 1990s, I’d get letters about what I’d written, real snail-mail letters with stamps and everything, weeks later — if at all. Thanks to the internet, however, I can now finish a column, send it by email, go downstairs to feed the dogs, and come back upstairs to find a nice email telling me I’ve just written something that is totally wrong. Actually, the vast majority of emails simply add helpful details to something I’ve written, and I urge readers to post those as comments when I put the column online.

Once in a while, however, a reader will send me information that completely changes my mind about something I’ve written, which brings us to today’s case. A couple of months ago, I wrote a column answering a reader’s query about the term “one-horse town,” meaning a small, backward burg. In the course of the column, I mentioned the equivalent 19th century epithet “jerkwater town,” and offered the following explanation: “Locomotives in the age of steam required regular replenishment with water, and in a small town lacking a water tower, the crew would have to form a bucket brigade and literally ‘jerk water’ from the nearest creek. By the late 1800s, ‘jerkwater’ had become an epithet applied to any thing or place considered ‘provincial, backward and insignificant’.” That is, in fact, the accepted origin of the term, echoed in dozens of dictionaries and etymological sources. The Oxford English Dictionary endorses this origin with two citations, from 1941 and 1945, that recount the “jerking water” explanation.

A week or so after I wrote that column, a reader named Robert J. Moyer sent me links to several sources that pointed out that the “bucket brigade” explanation really made no sense at all. Steam engines need two things: fuel (either wood or coal) to fire the boiler, and water, to fill the boiler and, as steam, to run the engine. A steam locomotive needs a lot of water, so many towns on its route would have water towers by the track, which made filling the tank on the tender simple. But we are talking hundreds of gallons of water, and the thought of railroad workers hauling it bucket-by-bucket from nearby streams is, quite frankly, a bit silly when you consider that train crews probably consisted of fewer than ten men, tops.

One of the links Mr. Moyer sent along was to a post about “jerkwater” on a blog called “Wordmall” (verbmall.blogspot.com/2008/05/jerkwater-town.html), run by Michael J. Sheehan, a retired college English teacher in Michigan, who rightly questioned the “bucket brigade” theory and provided some interesting links, as did his commenters. Long story short, it’s questionable whether railroaders themselves ever actually used the term “jerkwater town” for small, isolated towns; it was apparently more common to speak of “tank towns,” stops where the train stopped only to take on water from a water tower.

So if the “bucket brigade” story fails the practicality test and “jerkwater town” wasn’t authentic railroad lingo for a tiny town where the train stopped, where did it come from? This is where it gets truly interesting.

It turns out that steam locomotives did rely on “jerking water” to refill their tenders, but they did it without stopping at all. According to an article published in 1982 by the New York Central System Historical Society, several large rail systems that relied on steam locomotives outfitted them with remotely operated water scoops that could be lowered as the train passed through a station, scooping water from a shallow metal trough mounted between the track rails and passing it to the engine’s water tank. Such systems were apparently introduced around 1860, and, according to the article, there were still 19 such watering stations on the line between Harmon, NY, and Chicago in 1948. In the 19th century, this process was called “jerking water,” but by the early 20th it was known more felicitously as “scooping water,” and just before World War II it was possible for a train to travel at 60 miles per hour while “scooping” water.

This obviously puts a whole new light on “jerkwater,” but in a strange way it comes full circle and may explain the use of the term (by whoever used it, even if it wasn’t the actual train crews). A town where the locomotive “jerked water” from a trough between the rails was, by definition, a town where the train did not ordinarily stop at all, i.e., an unimportant, probably very small town. So while we may have lost that quaint story about a bucket brigade, we’ve gained a technically fascinating explanation of the phrase “jerkwater town.”