Wordorigins.org

This enthusiastic exclamation of surfers has its roots in children’s television programming of the 1950s. Cowabunga, or Kawabonga, was originally used by the television character Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody Show. From a Mad magazine parody of the show in the December 1954 issue:

Gosharootie ... I mean Kowabunga, Clarabella! Is something me gottum askum you!!¹

(Clarabell the clown was another character on Howdy Doody and this appears to be a reference to the show.)

“Buffalo Bob” Smith, host of the show, explained where the term came from:

As far as I know, our Howdy Doody writer, Eddie Kean “made up” the word Kawabonga—which Chief Thunderthud used when things were bad. When he was happy he said another original(?) word, Kawagoopa.²

¹”Howdy Dooit,” Mad (New York) 18 (Dec 1954): 11.

²John Algeo, “Where Do All the New Words Come From?” American Speech 55, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 268.

We all know that tit for tat means retaliation, to return a slight that one has received, but the choice of the two words make little sense. Why do we use this odd phrase?

The phrase was originally tip for tap and referred to an exchange of blows. From a poem, written sometime before 1466, by Charles, Duke of Orleans (he wrote a series of poems in English during his captivity following the battle of Agincourt):

As strokis grete not tippe, nor tapp, do way The rewdisshe child so best lo shall he wynne.
(As strokes great, not tip, nor tap, do the best for the uncouth child, lo he shall win.)

And there is this written by George Gascoigne prior to 1577:

Much greater is the wrong that rewardeth euill for good, than that which requireth tip for tap.

The altered form tit for tat appears in John Heywood’s 1556 The Spider and the Flie:

That is tit for tat in this altricacion.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

The word digs means place of abode or lodging, as in “he has moved into new digs.” But why digs?

The word was originally diggings, dating to the first half of the 19th century. The word is glossed in the 1834 Dictionary of American English. And there is this from Joseph C. Neal’s 1838 Charcoal Sketches:

I reckon it’s about time we should go to our diggings.

And from Dickens’s 1844 The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit:

She won’t be taken with a cold chill when she realises what is being done in these diggings?

The clipped form, digs, makes its appearance by the end of the century. From the 11 May 1893 issue of Stage:

“Being in the know” regarding the best “digs” can only be attained by experience.

But why diggings? It could be a reference to burrow. Or it could be an extension of miner’s use to mean a place of excavation, and by extension the place where the miner lives and works. Use of diggings to mean a place of excavation dates to the 16th century. From John Leland’s 1538 The Itinerary:

On the South side of Welleden...ys a goodly quarre of Stone, wher appere great Diggyns.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

In modern usage, a wild goose chase is a fruitless endeavor, a hopeless quest. But it was not always so. The original sense was kind of horse race where one rider would lead a group of pursuers along an erratic course, much like a flock of geese might follow its leader. Like so many words and phrases, this one is first set down on paper by the Bard. From the 1592 Romeo and Juliet (II.iv):

Nay, if our wits run the Wild-Goose chase, I am done: For thou hast more of the Wild-Goose in one of thy wits, then I am sure I haue in my whole fiue.

Shakespeare here is making a metaphorical allusion to the horse race. Such an actual race is referred to in Nicholas Breton’s 1602 The Mothers Blessing:

Esteeme a horse, according to his pace, But loose no wagers on a wilde goose chase.

Over time, this type of racing fell out of fashion and people forgot the origin. As this happened they reinterpreted the phrase to mean to chase a wild goose, instead of to give chase like a wild goose and the modern sense of a fruitless errand came into being. From a 1754 letter by Horace Walpole:

Don’t let me think, that if you return, you will set out upon every wild-goose chase, sticking to nothing.

And from Francis E. Trollope’s 1876 A Charming Fellow:

His journey to London on such slender encouragement is a wild-goose chase!

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

To be on tenterhooks is to be strained, waiting impatiently. But what the heck is a tenterhook?

A tenter is rack on which cloth or hide is stretched for drying. A tenterhook is what keeps the cloth in place. The exact origin of tenter is uncertain, the variety of forms makes it difficult to pin down. But it is either from the Anglo-Norman or Old French *tentour and ultimately the Latin *tentorum, or stretcher. English use goes back the 14th century manuscript Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost:

Whon þe Iewes hedden þus nayled Criston þe cros as men doþ cloþ on a teytur.
(When the Jews had thus nailed Christ on the the cross as men do to cloth on a tenter.)

Red tape is excessive bureaucracy or rigid adherence to bureaucratic rules and regulations. But why tape? And why is it red?

It is tradition, dating back to the 18th century, to bind government documents together using a red ribbon or tape. There is no particular reason for choosing the color red; it’s just an arbitrary choice. From Maryland Laws, written between 1696 and 1715:

The Map...upon the Backside thereof sealed with his Excellency’s Seal at Arms on a Red Cross with Red Tape.

And we start to see metaphorical use by 1736 in John Hervey’s Poetical Epistle to the Queen:

Let Wilmington, with grave, contracted brow, Red tape and wisdom at the Council show.

The association between red tape and bureaucracy was firmly established by the 19th century. From Catherine Gore’s 1837 Stokeshill Place:

My dear, you mistake John Barnsley...Dearly as he loves a bit of red tape, you never saw him try to inspire any other man with the love of business.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

Scram is an American slang verb meaning to depart, to get out. It probably is a clipping of scramble, but there is also the German verb schrammen, meaning to depart or run away. The German verb may have influenced or even been the root of the English slang term.

Scram makes its appearance in the late 1920s. From Walter Winchell’s column in the New York Evening Graphic of 4 October 1928:

His popular slang creations include..."scram," meaning “git out!”

The word is also a jargon term in the nuclear industry meaning to shutdown a nuclear reactor immediately or the emergency shutdown of a reactor. This use first appears in print in American Speech in 1950:

The point of neutron intensity at which the reactor is “scrammed"—shut down, automatically or otherwise.

But spoken use of the term almost certainly dates back to the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in 1942. From Francois Kertesz’s 1968 The Language of Nuclear Science:

During the experiment that culminated on December 2, 1942 in the accomplishment of the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, a safety rod was held by a rope running through the pile and weighted on the opposite end. The young physicist in charge was told to watch the indicator; if it exceeded a certain value he was to cut the rope and scram. Since then the term scram is used to designate the emergency shutdown of a reactor. Today the urgency is lost and the word scram indicates simply a fast-shutdown operation.

Some claim that the specific nuclear use of the word was coined by Enrico Fermi himself, although it seems unlikely, but not entirely implausible, that a recent immigrant such as Fermi would have such a command of colloquial American English.

It’s also often claimed that scram is an acronym for safety control rod ax man, a reference to the 1942 procedure. This rather tortured acronym did not appear until much later and is in no way the origin of the nuclear term.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

See lollapalooza.

A troubleshooter is someone who fixes problems, often mechanical or technical in nature but the term can be used more generally. The term dates to the turn of the 20th century and has its origins in repair of telegraph and telephone lines. From Strand Magazine of March 1905:

A good looking young “trouble-shooter"—as a mender of telephone lines is called—had...asked her to marry him.

The term alludes to gunslingers of the old West, but doesn’t actually date back that far.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

A lollapalooza is something that is outstanding or excellent. The origin is unknown, but it is almost certainly a fanciful formation and is likely related to the use of lolla or la-la to mean something excellent. Both lollapalooza and lolla date to the turn of the 20th century.

From George Ade’s 1896 novel Artie:

“But the girls—wow!”
“Beauties, eh?”
“Lollypaloozers!”

And we have la-la from a decade earlier. From The Lantern (New Orleans) of 8 September 1886:

[A racehorse that is] a regular la-la boy.

And from the same issue:

Gave him a quarter to find their la-la’s, Messrs. Tim Davis and his friend Wertenberger.

A letter by Frederick Remington written in 1888 has this:

I would be a “lolly” [of a savage]—but why harrow ourselves with such vain regrets.

(Source: Historical Dictionary of American Slang)