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.”

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

It's a shambles

 

According to the Free Dictionary,

A place or situation referred to as a shambles is usually a mess, but it is no longer always the bloody mess it once was. The history of the word begins innocently enough with the Latin word scamnum, "a stool or bench serving as a seat, step, or support for the feet, for example." The diminutive scamillum, "low stool," was borrowed by speakers of Old English as sceamol, "stool, bench, table." Old English sceamol became Middle English shamel, which developed the specific sense in the singular and plural of "a place where meat is butchered and sold." The Middle English compound shamelhouse meant "slaughterhouse," a sense that the plural shambles developed (first recorded in 1548) along with the figurative sense "a place or scene of bloodshed" (first recorded in 1593). Our current, more generalized meaning, "a scene or condition of disorder," is first recorded in 1926.

The photo above shows the York Shambles today. It was identified as a butchers' row or shambles as far back as the Domesday Book. Via ORB

Ever eaten humble pie?

According to The Phrase Finder, humble pie is

a play upon words which dates back to the time of William the Conqueror. First, the pie referred to in 'eating humble pie' was really umble pie, made from the umbles - heart, liver and gizzard - of a deer. It was made to be eaten by servants and huntsmen, while the lord of the manor and his guests dined on venison. Thus a person who had to eat umble pie was in a position of inferiority -- one who had to humble himself before his betters. The pun resulting from umble and humble is even more precise when you recall that in several British dialects - notably Cockney - the h in humble would be silent. Actually, the two words come from quite different roots, humble from the Latin 'humilis'(low or slight), and 'umbie' from the Latin 'lumulus'* (loin)."

*This should be lumbulus (OED)

The History of "Dirge"

From the Free Dictionary:

The history of the word dirge illustrates how a word with neutral connotations, such as direct, can become emotionally charged because of a specialized use. The Latin word dirige is a form of the verb dirigere, "to direct, guide," that is used in uttering commands*. In the Office of the Dead dirige is the first word in the opening of the antiphon for the first nocturn of Matins: "Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam," "Direct, O Lord, my God, my way in thy sight." The part of the Office of the Dead that begins with this antiphon was named Dirige in Ecclesiastical Latin. This word with this meaning was borrowed into English as dirige, first recorded in a work possibly written before 1200. Dirige was then extended to refer to the chanting or reading of the Office of the Dead as part of a funeral or memorial service. In Middle English the word was shortened to dirge**, although it was pronounced as two syllables. After the Middle Ages the word took on its more general senses of "a funeral hymn or lament" and "a mournful poem or musical composition," and developed its one-syllable pronunciation.

"Dirige me, Domine" is from the Latin translation of the eighth verse of Psalm 5; the chant is illustrated above in the  selection from the Poissy Antiphonal, dated between 1335 and 1345. For more information on this antiphonal, visit this LaTrobe University site. Psalm 5 also provides the text of the Wesley hymn, "Lead Me, Lord."

*AKA the imperative
**pronounced DEER-juh