LITTLE ROCK — A friend recently said, “Well, let’s go up to the peanut gallery ... where’d that expression come from?”
How come we use these figurative expressions instead of saying the thing directly? How come these figures of speech, which begin life as local or occupational expressions, end up here and there, across centuries and oceans?
And mercy me, sakes alive and carrot coffee - where in the heck did “OK” come from?
Jason Torrente, a master of fine arts in fiction degree candidate at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, says part of the reason for figurative language is that phrases may do more than communicate information, they can draw to mind an image, a mood or tone.
“Language can be (should be) used not just to convey information but as a crucial means of savoring all the highs and lows of life,” he says. “Language is often most interesting and true when it is conveying two meanings at once, as with a great Mini [car] ad telling us, ‘Small is the new black.’
“Considering all the possibilities of words and the human mind, isn’t asking your question of language a bit like asking of automobiles, ‘Why do we need sports cars?’”
Touche, but figurative language - so often cliche - rarely proceeds reasonably. Take “peanut gallery,” or the common analogy for a downpour: “rained cats and dogs.” It’s silly. The subject being explained (a storm) has nothing to do with the adjectival phrase (cats and dogs). Taken further, “dressed to kill” or “eat your heart out” are downright dissonant.
Or when the original reference is so antiquated, “rule of thumb” for instance. Today it means “as a general rule,” but few can tell us what the first “thumb” was.
One of them is Albert Jack.
Jack (nom de plume of Englishman Graham Willmott) wrote two books about the origins of cliches, Red Herrings & White Elephants and Black Sheep & Lame Ducks. He also wrote Pop Goes the Weasel, a desultory history of our nursery rhymes, and What Caesar Did for My Salad: Not to Mention the Earl’s Sandwich, Pavlova’s Meringue and Other Curious Stories Behind Our Favourite Food.
SON OF A GUN!
Ever wonder where we got that? Today, it’s the kid friendly version of a more obscene exclamation, but it has a beginning.
Back when sailing the seas was a many-week interlude for souls making the leap from Old World to New, many fecund female pilgrims got a head start and gave birth midjourney. One of the more private places aboard ship was the midship guns below deck. Now, it often happened that unmarried women couldn’t rightly testify to who the father was. Thusly, the new child was recorded in the ship’s log a son of a gun.
GORE FOR YOUR STORY
“Dressed to kill” calls to mind James Bond, who was forever getting his Walthar PPK past guards partly on the tails of his white dinner coats and high-rolling wagers.
In fact, the expression comes from an account in the Cambridge Tribune, dated Nov. 10, 1881. A reporter casually asked a new army recruit how he felt in his new dress blues. The soldier knew what such resplendent duds meant in the main and said he was “dressed to kill.”
From that single line in what must have been a local story inside a small newspaper, the expression caught on. What hasn’t caught on is The Marshall. The Marshall is a name I coined for an India Pale Ale served in a pint glass with a pickle spear. I have requested this drink twice on separate occasions at The Flying Saucer Beer Emporium, and each time I made sure to call it The Marshall.
And yet, we have “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Feline fanciers will be relieved to know this is a Southern expression originally about cat-fish. There’s more than one way to skin a catfish. Which is true. I was always taught to make a few strategic cuts behind the head, then grip and pull hard with a pair of pliers, but another way is to parboil the fish first.
ABSOLUTE NONSENSE
Imagine explaining to a Hindi or Bantu speaker the meaning of there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Now, if you can imagine that, please explain to us English speakers the meaning of “have a beef,” “steal your thunder,” and “(to be) at-large.”
“Have a beef” means having a complaint. Jack says the earliest reference he found went back to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, from the phrase “cry beef,” which meant to raise alarm - itself a derivation of “Hot beef!” which is a misdirection yelled by pickpockets and yobs whenever some well-intentioned innocent cried “Stop, thief!”
“Steal your thunder” means to have credit due you go to another, and on first blush it would seem to arrive from earlier man’s pantheistic mythologies - as a human might steal Zeus’ thunder. But then, those were thunder-bolts. In fact, it comes from an 18th-century playwright who discovered that a sheet of tin, wobbled or gonged, produced a sound exactly like rolling thunder. The dramatic effect was great. Unfortunately, his play stunk and was shortly replaced by Macbeth. The producers of that show found a place for the playwright’s greater contribution to the stage, prompting the poor writer to pen the yip, “See what rascals they are? They will not run my play and yet they steal my thunder.”
Few things would appear to be better than being “at-large,”and yet, if the hyphenation is applied to you it means you’ve done several things wrong. Actually, it has no basis in English. Ah-ha! No, this one is borrowed from the French. Their phrase is “prendre la large,” which means to stand out and be free to move. Stand out, yes, free ...?
OK, WE’LL NEVER KNOW
The general consensus on the origin of the acronym O.K. (now, OK, or okay) is we’ll never know. Jack, as many linguists do, place it to an 1839 travelogue in the Boston Morning Post in which the author uses “o.k.” for “oll korrect,” a popular print spelling of the mostly spoken English.
OK was helped along, Jack says, by the popular Haitian port of Aux Cayes, the 1840 presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren, known as “Old Kinderhook,” an Indian chief named Old Keokuk who signed all his treaties using just his initials, and a hardtack Civil War ration - known as “hard tack” today - that was made by a Chicago baker, Orrin Kendall.
All these ill-fitting explanations are really just too-small beginnings for an utterance that has become one of the most ubiquitous in all the world. From Africa and the Pacific Rim to France, the word “OK” is basically spoken with much the same sound, and in much the same usage, as we do here.
CARROT COFFEE
No doubt our great-greatgrandkids will one day ask themselves, “Where did ‘Ring so-and-so on the telephone’ come from?” They might even remember, “My grandmother used to say ‘take in some fresh air.’ Imagine people breathing untreated air!”
In Arkansas, the 61st governor, descended as she will be from a line of Monticello Mosses, will harangue the Legislature this way: “Mercy me, sakes alive and carrot coffee!” It will be routine, that idiom, and not even she will know that it was popularized more than a century ago by her greatgreat-grandad, Kermit Moss, in a newspaper.
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Style, Pages 27 on 05/22/2012