gaffe

11 August 2018

A gaffe is a mistake, a blunder, especially a verbal faux pas made by a politician. The word is a borrowing from the French, but its English use may been influenced by a Scots word as well as by a Vaudeville method of removing a floundering performer from the stage. So the origin is a bit more complex than a straightforward borrowing.

The “mistake” sense of the French gaffe, which as in English is literally a pole with a hook or barb at the end, antedates the English sense, and appears to be the proximate source for our present-day use of the word. The French word is also the origin of the English gaff or hook, but that’s a much earlier borrowing, from the thirteenth century. The earliest citation for the “mistake” sense of gaffe in the OED is from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1909:

These two gentlemen, whose weather predictions are still listened to with some deference, have made a bad “gaffe,” to use a popular slang expression.

But there’s an older sense of gaff meaning nonsense or humbug that comes from Scots, the dialect of English (some classify it as a separate language) spoken in lowland Scotland. The OED has this from W. H. Thomson’s 1877 Five Years’ Penal Servitude:

I also saw that Jemmy’s blowing up of me was all “gaff.” He knew as well as I did the things left the shop all right.

And the phrase to blow the gaff meant to reveal a secret. James Hardy Vaux includes this entry in his 1812 A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language:

BLOW THE GAFF: a person having any secret in his possession, or a knowledge of any thing injurious to another, when at last induced from revenge, or other motive, to tell it openly to the world and expose him publicly, is then said to have blown the gaff upon him.

In Scots, gaff has meant a boisterous laugh since the eighteenth century. The English guffaw also comes from this source. The Scottish poet Alexander Ross includes this line in his poem Helinore, written around 1768:

An’ tho’ poor Lindy look’t but half an’ half, Yet Bydby answer’d wi’ a blythsome gauff.

The Scots word developed into the sense of to babble, to talk foolishly or merrily. The poet James Hogg wrote in his 1801 Scottish Pastorals:

But man’tis queer to mak sik fike About an useless gauffin tike.

So it seems likely that this Scots word influenced the borrowing and use of gaffe after it was borrowed from French.

But there’s another possible influence on the English use of the word. Around the turn of the twentieth century it was an occasional practice on the Vaudeville circuit to remove an act that was bombing by using a giant hook to yank the performer from the stage. The practice went on to become a staple gag in early television comedies, so it’s familiar to later generations. While not the origin of the word gaffe, the metaphor may have helped boost its use in present-day political circles.

Of course, no discussion of the word gaffe would be complete without mention of journalist Michael Kinsley’s definition of the word. (It’s one of those unwritten rules of language commentary that one must mention Kinsley when discussing gaffe.) In 1984, Kinsley wrote:

The dictionary defines “gaffe” as a social error or faux pas. Its usage to refer to political misspeak probably began by courtesy or newspaper headline writers, whose work requires words of few letters. Of course, “lie” has even fewer letters than “gaffe,” but lies by politicians are not news. A “gaffe” is the opposite of a “lie”; it’s when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2012, s. v. gaffe.

Dictionary of the Scots Language (Dictionar o the Scots Leid), 2004, s. v. gaff, n. v.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2018, s. v. gaff, n.2.

Kinsley, Michael. “Mondale Tries Demagoguery on Mortgage Interest Issue.” Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1984, C5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. gaffe, n., gaff, n.1, gaff, n.2, guffaw, n.

Vaux, James Hardy. A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812). Project Gutenberg Australia, 2011.

four-twenty / 420

20 April 2017

There are many origin stories for 420, a slang term referring to marijuana, but unlike most slang terms, researchers have been able to pin down its actual origin with specificity. 420 was first used by a group of students at San Rafael High School in 1971, and it refers to the time of day, 4:20 pm, when they would meet to search for a mythical crop of marijuana plants.

San Rafael is in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and in 1971 a group of students who called themselves the Waldos—because they used to congregate along a wall near the high school—got wind of a crop of pot plants allegedly growing near Point Reyes, further north. They would meet each day at 4:20 pm, after the school’s athletic practice, and venture north in search of the cannabis cache. They never found the pot, but in the course of their quest they smoked a lot of weed, had a lot of fun, and began using the term 420.

Marin County in the 1970s was also the stamping grounds of the Grateful Dead, and members of the Waldos had friends and family members associated with the band. 420 was picked up and used by Deadheads, as fans of the band call themselves, and from there the slang term spread to the wider world.

We have solid testimonial evidence that 420 was in use by the Waldos in 1971, but the first known use in print is from the Red & White, San Rafael High School’s newspaper from 7 June 1974:

If you had the opportunity to say anything in front of the graduating class, what would you say? [...] 4-20.

The OED archives also has a letter from Dave Reddix, one of the Waldos, from 23 September 1975, in which Reddix writes:

P.S. a little 420 enclosed for your weekend.

That’s the real origin. Among the false alternatives that have been proposed over the years are:

  • It was a police code referring to marijuana

  • It was a section of [insert state here]’s penal code referring to marijuana

  • It is the number of chemical compounds in marijuana

  • It was the date [insert name of famous rock musician here] died

  • It refers to Hitler’s birthday (Hitler was indeed born on 20 April, but the association with pot is never adequately explained).

There are many other explanations. All without any evidence.

Sources:

Grim, Ryan. “Here’s the Real Story of Why We Celebrate 4/20.” Huffington Post, 20 April 2016.

Mikkelson, David. “The Origins of 420.” Snopes.com, 14 September 2002.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2017, s. v. 420, n.

fond

8 September 2013

The modern adjective fond refers to the quality of having affection, liking, or eagerness for someone or something. But this was not always so. In Middle English, fond could mean “insipid, flavorless” or “foolish, stupid.” The verb fonnen meant “to be foolish or misguided, to fool or make a fool of someone,” and the modern fond comes from the past participle of that verb, fonned.* The word fun comes from the same root, and the modern verb to fondle is derived from the verb fonnen, appearing in the eighteenth century.

We don’t know where the word comes from; it just appears in Middle English. There are what look to be cognates in Swedish and Icelandic, which might point to the word having been brought to England by the Vikings, but there are phonological problems with that hypothesis that make it unlikely.

In Middle English, fond could also be a noun, meaning “fool,” as in Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, written c. 1390, lines 4088–89:

Why ne had thow pit the capul in the lathe?
Ilhayl! By God, Alayn, thou is a fonne!
(Why did you not put the horse in the barn?
Ill fortune! By God, Alan, you are a fond!)

And at around the same time, theologian John Wyclif uses the word in its “insipid” sense, paraphrasing the gospels:

Ȝif þe salt be fonnyd it is not worþi.
(If the salt is fond, it is not worthy.)

But over time, the word softened, coming to mean gently foolish, as in a person overcome with the madness of love. In 1579, John Lyly writes in his book Euphues, the Anatomy of Wyt:

A cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond louers.

And by 1590, Shakespeare was using fond in its modern sense, where the foolish connotation has been dropped, leaving only the gently loving. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.i):

Effect it with some care, that he may prove
More fond on her than she upon her love.

But the older sense meaning “foolish” did not completely disappear for some while. Thirteen years later the Bard has the character Isabella say in Measure for Measure (II.ii)

I’ll bribe you.
[…]
Not with fond sicles [foolish shekels] of tested gold,
Or stones, whose rate are either rich or poor
As fancy values them; but with true prayers.

So when you say you are fond of words and language, there may be double entendre buried in there.

* Liberman says that fonned ”may never have existed,” but I’m not sure what he’s on about. The past participle is well attested in Middle English literature, being especially common in Wycliffite works.

Sources:

“fond, adj. and n.1,” “fon, v.,” “fon, n. and adj.,” “fun, v.,” “fondle, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“fonnen, v.,” “fonne, n.,” Middle English Dictionary, 2001

Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins ... And How We Know Them, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 91, 195.

ergonomics

13 October 2014

I was listening to a podcast in which the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated that he was under the impression that the discipline of ergonomics arose when the baby boomers started growing old and began feeling aches and pains. Of course, I had to immediately research the origin of the term, and it turns out Tyson’s impression is incorrect. (To be fair, Tyson wasn’t stating it as fact and expressed his own skepticism as to whether or not it was true.)

It seems the term ergonomics was coined in 1949 by British psychologist K. F. Hywel Murrell (1908–84). That same year Murrell as several colleagues founded the Ergonomics Research Society. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of the term in a published work is from the 1 April 1950 issue of the medical journal The Lancet, when that journal made mention of the society that Murrell had founded. The word is modeled after economics, but uses the Greek ἔργον, or ergon, meaning work, as the root.

So the term comes much too early to be the result of aging baby boomers, the first of whom were only toddlers when the term and the discipline came into existence.

Source:

“ergonomics, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

enthusiasm / enthuse

14 February 2015

The meanings of words change over time. Sometimes words become more specialized; the Old English deor was used to refer to any kind of wild beast, but by the end of the thirteenth century had started to be used specifically to refer to the creature we now call a deer. Other words become more general; one such is enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm comes into English from Greek, where it refers to the state of being possessed by a god. It was a religious term for a state of divine ecstasy or frenzy. A poet, for instance, might be filled with enthusiasm by his muse. The Latin and Greek meaning was the sense of the word when it was first used in English.

Edmund Spenser uses the Greek word in his 1579 Shepheardes Calendar for the month of October, saying that poetry is:

a diuine gift and heauenly instinct not to bee gotten by laboure and learning, but adorned with both: and poured into the witte by a certaine ἐνθουσιασμός and celestiall inspiration

Within a few decades, the word had been anglicized. Philemon Holland, in his 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Morals, writes:

The Dæmons use to make their prophets and prophetesses to be ravished with an Enthusiasme or divine fury.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, enthusiasm had become generalized and was not always used in a religious sense or in reference to poetry. Now it could mean any passion or intense feeling toward someone or something, which is how it’s most commonly used today. So White Kennett could, in 1716, write a letter containing:

The King of Sweden [...] must have much more enthusiasm in him to put it in execution.

But the shifts in meaning were not finished. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an enthusiasm could also be a temporary fad or craze or a hedonistic indulgence, and James Joyce could write in his 1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man about Stephen Dedalus’s youthful revels and carousing:

The letters cut in the stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily weakness and futile enthusiasms and make him loathe himself for his own mad and filthy orgies.

But enthusiasm has given us yet another linguistic shift; it has been formed into the verb to enthuse. The verb is much derided. Style maven Bryan Garner says it “is a widely criticized back-formation avoided by writers and speakers who care about the language. Even the OED, in an entry written in 1891, calls it “an ignorant back-formation.” But the verb is older than many may think.

It’s first recorded in 1827, in a letter by botanist David Douglas:

My humble exertions will I trust convey and enthuse, and draw attention to the beautifully varied verdure of N.W. America.

Douglas was a Scotsman who traveled and spent many years in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Enthuse is distinctly North American, and it tends to be used in more informal registers. Use of the verb is becoming more common, and it is inching its way into more formal contexts. So despite the best efforts of language purists, it has been making steady progress over the last two centuries.

That’s quite a journey in a mere four centuries, from religious ecstasy to boozing it up and sowing one’s wild oats, with detours into fads and gushing praise.

Sources:

Garner, Bryan A.; Garner’s Modern American Usage, third edition; s.v. enthuse, vb.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition; s.v. enthusiasm, n., enthuse, v.; 1989.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage; s.v. enthuse; Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1994.