I worked for more than a decade as a consultant so I’m sensitive to jokes like

A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and then keeps your watch.

Well, I would be sensitive if I hadn’t gotten paid to hear the joke.

The word “consultant” was adopted from Latin and at first meant the people who went to consult the mystical Greek oracle; so consultants have evidently always been completely reliable.

Later it referred to a consulting physician.  Our current understanding of what a consultant is seems to have been well and truly in place by 1907 for which the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation that shows a distinct disregard for our honorable profession.  What brought me to the word in the first place though, was that the first citation for “consultant” as the term for a recognized expert appears in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The OED gives us a second Holmesian citation only 7 years later in 1900 by the author Allen Upward writing an early spoof on Conan Doyle’s detective.  So Sherlock Holmes was a consultant in that he was a consulting detective.

Evidently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took his writing so seriously that he tried his hand at it himself.  He seems to have undertaken several cases of injustice and as well as trying to solve the cases, wrote them down in a kind of “true crimes” book.  One of his real life cases has recently been retold in the book Arthur & George, in which Conan Doyle’s efforts to clear the name of George Edalji are chronicled.  Not only did Conan Doyle show that the police were wrong and biased because of Edalji’s skin color, but Sir Arthur points out who the real crook was.

guess that means that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought to life another consultant joke: A consultant is someone who comes in to solve a problem and stays around long enough to become part of it.

Anatoly Liberman has a blog going called “the Oxford Etymologist“  I was reading one of his pieces that talked about the antiquity of some words and how the older they get, the more silly it becomes to try to pin a specific year on their emergence.

Brittle is a good word to exercise this idea.

Professor Liberman says that especially in old documents the fact that someone actually wrote a word down was some kind of indication that the writer expected his readers to already know the word.  And since there were no mass communications in those days, in fact nothing more than word of mouth for most people, that usually meant that the word used was in pretty wide circulation.

The word brittle doesn’t show up in a document until 1382 but the OED notes in it’s etymology that not only does it appear to be related to the word “break”, it appears to have had ancestor words in Old English that just weren’t written down.

I’ve mentioned this before.  In the OED sometimes you can see an etymology traced through words that have a little star beside them.  These words are words that lexicographers feel must have existed back somewhere in the past, but that haven’t shown up in the written record.

Etymonline pushes the date for the parents of brittle even further back, invoking proto-germanic, Old High German and Old Norse.

While the word “brittle” has always meant liable to break, over the years that we have been able to track its use it has not only applied to things like peanut brittle that crack and snap, but to people and their tendencies to eventually fail in their grand schemes.  Also a brittle person can be someone who is unfriendly.  Is it because she is cold and icy or because she is stiff and formal?

There is one definition for “brittle code” in urbandictionary as being software that is liable to crashes when not working in it’s ideal operating conditions.  My wife is an old software person and she talked of the sanity of code, it’s likelihood of going crazy if pressed.  The urbandictionary reference is only by one person and no one else has voted on it so I can’t exactly claim it is in broad usage, but it does go on to apply brittle code back to people who crack under pressure.

In 1993 the entry for “hassle” in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English gave the word a meaning close to “fight.”

For me though, hassle means more inconvenience than fisticuffs and I seem to be supported in this by most of the dictionaries I checked.

One point that comes up with this word is its informal nature.  While it is unquestionably an established word in English having emerged from slang decades ago, it hasn’t quite gained respectability. You’d be surprised to hear a preacher talking about the hassle it is to keep away from sin, or a politician describing different hassles related to how to govern.  Yet it is so acceptable that it barely rates a mention in Urbandictionary.com; it’s understood, like the earliest English dictionaries, there’s no need to define it.

There are a wide range of theories on where we get the word “hassle.”  The Oxford first citation is as recent as 1945 from Downbeat Magazine so the word appeared first among hip talkers.  The citation also is phrased in such a way that it is obvious that readers are expected to understand the meaning of “hassle” so it had certainly existed in spoken form fairly widely before.

But non-hip people wouldn’t have heard of it and so when it appeared the following year in the Saturday Evening Post it was couched in an explanatory tone.

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang says the word had been floating around since the 19th century and among other possible sources pulls out an unlikely French harceler which does actually mean hassle.  Both Etymonline and the American Heritage Dictionary say that there was a precursor “hassle” from the southern US that meant to breathe heavily or to pant.  The Heritage Dictionary also claims that there was a meaning once of hassle to cut and hack at something with a sawing motion using a dull knife.

But the source that seems to rise to the top like cream (at least to my ear) is the thought that it is a blend of two other words, although no one seems to agree on which ones.  Candidates are harass and hustle, haggle and tussle, and haggle and wrestle.

When I go out in the winter I wear my winter boots.  When I was a little kid my dad wore overshoes.  They were a kind of rubber outer boot that he zipped or clipped up over his dress shoes.  They were also called galoshes.

It seemed to me a pretty British word, like Macintosh for a raincoat.  So I was pretty surprised to find a fairly rich vein of etymology on this one.  I get several different takes on this one depending who I believe.

The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the word has been around since 1377.  At first it seemed to be a wooden shoe, perhaps one that had a wooden sole but leather uppers.  The OED breaks the word down into Greek roots meaning wood and foot.

Tracing the citations through the centuries it looks like some years after Shakespeare a pair of galoshes changed from being simply outdoor footwear, to being outdoor footwear that covered the indoor footwear.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable takes a slightly different view.  Instead of seeing galoshes as having originated with Greek words, forming into Latin then French and finally English, Brewer’s sees the “gal” in galosh as pointing to the gauls, the people the Romans pushed out of France so that a “galosh” was a “Gallic shoe.”  Brewer’s also seems to feel that in English galoshes have always been overshoes, saying that this comes from the time when silk or cloth shoes were worn indoors and in dry conditions.  Brewer’s also pulls out the same old citation as the OED—Piers Plowman—as it’s source for this interpretation, but when I read it it doesn’t say overshoe to me.

Strangely, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology seems to agree with Brewer’s and not with the OED—it’s fellow Oxford University Press publication, in blaming galoshes on the Gauls.

Merriam Webster is even more strange in tracing its etymology to a French word for a flat round cake.

The choice of the word doohickey as today’s word gives me a chance to go back and revisit a little doohickey I talked about some weeks ago when I covered the word “naïve.”

At the time I explained that sometimes over the “i” in naïve there are two dots instead of one.  I said that the double dot doohickey was called an umlaut.

Let me tell you, I heard from my listeners on this one.

I was wrong.  The two dots over the “i” in naïve isn’t an umlaut, it’s a dieresis.

Please forgive my confusion.

It seems that these are two completely distinct punctuation marks from non-English languages, both of which are a double dot hanging over a letter.  The umlaut was from German and the dieresis from Latin.

In case any other listeners want to compain let me say right now that the dieresis is also sometimes called a “trema.”

The reason it matters is that the reason these doohickys are even there is to help instruct on word pronunciation.  The diaresis comes from Greek and means “to separate,” so that’s why we pronounce the “a” and “i” distinctly in “naïve.”  In explaining this I hope that I have also explained our word of the day, “doohickey.”

A doohickey is a thingamajig.  That is to say a doohicky is what we call something that we aren’t exactly sure what the name is.

I am told by the Oxford English Dictionary that a doohicky is actually a word built on two earlier words; a doodad and a hicky.  All of these seem to have appeared as if tumbling out of a toolbox around the beginning of the 20th century.  Doohickey was first cited in 1914 and at first applied to the nameless little knobby devices that are screwed and bolted to military vehicles and equipment.  A doodad came only slightly earlier and appeared to have more of a decorative connotation—like all the doodads that decorate the façade of a building. While a hicky appeared to be a one of any number of small specialized tools.

Not long ago I heard the Word Nerds talking about spoonerisms.

I know they mentioned how William Spooner was supposed to have referred to God not as our loving shepherd but our shoving leopard.

Somehow that seemed to relate to my episode from yesterday with the slang expression involving ferrets.

Anyway they also mentioned Spooner’s transposition of a well oiled bicycle to a well boiled icicle.  Which is a great oxymoron made greater because and icicle is sharp and the oxy in oxymoron means sharp too.  T

he reason I chose icicle today is that this old English word is actually a redoubling of its own meaning.  It appears in an early manuscript as a gloss, that is an explanatory note translating, often a Latin word.  But there the gloss doesn’t appear as the word icicle, rather as two words meaning an ice icicle, as if there were another kind.

This is because there is also an Old English word icel, or it might be ichel—I’m working on my Old English pronunciation—and it too means icicle.

So the first I C in icicle is a duplication of the second I C.

I don’t find too many other interesting references to icicles in my usual sources; something smutty at urbandictionary; people referring to other people as icicles if they have an aloof manner.  Ah, here, Shakespeare used the word a few times.

What caught my eye was not icicle, but where in Loves Labours Lost

“icicles against the wall”

are used to evoke winter while

“when daises pied”

is used to evoke spring.  What’s that mean?

“Pied” means multicolored or at least two colored, black and white like a magpie, the bird that gave us this not-very-often-used word.  So that’s who the pied piper of Hamlin was, he had multicolored clothes.

Ferret’s are very popular pets.  I looked at urbanditionary to find not definitions of some slang use of the word ferret, but a bunch of entries by enthusiastic pet owners extolling the virtues of their animals.

Still, people sometimes throw around the insult “ferret face” and although this isn’t for etymological reasons, there is an etymological connection.

Ferrets were domesticated for use as hunting animals but they aren’t exactly man’s best friend.  They sneak around and their name comes ultimately from Latin and means “little thief.”

Another animal name isn’t etymologically related but it is in terms of species.  When I think of the word polecat I think of someone with a southern accent saying it.  In America, in some places polecats are what they call skunks.  But “polecat” is a word that has been used in England just as long as “ferret” and in England a polecat isn’t a skunk but a close wild relative of the ferret.  So close that domestic ferrets that have been let loose or escaped have cross bread with the wild polecats.

The polecat is just as much a sneak and a thief as it’s domesticated cousin and the name reflects that. The pole in polecat is the same pole as in poultry.

These little rascals made themselves famous as chicken thieves.

Urbandictionary notwithstanding I see that the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang does have an Australian expression that involves ferrets, and I quote:

To exercise the ferret: to have sex. An unromantic male expression equating the penis with the aggressive, hyperactive animal and its well-known proclivity for wriggling into crevices and tunnels.

A pickle is for me a crunchy preserved small cucumber.  This little green luncheon item takes its name from the preservation method of being immersed in a brine or salt and or vinegar.

We get the word from Dutch and not only are foods preserved by pickling but so are metals; immersed in various toxic, acidic pickling liquors to give them a hardened outer layer.

The word appeared first in English in 1440 in a work regarded as a masterpiece.  Thomas Malory is a bit of a shadowy figure, having lived so long ago, but it seems that he was a knight on the wrong side of political struggle in England and spent lots of time in prison where he penned Le Morte d’Arthur; which translates as “the death of king Arthur.”

Not too long after he finished it he himself died.

Enter an almost contemporary business titan on the right side of the political powers of the day.

William Caxton made scads of money in various businesses and in his travels came across a new invention, the printing press.  After a printing partnership in Belgium began supplying England with the first book ever printed—as opposed to hand written—in English, he promptly set up a press in England too.  The fact that his first authors included close relatives of the king shows how much he was on the right side of the politics of the day.

He also printed Le Morte d’Arthur as well as Canterbury Tales.

Both of these are still in print but most of the versions of Le Morte d’Arthur are different than what that old political prisoner Malory actually wrote.  We know this because one day in 1934 there was housecleaning going on in the library at Winchester College. A guy named Oakeshott was a specialist in how medieval books were bound and went to look at a pile of manuscripts that were tucked away in a safe place.  The library knew they were valuable, just because they were old, but hadn’t bothered to figure out exactly what they were.

Oakeshott was really disappointed because none of the old documents were bound in any way so there was nothing for him to study.  Still, you don’t get to look at 500 year old books too often so he thumbed through them…carefully.

Years later he was embarrassed to admit that he had never read Le Morte d’Arthur at that point and so no special little bell went off in his head at the time.

A couple of weeks later he was preparing a book display and noticed some familiar wording on one of the books on display.

NOW the bell started to tingle.

He runs down to the bookstore and buys a cheap copy of Le Morte d’Arthur and goes to the old hiding place to compare it to one of the manuscripts.  By now the bell is gonging because what he found was the only known manuscript.  All the books that had been produced over the intervening centuries had been copies of the printed version.

Subsequent scholars have noticed something else.  As well as Malory’s handwriting—actually it was the handwriting of a copyist—on each page of the manuscript there are also little ink smudges.  These ink smudges match the printed version that Caxton produced so that it seems that William Caxton actually had this particular manuscript in his printing shop when the book was being printed and compared the printed pages with the original, one by one, allowing the still wet inked pages to rest against the original as he moved to the next page.

This underlines both the lack of copyright laws at the time and Caxton’s business sense, because he has edited the text of the printed version to suit his purposes and it seems clear that he had the original and knew that he was making changes to it.

In closing, word lovers will appreciate that the name Malory means “unlucky.”

Yesterday I touched on the word “match” when I said that a strike anywhere match was once called a Lucifer.

This got me wondering why a match was called a match.

Of course there are two matches.  My wife and I are a good match—that’s the older word in English—and when we light our candle-lit dinners we use a match—that’s the one I was wondering about.

The older match comes from Old English where it seems to have been pronounced yemak-k-eh.  It was used much in the way I used it just now, in talking about a pair of equals, usually people, occasionally animals.  Objects didn’t seem to be a match until about 500 years ago.

The match that bursts into flame isn’t Old English but another word entirely that came over with the French in 1066.  It didn’t emerge in written English until about 600 years ago though.  At first it referred to the wick of a lamp or candle, then to things kept alight to ignite other things like cannons.

Before the strike anywhere match was invented people used tinderboxes.  They would strike a spark off the friction between flint and steel and catch a tiny piece of tinder alight.  This tiny flame had to be tended in order to grow into a real fire and the first tiny sticks of fuel added were also called matches.  It’s these little wooden sticks that took over the name from Lucifer for what we now call matches.

Actually the Lucifer match was a little different than the wooden matches we might buy today, and the technology that moved from flit and steel to safety matches took a few dangerous turns.

The Lucifer was in fact a bit devilish because one of its active ingredients was phosphorus.  This tended to give cancer to the workers who made and transported the things.  Sugar was also used as a preservative and kids regularly died from sucking on them.  The heat was on to come up with a good alternative and so around the same time in the early 1800s another technology came out dubbed the promethean—Prometheus being the guy who brought the fire of the gods to the Greeks.

The core of the promethean match was sulfuric acid in a tiny glass container which was surrounded by chemicals and materials calculated to burst into flames when the acid was released.  People found it easiest to light these matches by gently biting them.  Gives a whole new meaning to “safety matches.”

Do you find it odd that the Devil’s Dictionary does not have an entry for Lucifer?

I mean isn’t Lucifer a synonym for Satan?

When I check most of the dictionaries that’s what it says.

Except of course for the Oxford English Dictionary.  While the New Oxford American Dictionary or Merriam Webster says Satan or the Devil, the OED says that Lucifer is a word misused to mean devil.

Where’s the sense in that we ask.

Digging back to the etymology of Lucifer we find that it comes from Latin and probably Greek and is built on lux meaning light, and fer meaning bearing.  So the literal meaning of Lucifer is the bringer of light.

That doesn’t sound very devilish does it?

In fact, I found one reference where Lucifer is used as an alternative name for Jesus because of this root meaning.

So how come I thought Lucifer was the fiery demon from below?

Well, before Lucifer was the bad guy the Romans used the name to designate the planet Venus as it rose before the sun in the morning, heralding the light of day.  In the Bible, in Isaiah the king of Babylon is also called Lucifer because he strove to be equal to God.  But of course he failed.  His rise to power and subsequent grand collapse reflect another tale of Lucifer.  In that one Lucifer was the head clerk of all the angels under God. But he got too big for his britches and God tossed him into the eternal pit of everlasting yuckiness, also changing his name at this time to Satan.

This second story isn’t actually in the Bible, its just one of those tales that has grown up around the bible over the millennia.

I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but once in a while, reading an old book I’ve come across a reference to a strike anywhere match referred to as a Lucifer.  I always thought this was a catchy name for a match based on the fires of hell.  But now I know that it really means bringer of light it seems even more catchy.

The guy who invented the strike anywhere match was John Walker in the early 1800s.  But he didn’t light upon the successful marking name, he called his invention the “friction light.”  Another guy, Sam Jones grabbed the idea and stuck the catchier name on it and made a killing.

The reason the OED says that equating Lucifer and the devil is a misuse is that this entry for the OED hasn’t been updated in more than 100 years and in the mean time English speakers have misused the word so many times that it has become standard use.