Wordorigins.org

Someone who is tow-headed has light-colored or tousled hair. Whence comes the word tow?

Tow is another name for flax, a light-colored, fibrous plant once commonly used to make thread. Tow is of uncertain origin. It may be connected to the Old Norse tó, meaning fiber that has yet to be spun into thread, and there is the Middle Dutch touwen, meaning to weave. But the connection between these words is not known. The English word dates to the late 14th century when in appears in William Langland’s 1377 Piers Plowman (B text):

Ac hew fyre at a flynte fowre hundreth wyntre But þow haue towe to take it with tondre or broches Al þi laboure is loste.
(But you can make a spark with a flint for four hundred winters but you must have tow to use as tinder or brush or all the labor is lost.)

The expression tow-headed dates to the mid-19th century. From Sylvester Judd’s 1850 novel Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family:

Bronze-faced and tow-headed Wild Olive boys.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

Not worth a tinker’s damn is a phrase that is often uttered, although most people who say it nowadays have no idea what a tinker is. There is also considerable confusion over the word damn in this phrase, which is often misspelled dam.

A tinker was an itinerant tradesman who mended pots and pans. The variant tinkler, common in Scotland, the north of England, and Ireland, appears as an English word in a Latin manuscript, Carta Willelmi Regis, from c.1175.

Que iacet inter terram serlon incisoris et terram Jacobi tinkler.
(Which lies between the land of Serlo the engraver and the land of James the tinkler.)

It was once the practice to signal contempt for someone or something by making a bulge in your cheek with your tongue. From Tobias Smollett’s 1748 The Adventures of Roderick Random:

I signified my contempt of him, by thrusting my tongue in my cheek.

By the first half of the 19th century, the idea of speaking with one’s tongue in one’s cheek had come to mean to speak insincerely. From Walter Scott’s 1828 The Fair Maid of Perth:

The fellow who gave this all-hail thrust his tongue in his cheek to some scapegraces like himself.

And from Richard Barham’s 1842 The Ingoldsby Legends:

He...Cried “Superbe!—Magnifique!” (With his tongue in his cheek).

The adjectival form tongue-in-cheek appears in the early 20th century. From the Times Literary Supplement of 30 March 1933:

Shooting the Bull...is a tongue-in-the-cheek march through newspaperdom.

It is commonly held that this phrase comes from the acting practice of thrusting one’s tongue into your cheek to keep from laughing at an inappropriate moment while on stage. There is no evidence to support this story or the idea that the phrase originates in the theater.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

Yes, it’s toe, not tow, a common mistake. Toe the line or mark is a metaphorical reference to either the start of a race, the runners conforming to the starter’s orders, or to soldiers and sailors standing in formation, often literally with their toes touching a line drawn on the ground to ensure the formation conforms to the proper standard. Many of the early citations are from the Royal Navy and this may be the source of the phrase, although this is not certain. From Hector Bull-Us’s (James Kirke Paulding’s) 1813 The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan:

He began to think it was high time to toe the mark.

And we have this from William Glascock’s 1826 The Naval Sketchbook:

The brigades of seamen embodied to act with our troops in America, as well as in the north coast of Spain, contrived to ”ship a bagnet” on a pinch, and to ”toe” (for that was the phrase) “a tolerable line.”

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

How did a gratuity given to a serving person come to be called a tip?

Tip is underworld cant meaning to pass on, to hand to, especially to pass on a small sum of money. The ultimate origin of the word is not known. It may come from the sense of tip meaning to lightly touch someone, but this is by no means certain. From Samuel Rowland’s 1610 Martin Mark-All:

Tip me that Cheate, Giue me that thing.

and

Tip a make ben Roome Coue, Giue a halfepeny good Gentlemen.

The sense meaning to give a small sum of money, appears at the beginning of the 18th century. From George Farquhar’s 1706-07 The Beaux Stratagem:

Then I, Sir, tips me the Verger with half a Crown.

The noun appears about a half-century later. From J. Barebones in The Connoisseur No. 70. of 1755:

I assure you I have laid out every farthing...in tips to his servants.

The idea that it comes from an acronym for to insure promptness is just plain wrong.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

A threshold is piece of wood or stone that is beneath a door and serves as a boundary between indoors and outdoors. It is also used figuratively to mean a boundary or a line that is to be crossed. It is a very old word, dating back to Old English. The first element, thresh, originally meant to stamp on or trample and survives today in the verb to thresh (wheat) and in to thrash. The hold portion is of unknown origin. The threshold is literally the first place in a building you step.

The extended sense of a boundary or limit to be crossed actually appears earlier in the literature than the literal sense. The literal sense is certainly the original, but given the relative rarity of Old English manuscripts such reversals in dating are somewhat common when you go back this far. From Alfred’s c.888 translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy:

Se ilca [sc. Godes miht] forwyrnð þæræ sæ þæt heo ne mot þone þeorscwold oferstæppan þære eorþan.
(The same [i.e., God’s power] forewarns the sea that it may not overstep the threshold of the earth, but he has so fixed its limits, that it may not extend its boundary over the still earth.)

The literal sense can be found as far back as c.1000, but as mentioned is undoubtedly considerably older. From Ælfric’s translation of Exodus 12:22 from c.1000:

And dippað ysopan sceaft on þam blode, þe ys on þam þerxolde.
(And dip a spring of hyssop in the blood, that is on the threshold.)

There is a specious bit of internet lore, often going by the title ofLife in the 1500s, that badly misstates the origin of threshold. It claims that thresh was placed on the bare floor and a block of wood, the threshold, would keep the thresh in when the door was opened. The big problem is that there is no such thing as thresh. Thresh is not and never has been a noun. It is a verb meaning to beat, stamp, trample.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

Slate takes on the question of what to call an unmarried life partner of the opposite sex.

My vote would to revive paramour.

The phrase three sheets to (or in) the wind means to be drunk. The sheet in question is a reference to a rope tied to a corner of a sail that is used to control it. To have a sheet loose in the wind is bad seamanship, to have three loose means you are not capable of controlling the boat. The phrase dates to at least 1821; from Pierce Egan’s Real Life in London of that year:

Old Wax and Bristles is about three sheets in the wind.

The phrase is often misinterpreted with sheet meaning the sail itself. The sailing and common senses of sheet are easily confused and the misinterpretation goes back a ways. From Edward Howard’s 1836 Rattlin The Reefer:

As the seamen say, they all had got a cloth in the wind—the captain two or three.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

This political term is originally French. Tiers Monde was coined in 1955 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy and first used in print the following year by Georges Balandier in his book of that title. The English is a literal translation, or calque, of the French. Sauvy used the archaic tiers instead of the modern troisième as a parallel construction to the Tiers état, or Third Estate. From Balandier’s 1956 Tiers Monde:

La conférence tenue à Bandoeng en avril 1955, par les délégués de vingt-neuf nations asiatiques et africaines...manifeste l’accès, au premier plan de la scène politique internationale, de ces peuples qui constituent un “Tiers Monde” entre les deux “blocs,” selon l’expression d’A. Sauvy. (The conference held in Bandung in April 1955, by the delegates of twenty-nine Asian and African nations...marks their entrance to the foreground of the international political scene of these peoples who constitute a “Third World” between the two “blocs,” to use the phrase of A. Sauvy.)

The “two blocs” are the industrialized West of the First World and the Soviet-dominated nations of the Second World.

The term quickly entered English soon after its coining. From The Economist of 26 October 1963:

Relations between Europe and the third world nowadays.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

The third degree, thanks to old Hollywood cops and robbers movies, is now synonymous with police interrogation with bright lights and rubber hoses and without the benefits of counsel. But where did this phrase come from? And what are the first two degrees?

The phrase comes from freemasonry, where a Third-Degree or Master Mason is the highest rank. From William Preston’s 1772 Illustrations of Masonry:

A charge, to be delivered at Initiation in the Third Degree.

To obtain the Third Degree of Freemasonry one must submit to ritual questioning. Some sources say the questioning is long and intense, others that it is a mere formality (not being a Mason I don’t know), but whichever is true, the idea that the Masons’ testing was an ordeal became fixed in the public mind. From Jeremiah How’s 1865 Freemason’s Manual:

The Fellow-Craft who is duly qualified by time, on presenting himself as candidate for the third Degree, has to submit himself to an examination of his qualifications as a Craftsman.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the term third degree began to be applied to extralegal police interrogations. From Everybody’s Magazine of November 1900:

From time to time a prisoner...claims to have had the Third Degree administered to him.

The idea of a brutal interrogation being called the third degree was no doubt helped along by association with third-degree burn.

So, there really are no first or second degrees of police brutality.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)