Beautiful English Online

Great cry and little wool

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898:

This is derived from the ancient mystery of David and Abigail, in which Nabal is represented as shearing his sheep, and the Devil, who is made to attend the churl, imitates the act by “shearing a hog.” Originally, the proverb ran thus, “Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.” N. B.—Butler alters the proverb into “All cry and no wool.”

Stalking horse

"A stalking horse from: Richard Blome. The gentlemans recreation. London: Samuel Roycroft, 1686. [Lambeth Palace Library, Sion College Library Collection]" from King's College collection.

According to Word Detective:

“Stalking horses” were trained to allow a hunter to dismount and then use the horse as a blind to conceal his presence as he “stalked” the game (which apparently did not notice that it was being approached by a six-legged horse).  The term was expanded fairly quickly to cover any sort of portable blind (often with horses or other animals painted on it), and by the end of the 16th century had acquired its modern figurative meaning of “underhanded pretext.”

Nuns fret. Not.

In 1806, when William Wordsworth composed his sonnet, "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room," it was perfectly acceptable to say "nuns fret not," but not anymore. Now we would be obliged to say, "Nuns do not fret at their convent's narrow room." This is because, in order to transform a positive, declarative sentence into a negative, interrogative, or emphatic form, we need to insert a "do" when there is no other auxiliary to signal the tense.

The linguistic process at work is called "analogy." We want rules to apply across the board, and when they don't, we often try to change them. Most verb forms have auxiliaries. For example, we can easily transform "Nuns are fretting" to "Nuns are not fretting" without introducing a "stand-in." There are only two verb forms that have no other auxiliary and therefore need "do," the simple present and the simple past, as in "fret" or "fretted." Because we wanted these forms to match up with the others, we began to use "do" as a substitute for the "missing" auxiliary. 

There is only one modern way of saying "Nuns fret not."

The staff of life

I've been baking a lot of bread recently, which made me think of the phrase "Bread is the staff of life," and it occurred to me that I had no idea what it really meant. A staff is a walking stick -- so are we saying that bread is the walking stick of life? In what way is it a walking stick? Does it support life as it hobbles along?

Online Etymology Dictionary explains the origin of the term: Staff of life "bread" is from the Biblical phrase "to break the staff of bread" (Lev. xxvi.26), transl. Heb. matteh lekhem. This is translated into Latin as baculum panis, literally the walking stick or staff of bread. The walking stick of BREAD? Are we talking about a really long baguette here?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, this is not (as I thought at first) a physical description of a long loaf of bread: to break the staff of bread is to cut off the supply of bread. It's a strange metaphor -- to break bread's walking stick -- so it's probably not all that unusual that it was rephrased in a later era. And indeed, by the seventeenth century, "supply, the walking stick of bread" becomes "bread, the walking stick of life," in other words its support and mainstay.

Before they had watercoolers . . .

They had scuttle-butts. According to Wikipedia:

Water for immediate consumption on a sailing ship was conventionally stored in a scuttled butt: a butt (cask or small barrel) which had been scuttled by making a hole in it so the water could be withdrawn. Since sailors exchanged gossip when they gathered at the scuttlebutt for a drink of water, scuttlebutt became Navy slang for gossip or rumors.

The scuttle-butt in the photo is on the USS Constitution:

She could carry 48,600 gallons of fresh water, which was primarily used for drinking, and was stored in numerous containers in the hold and dispensed from the scuttlebutt, a large wooden cask laid on its side. The term "scuttle butt" is literally the combination of two words: 'scuttle' meaning hole, and 'butt' meaning a barrel of the 108-140 gallon capacity. Over time scuttlebutt's meaning transformed to rumor or gossip because sailors would congregate around the "scuttlebutt" exchanging the latest rumor. Maintaining tradition on modern Navy ships, water fountains are still called scuttlebutts.

At loggerheads

You know what it means to be at loggerheads, but do you know what a loggerhead is? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a logger is a "heavy block of wood fastened to the leg of a horse to prevent it straying." Combined with "head," it becomes a synonym for blockhead. The first usage recorded is in Love's Labours Lost:

"Ah you whoreson logger~head, you were borne to doe me shame."

The term is also applied to animals whose heads are too large for their bodies, like loggerhead turtles. But to be at loggerheads is another matter altogether.

There is considerable disagreement about the origin of the phrase, but I suspect that it comes from the tool known as the loggerhead. "an iron instrument with a long handle and a ball or bulb at the end used, when heated in the fire, for melting pitch and for heating liquids." (Metaphorically, it is an animal whose head is too large for its body.)

There is an instance in Patrick O'Brian's vastly entertaining maritime adventure, The Commodore, in which two Royal Navy sailors had playfully batted at each other with these unwieldy instruments and could be said to have suffered the effects of being truly "at loggerheads":

There were two invalids in the starboard sick-berth, whom Padeen had been sitting with. They had been sparring, in a spirit of fun, with loggerheads, those massy iron balls with long handles to be carried red-hot from the fire and plunged into buckets of tar or pitch so that the substance might be melted with no risk of flame. 'They are sober now, sir; and penitent, the creatures.'

This would likely be the nautical equivalent of running with scissors.

One jot or tittle

According to Bible History. com, the phrase "one jot or tittle" in Matthew 5:18 refers to a tiny letter and an even tinier "decorative mark":

The "Jot" is the Hebrew word "Yodh" which is the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is also the smallest letter. Its European or English equivalent is the letter "Y" as in the English term Yahweh or in Hebrew YHVH since there were no vowels used in the ancient script.

The word "jot" itself is an English transliteration of "iota" which is the 9th letter of the Greek alphabet. "Iota," in turn, is the nearest Greek equivalent for the Hebrew yodh.

The "tittle" is the small decorative spur or point on the upper edge of the yodh. If you can imagine a tiny letter with a slightly visible decorative mark. Tittle is used by Greek grammarians of the accents and diacritical points.

Here is a yodh:

And here is an iota:

Have you ever been "in hock"?

Here are the necessary criteria:

When one gambler is caught by another, smarter than himself, and is beat, then he is in hock. Men are only caught, or put in hock, on the race-tracks, or on the steamboats down South... Among thieves a man is in hock, when he is in prison... ‘If the cove should be caught in the hock he won't snickle,’ if the fellow should be caught in the act, he would not tell. -- G.W. Matsell, Vocabulum (1859) via OED

Yuchi

Yuchi is spoken in Oklahoma, USA, by just five people all aged over 75. Yuchi is an isolate language (that is, it cannot be shown to be related to any other language spoken on earth). Their own name for themselves is Tsoyaha, meaning "Children of the Sun". Yuchi nouns have 10 genders, indicated by word endings: six for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relations to the person speaking), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical, and round). Efforts are now under way to document the language with sound and video recordings, and to revitalise it by teaching it to children. -- Phenomenica

What would the Blue Man Group be in Old Norse?

In Old Norse the word blá was . . . used to describe black [as well as blue] (and the common word for people of African descent was thus blámenn 'blue/black men'). In Swedish, blå, the modern word for blue, was used this way until the early 20th century. -- "Distinguishing blue from green in language," Wikipedia