If I tell you that I am going to give you a recipe you’ll likely expect it to be for some delicious meal.

I checked both with online newspapers and with a dictionary corpus and confirmed that this is pretty well the universal usage of the word recipe these days; the ingredients needed and how to prepare them for a meal.

But if I say to you I have a recipe for a happy life you’ll think that I am extending the meaning of the word, making a metaphor. In fact it is the other way around chronologically, the recipes we use for cooking are so called because earlier meanings to the word fell away.

In Latin the parent word was recipere and meant “to take.” About the time of William Shakespeare’s birth just over 400 years ago physicians would give written instructions on what to take to make a sick person better and would head the list with this Latin word.

You still see a vestige of this at the pharmacy when you notice the pharmaceutical symbol Rx. That’s what that mysterious little Rx symbol actually means; it stands for the Latin parent of recipe and it literally means “to take” because these are the medicines you are supposed to take according to your doctor.

Before recipes came to mean instructions for food preparation the meaning of recipe branched out from medical prescriptions to that metaphorical sense of a mix of things to achieve some end, such as an honest life as suggested in the 1643 citation from the Oxford English Dictionary; or a happy life as in my example.

It wasn’t until the mid 1700s that we have citations for cooking recipes.

These early recipe mentions are perverse and frustrating. The first one—ostensibly for pastry—reveals on double-checking the source of the citation to be an extract from a poem ranting against another kind of poetry; saying that the poet would no sooner have copies of this poetry that he doesn’t like—and has just tossed in the fire—than have recipes for pastry.

I guess he was no cook.

The next citation which comes from a 1775 book called Travels in Asia Minor in which the Turks are said to drink coffee

“in little china dishes, as hot as they could endure, as black as soot, and tasting not much unlike it.”

This coffee is compared to the black broth of the Spartans which is said to have been made with human blood and so—and this is where the recipe citation comes in—and so

“the epicure will not lament that the entire recipe has not reached us.”

The first citation (at least in the OED) that relates to real recipes comes in 1853 (although there must be examples before that) and it is worthy because it is from a work called The Pantropheon: or history of food and its preparation by Alexis Soyer. This reference thankfully closes the circle since it relates to pastry recipes.

Soyer was a kind of culinary superstar in the England of the Victorian age. He cooked for kings and queens and for the 1851 London exhibition he opened something he called the Gastronomic Symposium of all Nations which was not only a restaurant serving a thousand people a day, but a kind of early theme park as well.

The Royal Navy was killing sailors with its food and asked Soyer to investigate; he also wrote helpful guides for housewives.

But behind all the glitter things weren’t quite simmering properly. His Gastronomic Symposium ended up thousands of pounds in debt and all his flashy activity didn’t leave him as much time as he’d like for other pursuits, so although that Pantropheon history of food stands in old libraries with his name on it, he actually just bought a French version and translated it, sticking his own name on as the author.

This gives a whole new meaning to recipere “to take.”

I also wanted to mention that at the podictionary website every blog entry ends with a little green button marked “share this.” If you click it, it allows you to email the article to a friend or to add it to one of the social networks such as Facebook or Google bookmarks.

In November of 2007 a small cruise ship sank in the Antarctic.

My parents had actually taken a trip on that very boat—fortunately not this particular trip.

I’ve never been in anything that big that’s capsized, although I’ve gone over in my canoe a few times.

No one really knows why tipping a boat over is called capsizing. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the word first appeared in 1788 and they say it’s a sailor’s expression. But they also say “origin unknown” as does Merriam Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary.

But the OED and others do give one theory.

The theory is that capsize means to “sink by the head” or top of the ship since cabo means “head” in several languages. So if a ship turns over it often sinks; and in this case it sinks head first.

But the interesting thing about this theory is the people the OED mention in denying knowing what the etymology is.

The guy who came up with the theory was someone named Walter Skeat. In the world of English dictionaries and history of the English language Walter Skeat is royalty. He was one of the pals who got the idea together for what turned into the Oxford English Dictionary and he was regarded as one of the best there was in terms of etymology.

All the references I’ve seen talk about how approachable and selfless he was as well as how smart and hardworking. He made a little rule for himself that I wish I could stick to. If he came across a word with a particularly difficult etymology he’d spend no more than three hours on it. If he couldn’t crack it in that time, he’d move on. I sometimes spend more than that, and surely with less valuable results. But then he knew far more than I ever will.

The OED points out that this word capsize wasn’t in dictionaries put together by earlier pioneers like Nathan Bailey whose work provided a framework for Samuel Johnson. Nor in Johnson’s dictionary nor its revision in 1818 by Henry John Todd.

The final name who had nothing to say about capsizing is John Ash.

In 1775—20 years after Samuel Johnson’s dictionary—John Ash produced his dictionary. It sewed together all of the best features of dictionaries that had gone before it. But unfortunately for Ash it contained one big boo-boo, and that’s what it’s remembered for.

In Johnson’s dictionary he had included the word curmudgeon and his etymology for curmudgeon was coeur méchant which is French meaning “naughty heart”, or “nasty heart.”

These days most lexicographers think Johnson was wrong in this etymology. But poor Ash was wronger!

Johnson had learned this etymology from someone else but either he couldn’t remember who, or never knew because he included the note “unknown correspondent” beside it. Where Ash went wrong was that instead of translating coeur as “heart” and méchant as “naughty” he translated coeur as “unknown” and méchant as “correspondent.”

That’s what sunk him.

Podictionary is full of mistakes too, but I hope none of them capsize me.

According to Ambrose Bierce and his Devil’s Dictionary a prescription is:

A physician’s guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Actually that is a pretty good description of what’s happened to me. I’ve recently started taking the first prescription medicine that I expect I’ll have to continue for the rest of my life. Nothing too serious; eye drops to control the pressure in my eyeballs so I don’t get tunnel vision from glaucoma. This process has taken years but here’s the summary and why it relates to today’s word.

I went to the doctor and he did some tests. Then he scribbled on a little piece of paper and I took that piece of paper to the drug store and got my eye drops.

The piece of paper was called a prescription and the reason it is called a prescription is that the doctor had to write it out before I could get the drops. It’s right there in the word pre scribe; pre meaning “before” and scribe meaning “write.”

But there’s more to the word than the fact that the doctor had to write me a note. There is a sense of enforceability to prescribe and you can’t get the kind of drugs doctors prescribe without a prescription.

This actually shows up in the history of the word since prescription only began to mean the little notes doctors write about the time Shakespeare was born, while the word itself had been around in English for 200 years by that point with a legal meaning.

There’s always been a sense of “rules” about prescribe.

The reason this word came to my attention was that a few weeks ago Grammar Girl talked about the difference between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries in her podcast. One of her listeners had asked about the word irregardless and the argument came up that if it’s in the dictionary it must be a word.

Fact is that any word that people actually use is a word; and people actually use irregardless, so it’s a word.

Grammarians object to it because it is repetitive in meaning— irregardless literally means “not-regard-not;” what people usually mean is “regard not” which is what regardless breaks down as.

But this brings up a fundamental difference between grammarians and lexicographers.

• Grammarians start from a point of view that there is a right way and a wrong way to express yourself—that’s prescriptive.
• Lexicographers on the other hand are only reporting on words as they see them being used; no value judgments—that’s descriptive.

So why don’t grammarians and lexicographers get into fistfights in libraries and bookstores all over the world?

The reason is because they are both right. The point of words is to communicate and whether you are a university professor or a street kid or live in some former British colony, if you use words that get your message across then the words you’ve used are perfectly good.

All of these places and more have differing codes for what is the social norm in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation. That’s why my accent sounds weird to some and fine to others.

But it’s also true that along with the different colors of English across the landscape the landscape isn’t really flat. The university professor likely makes more money and has more prestige than the street kid. The accents you year on NPR and BBC are more uniform than the entire range of accents across America or Britain. This has to do with the concept of “standard English.”

There is no legally authorized body to enforce certain English usages but the fact is when you open your mouth and say something you leave an impression with people. If what you say is too different from the way they are used to hearing things expressed the impression you leave may not be good.

Grammar Girl promotes her podcast as important tips for better writing and I can tell you that it can be important. One guy I know has such atrocious communications skills that I didn’t want to work with him. I had to re-read all his emails to be sure I didn’t get his meaning wrong.

So although I’m firmly in the descriptivist camp that’s why I don’t get in fistfights with grammarians (although they sometimes might want to punch me out). They don’t have tunnel vision, in being prescriptive they’re only trying to help you get ahead.

As for me, with this podcast it’s clear that it’s too late for me to take the following little piece of advice:

It’s often better to keep your mouth closed and have people think you’re an idiot than to open your yap and have them know it.

I saw a Google message the other day that made me want to look into the word pound.

Google had confused some people by giving some directions for a certain procedure that included instructions to “press the pound key.” By this Google had intended people to push the button with that little cross-hatched symbol on it, also known as the hash mark or the octothorp but evidently lots of people didn’t know this and thought pound meant the symbol for British money.

So that gives me two stories to tell:

• Why pounds are both weight and money; and
• how come the name of that little cross-hatch symbol doesn’t have a universally recognized name.

The word pound shows up as early as there is English so it came from a Germanic source. In pre-English Germanic languages a pound was a unit of weight although for the longest time it represented wildly different weights in different places, and even different weights for different things in the same place. A pound of bread didn’t necessarily weigh the same as a pound of cheese even in the same town.

This Germanic word evolved out of an Indo-European root that also made its way into Latin. Pondo was a Latin word that meant “by weight” and so this reinforced the Germanic word in English and legitimized its application to what in Latin was called libra and was also a unit of weight. So in Latin libra pondo meant a “pound of weight” or a “pound by weight.”

Since ancient times money was minted in precious metals and so at first a pound sterling was actually a pound of silver.

This explains why French money was at one time counted in livre and Italian money in lira. This also explains why the monetary symbol pound is a stylized L £ and the abbreviation for a pound of weight is lb.

But at some point in the first half of the twentieth century people in America started to use two lines horizontally crossing two lines vertically # instead of the abbreviation lb. The first citation for this is from 1923 in a typewriting textbook. This symbol is also sometimes called a number sign.

But it seems that even if it made it into print in 1923 not everyone recognized it because we have a 1974 citation calling it an octothorp and a 1984 citation calling it the hash symbol.

I’ll make short work of the hash symbol by telling you that lexicographers suspect this was a popular alteration of the word hatch which makes sense since the thing looks like a cross hatching.

It’s the word octothorp that merits a little more time. Even though Americans had been calling this thing the pound sign or the number sign for 50 years Bell Labs was having none of it. So in 1974 the magazine Telephony announced that this symbol

“at long last had a name: octothorp.”

Evidently a guy named Don Macpherson had pondered long and hard on this question back in the 1960s and decided that because there were eight little line-ends sticking out of the symbol it had to be called something that included octo; octo meaning “eight” like an octopus has eight legs. But octo wasn’t enough; there had to be more to the name than that.

Evidently Macpherson was quite involved in a campaign surrounding an athlete named Jim Thorpe and figured adding Jim Thorpe’s name to octo would be a memorable way to differentiate the word.

Jim Thorpe was a double gold Olympic medal winner who had the misfortune to compete during a time when the amateur status of Olympic athletes was taken more seriously than it is today. Thorpe was found to have played minor league baseball—horror of horrors—for money, and so had is Olympic medals taken away.

Those were the 1912 Olympics. My grandfather George was also a double gold medal winner in those Olympics. He also had his medals taken away, but by thieves out of a display case at the Montreal Amateur Athletics Association.

It’s enough to make you want to pound something.

Please remember to tell a friend about podictionary.

I caught a trailer the other day for a movie based on the old TV series Get Smart.

Secret agent Maxwell Smart is an agent for Control (the good guys) and wages a constant battle against KAOS (the bad guys).

KAOS is conveniently named to sound like chaos, the state of disorder and seemingly the opposite of a state of control.

But is it?

We think of things as being in control when they are orderly and according to our plans and wishes. We like to feel in control and this is emphasized at Urbandictionary where I see only two entries for the word control. One takes a positive attitude to control while the other claims we aren’t in control even when we think we are. The positive attitude entry gets lots of votes of approval while the other entry has more votes against than for.

I remember years ago when I took a role as an engineering project manager; one of the main tasks was to have some sort of a written plan in hand and to constantly review how progress was going against the plan. I thought:

“What kind of management control is this? I’m not really managing the project as much as watching it unfurl. It’s not like I have control if things get done or go wrong. I can only tell that after they’ve happened.”

Well it turns out, from the etymology of control that that’s all the management control you can ever have. The very word control isn’t so much an opposite to chaos but holds a root meaning of watching closely for signs of chaos. The idea is that things will always go off the rails, but if you’re watching closely you can catch these problems early and take corrective action and prevent a total train wreck.

English got control from French—well the word at least—back before 1475 when it first turns up in the written record.

As we know by now French evolved out of Latin and way back in Latin the word contrarotulare came about as a blend of two earlier Latin words contra meaning “against” and rotulus meaning “roll.” While the literal meaning of this Latin word is “against the roll” the figurative meaning is “duplicate register” because the way that people have always managed and controlled is by keeping lists and checking against those lists.

Contra rotulus meant that the manager kept a duplicate set of records (the roll) in his possession so that he could check them against the active accounts and make sure everything still added up.

Before I go I’d also like to say that I have no control at all over my book sales. By that I mean not only control in the sense of making people buy the thing, but also in the etymological sense since I don’t even have any data on how book sales are going. It’s an incredibly long chain from bookseller to author but to give myself an illusion of control I’m going to plug the thing again. Titled Carnal Knowledge it’s a book about the words we use for our bodies. I’ve included a link in this post and at the podictionary website but you can get it at all the big book chains plus local bookstores, if they don’t have it, can get it in for you in a couple of days.

I mentioned the brothers Thomas and Charles Blount in the podictionary episode on the word ditto. This was appropriate because ditto means “the same” and Charles Blount was there accused of being a plagiarist.

I gave you all the lurid details.

Ditto the case of Thomas Blount today. Doubly ditto because I’ll give you the lurid details but it’s also true that while Charles Blount did the copying it was the other way around for Thomas.

Thomas Blount put his hand to many things including studies of legal customs and the study of antiquities of England. This was back in the decades immediately following William Shakespeare’s death; say the 1630s to the 1670s. Importantly to us he put his hand to the production of a few dictionaries too.

One was on legal terms but the other is now regarded as one of the foundations of English dictionaries. I mentioned it yesterday. It has a rather lengthy title but we’ll just call it Thomas Blount’s Glossographia.

One of Thomas’s firsts was to include some etymology and that had never been tried before in an English dictionary.

But as important as his work was he found the whole exercise a really frustrating experience. Glossographia came out in 1656 and then in 1658 a guy named Edward Phillips comes out with something called The New World of Words. Edward Phillips was the nephew of John Milton of Paradise Lost fame and so had a little more pull in the publishing world.

Glossographia was one of those dictionaries that restricted itself to words that would add to the average Englishman’s vocabulary. It didn’t include a whole pile of words that most people would know anyway.

Phillips took all of Thomas Blount’s work and puffed it up with these common and already understood words and proceeded to outsell Glossographia like there was no tomorrow.

To us today Phillips was taking a bold new step in the content of dictionaries; something that we still use. Would you think very highly of a dictionary if it didn’t contain the word cow or house just because you already knew them? Who knows if Phillips thought he was being innovative of just repurposing someone else’s material for his own gain.

Certainly that’s what Thomas Blount thought though. In his rage he wrote:

“Must this then be suffered? A Gentleman for his divertissement writes a Book, and this Book happens to be acceptable to the World, and sell; a Bookseller, not interested in the Copy [meaning who isn't profiting from it] instantly employs some Mercenary to jumble up another like Book out of this, with some Alterations and Additions, and give it a new Title; and the first Author’s out-done, and his Publisher half undone.”

He even published a rebuttal dictionary to The New World of Words called A World of Errors Discovered in The New World of Words. As you might imagine all this frustration was enough to make him sick, which is what brings us back to lurid today’s podictionary word.

This word lurid came into the English record with Glossographia and at the time it was used to describe the skin color of someone who was sick. In Latin luridus meant a ghastly pale yellow. In English it seemed to grow to include bruises and other shocking visual signs of ill health.

From there by analogy lurid grew to our current understanding: something causing shock or horror; something marked by sensationalism.

Before I go I’d like to remind you that if you enjoy podictionary please recommend it to a friend or two. There are a number of ways to subscribe either to the podcast or the blog, including email subscription. It’s easy to do from the podictionary website and you ‘d be doing both podictionary and your friend a favor.

Thanks again.

I am most familiar with the word syllabus from school where the description of what the teacher is going to cover is handed out at the beginning of a course and called a syllabus.

This matches well with the first citation of syllabus in English back in 1656 in an early dictionary called

Glossographia, or, A dictionary interpreting all such hard words, of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue;

the entry—shorter than the title—reading:

Syllabus, a Table or Index in a Book, to shew places or matter by Letters or Figures.

I’ve talked about lots of examples of words that have their current form because the general population kept on making mistakes in using the word and so it was eventually adopted in its incorrect form as correct.

One example is calling a snake an adder when originally the thing was called nadder; it was just that no one could believe it was right to say a nadder so they kept saying an adder.

This word syllabus isn’t like that.

Syllabus is a great example not of the common Joe getting it wrong, but the educated specialist getting it wrong, and then even earlier the fancy-pants specialist not even caring if it was wrong.

Back more than two thousand years ago in Rome there was this guy named Cicero. You’ve likely heard of him because he is considered one of the greatest public speakers ever. He was a high roller at the time of Julius Caesar.

As you might remember from William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar didn’t die peacefully in his sleep and the reason for this was that Rome at the time was full of what might be called political intrigue. Cicero suffered from this too, but before it killed him it gave him some other headaches and syllabus is the result of one of these.

At one point his political rivals ran him out of town and passed a law saying he couldn’t come back. His several houses were trashed. The pendulum swung and eventually he was welcomed back into town but he had to put his life back together.

He asked one of his friends to help him reassemble his library. We know this because he asked in writing. At the time libraries were made up of scrolls, not bound books and a little tag was attached to each scroll so that the librarian would know which was which. Cicero mentions something about these little tags in his letters to his friend.

Centuries later academics poured pored over the writings of this great and ancient thinker and one of the things they found was this word sillybus. They’d never seen it in other classical writings and so they compared it to words they did know.

Maybe it was related to a Greek word meaning “to put together.” That must be it Old Cicero was writing about a list of scrolls and calling the list a syllabus; and so syllabus came into English.

The problem was that Cicero wasn’t writing about a list, he was writing about the little tags on the scrolls and the classics scholars jumped to conclusions.

So everybody makes mistakes; who really cares.

And that’s the second point; who cares?

One of the reasons the classics scholars might have been fooled was the great stature of Cicero. It was assumed that someone with so much ancient authority must have known what he was writing about. But other more modern interpretations run along two lines of possibility. One is that some anonymous scribe miscopied the word during the intervening centuries.

But the other is that in fact Cicero was a great and noble statesman and didn’t give a hoot about what the correct technical word was that the lowly librarians used in describing those fussy little tags; who cares?

I’m sure you’ve heard the poem Desiderata, it begins:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence…

Such a meaningful poem.

Except to me when I heard it—likely in the 1970s—that title, Desiderata meant nothing.  Who would choose a title of a poem like that so that nobody would understand what it meant.

So now, after all these years I’ve looked it up.  It’s Latin and it is the plural of desideratum.

I’m sure that helps you.

Okay, desideratum means “something that is desired” so desiderata means “things that are desired.”  You can hear that Latin root of desire in there can’t you.

Anyway, the answer to my question about who would use such a title was in some dispute for a while.  But Wikipedia has the answer and I’ve checked out the Wikipedia claims and they stand up.  Here’s how it went.

By the time I heard the poem it had been circulating in popular culture for a few years.  The hippie years of the 1960s were particularly fertile ground for the sentiments expressed.  But there is a tipping point for every phenomenon before which nobody’s heard of it and after which everybody’s heard of it.  For Desiderata the tipping point seems to have been the death of Adlai Stevenson.

Adlai Stevenson was the presidential candidate who lost to Eisenhower.  He had a reputation as an intellectual and when he died the tale is told that among his effects were found this poem Desiderata that he’d planned to include in his Christmas cards for that year.

So somehow this 1965 connection was enough to vault Desiderata into the cultural consciousness.

Evidently prior to Adlai Stevenson getting a hold of the poem it had been used in an inspirational pamphlet handed out at St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore.  The pamphlet had not given credit to the original poet but had included St. Paul’s name and the date of its founding 1692.  To the idealistic readers this leant an air of antiquity to the poem that seemed to enhance its truth-of-the-ages appeal.

No matter that the title hadn’t appeared as a word used in English until just 40 years before across the sea in England—nobody would have looked that up—also no matter that the actual language of the poem sounded more like hippy talk than the language that might have been used during the Salem Witch Trials that did actually happen in 1692.

So everyone continued along believing that this meaningful poem was the work of some ancient wise man until Les Crane recorded the poem and won a Grammy for it in 1971.

The problem was that Desiderata had actually been written by a lawyer from Indiana named Max Ehrmann in 1927.  His widow had published it in 1948 and it was still under copyright.

Even though Les Crane was a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars and had a right to be here he didn’t have a right to infringe on the Desiderata copyright and so got sued for it.

One of the desires of the Desiderata is that one exercise caution in their business affairs.

Good advice from a lawyer.

Before I go I wanted to mention that I’ve been working on backfilling the podictionary archive. Back in the spring of 2007 I began including full text transcripts of all the podictionary episodes and more recently I’ve been working to add those transcripts also for all the episodes from the beginning.  I’m 2/3 of the way there with 10 months of episodes to go out of a total of 32 months of episodes.  What remains is mostly from 2006 and in most cases I also have to repair those posts because their audio mp3 files have fallen off too during a change I made last fall.  I hope to be done in a month or so.

What is the difference between movies and cinema?

I went looking for the answer to this and quickly felt my eyes glazing over as advocates for cinema droned on about art and culture while movie buffs didn’t seem to even hear the question.

That’s okay, I already know the answer.

A movie is an abbreviation of a moving picture while cinema is also an abbreviation of a moving picture (except in Greek).

The Greek word for “motion” is kinema and before we ever had the word cinema we first had to labor under the much more tongue tiring kinematograph.

Graphics as everybody knows are visuals so kinematograph really did mean “moving pictures”—even though the Greek root of graph actually was closer to “writing” than “drawing”, hence autograph, etc.

Cinema appears in English almost exactly 100 years ago; a quick abbreviation from kinematograph and cinematograph both of which appeared in 1896. They were big news because they had just been invented.

We remember the word cinema for the same reason we remember VHS but might have forgotten Beta. If you’ve forgotten both VHS and Beta then you can get ready to forget HD and Blu-ray too since technology seems to advance a little faster these days than it did 100 years ago.

Back then the two players wrestling it out in the marketplace were the Lumière brothers in France and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany.

In fact Max and Emile Skladanowsky brought their product called a bioscop to audiences a few months before Auguste and Louis Lumière appeared with their kinematograph.

The bioscop was just too finicky a device to take on the market. That’s what the cinema history books say anyway.

But the kinematograph wasn’t exactly fully productized either. There are reports of the thing catching fire and burning down the entire building. I suspect that the real reason the bioscop never made it was that neither set of brothers really believed their plaything was the basis of a worldwide industry.

Here’s what Auguse Lumière had to say to one enthusiast:

“Young man, you can be grateful that my invention is not for sale. For it would undoubtedly ruin you. It can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.”

Building a business takes serious commitment and I’d say they didn’t have it in this case.

But we still remember them in the word cinema because at root it was such a great idea that people adopted it anyway.

Appropriately the Lumière brothers’ name means “light” in French.

Here’s a link to one of their first films.

Please tell a friend about podictionary. Thanks!

What got me thinking about this word was the expression on the spur of the moment. Where did that come from I wondered. Because we don’t have so many horses hanging around our daily lives as was the case before 100 years ago this expression seemed a little mysterious to me.

The word spur is one of those Old English words that left its footprints through history among the earliest of English documents—in this case one dating back almost 1300 years—and before that through Germanic parent languages and into Indo-European.

When I say left its footprints I mean it literally because the Indo-European root word likely meant “ankle” and evolved into a word that meant “kick,” with then only a short conceptual step over to the spurs that riders used to kick their steeds.

But also this word root led to the word spoor.

If you are a hunter you’ll know that spoor are droppings that allow you to track an animal. But the reason these droppings are called spoor is because the root meaning of spoor is the track or trail of the animal itself. In a number of European railway stations you’ll see a very similar word used to identify this or that track.

The phrase that got me looking into spurs on the spur of the moment doesn’t seem to have arisen until 1801. But I notice an older expression that may have lead to this one.

On the spur was itself an expression dating from about 300 years earlier. To do something on the spur meant to do something with the greatest of haste; as if you were pushing things to the utmost.

So that my guess is that on the spur of the moment appeared not because it was the moment spurring you on, but because whatever you did in the spur of the moment was done in the haste of the moment; the unthinking instant of the moment.

I see from Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable that there was once something called spur money which was a fine levied on people so inconsiderate as to enter church with their spurs jingling; the sound apparently enough to disrupt the service.

The reason the spurs jingled is because some spurs have little spiked wheels on them that rattle around. These are called rowels.

The reason spurs have rowels is that it isn’t good policy to keep poking holes in the side of your horse and if you have rowels then there is less likelihood of you tearing the horse’s flesh quite so much. As your foot moves away after the kick, instead of gouging and tearing at the horse’s skin the spur rolls (rowels) off.

Here’s (yet) another reminder that my book about the words we use for our bodies is available at all the online booksellers and many smaller bookstores.