In North America, distanced by the ocean, the word stayed closer to its positive origins and gave rise to the expression “bully for you,” meaning “admirable or worthy of praise.”
Why are rental accommodations called “digs”?
Digs comes from Australian gold prospectors who used the word diggings to describe their mining claims, which usually included makeshift lodgings. In 1893 digs first appeared as a slang term for rooms and small apartments in boarding houses that were strictly supervised by landladies who usually forbade visits by the opposite sex. Students have since adopted the word to describe the humble temporary places they call home.
Why do we say that somebody who speaks nonsense is “babbling”?
To babble means to speak foolishness. It is a verb rooted in the French and Scandinavian languages and was used to describe baby talk in the months leading up to a child’s first words. Babble has many different forms and circumstances, for example, squabble, blather, and charlatan, all of which, to some degree, mean “chattering and prattling nonsense.”
The Latin for babble is blatire. Babble or blatire is the word that blatant is derived from. It was coined by English poet Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) in The Faerie Queene in 1596 to describe a thousand-tongued beast representing slander.
Why do we refer to a tired story or joke as an “old chestnut”?
If a joke or expression works, especially for a comic or a public speaker, it is usually overused and is consequently called “an old chestnut.” The expression comes from a British play, The Broken Sword, or The Torrent of the Valley, written by William Dimond (1780–1837) and first produced in 1816 at London’s Royal Covent Garden Theatre. Within that play a principal character continually repeats the same joke about a cork tree, each time with a subtle variation, including changing the tree from cork to chestnut. Finally, tiring of the joke, another character, Pablo, says: “A chestnut! I’ve heard you tell that joke twenty-seven times and I’m sure it was a chestnut!”
The impact moment when the phrase likely entered the English language was during a dinner party somewhat later in the nineteenth century. At the dinner the American actor William Warren the Younger (1812–1888), who at the time was playing the part of Pablo, used the “chestnut line” from the play to interrupt a guest who had begun to repeat an old familiar joke. Coincidentally perhaps, the younger Warren’s father, also named William, was an actor, too, who for a time was associated with Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theater.
Why is an artist’s inspiration called a “muse”?
Many great artists have been influenced by a muse, a person whose very existence inspires them to reach beyond themselves. It literally means the inspiration a man receives from a special woman. The word muse, as it is used in this case, comes from any of the nine beautiful daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus, each of whom in Greek mythology presided over a different art or science. Muse is the derivative of such words as music, museum, and mosaic.
The Greek Muses also gave us the English word muzzle, because before muse entered English around 1380 it was known in Old French as muser, “to ponder or loiter,” usually with your nose in the air (something all artists are familiar with). Before that the derivative in Gallo-Romance was musa or “snout.”
| Muse | Art or Science | Symbol |
| Calliope | Epic poetry | Tablet and stylus/scroll |
| Clio | History | Open chest of books |
| Erato | Love and poetry | Lyre |
| Euterpe | Lyric poetry | Flute |
| Melpomene | Tragedy | Tragic mask |
| Polyhymnia | Sacred poetry | None; she sits pensively |
| Terpsichore | Choral song and dance | Lyre |
| Thalia | Comedy | Comic mask/wreath of ivy |
| Urania | Astronomy | Staff pointing to a globe |
Why is making it up as you go called “winging it”?
“Winging it” usually implies the same thing as having your first swimming lesson by being thrown into the deep end of a pool. It takes courage and sometimes ability you didn’t know you had. It’s an exercise familiar to good salespeople. The expression derives from an unprepared stage actor standing in the “wings” and cramming desperately before hearing a cue that will force him onstage.
QUICKIES
Did You Know …
that playing cards in Spanish are called tarjeta, meaning “little shields”?
that “no dice,” meaning “no deal,” comes from a time when dice were tossed during a game and either didn’t land flat or were thrown out of play?
that “egg on your face” means to look foolish or embarrassed and comes from bad actors having eggs thrown at them by the audience?
that “one potato, two potato, three potato, four,” the children’s counting-rhyme, originated in Canada around 1885?
How did “Greensleeves” become a Christmas song?
The ballad “Greensleeves” was first published in 1580, but no doubt had been known long before that. One early lyric (“Lady Greensleeves”) was a love song to a well-dressed woman, possibly a prostitute. The music’s first application to Christmas appeared in New Christmas Carols of 1642 and was entitled “The Old Year Now Is Fled.” William Dix, a British insurance agent, wrote a poem in 1865 entitled “The Manger Throne.” In 1872 a publisher took three of the poem’s many verses, set them to the “Greensleeves” melody, and published the resulting song as “What Child Is This?”
Contrary to a popular legend, England’s King Henry VIII (1491–1547) did not write the music for “Greensleeves.”
The song has been around for 500 years and has been used to cover a myriad of lyrics within almost as many different theatrical productions and has even been referenced by William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Its most successful modern secular rendition was as the theme for the 1962 John Ford (1895–1973) movie How the West Was Won.
Why do jazz musicians call a spontaneous collaboration a “jam”?
All musicians refer to an informal and exhilarating musical session as “jamming,” but the term first surfaced in the jazz world during the 1920s. “Jam” in jazz is a short, free, improvised passage performed by the whole band. It means pushing or “jamming” all the players and notes into a defined free-flowing session. And just like the preserved fruit “jammed” into a jar, a musical jam is sweet!
Preserved fruit was first called jam during the 1730s simply because it was crushed, then “jammed” into a jar. To be “in a jam” has the same origin and means to be pressed into a tight or confining predicament. Jamming radio signals is a term from World War I and means to force so much extra sound through a