Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Ultracrepidarian

 Ah, we probably all have an ultracrepidarian (or two) in our lives, and they certainly abound in the world at large.

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This very useful 19th-century word is defined as "a person with opinions on subjects beyond their knowledge" courtesy of The Little Book of Lost Words by Joe Gillard. More background appears in The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth, where he says (in part) that the word ultracrepidarian was "introduced into English by the essayist William Hazlitt, but it goes back to a story about the great ancient Greek painter Apelles." 

That story (I'm summarizing here) involves a cobbler (i.e., one who mends shoes) telling the painter he'd painted the shoe all wrong in a particular painting. When Apelles fixed the offending shoe, the cobbler proceeded to loudly describe what was wrong with the leg. According to the story, Apelles then shouted, "Ne sutor ultra crepidam!" This, according to Forsyth, roughly translates into "the cobbler should go no further than the shoe!" Thus (saith Forsyth) ultracredpidarian literally means beyond-the-shoe.

You can find out more about this wonderful word on the website World Wide Words, which has a nifty entry on ultracrepidarian with many more details on the tale of Apelles and the cobbler.  

And now, you have a great 19th-century word that you can apply to 21st-century charlatans and pretend-pundits... May you use it wisely!

There they go, overstepping their area of expertise yet again.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Showdown

 In westerns of old, a showdown is often what follows a remark such as "Them's fightin' words, pardner." I'm guessing showdown predates the mythological rise of "The American West," but what do I know? (Not as much as I sometimes think I do!)

Time to check it out...

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Well, this is interesting! The Online Etymological Dictionary says showdown first popped up in 1873 as a poker-playing term:

...a slang term for the act of laying down the hands face-up, from show (v.) + down (adv.). Figurative sense of "final confrontation" is by 1904.

On the one hand (so to speak!), the term does seem to have arisen in the 19th-century American West On the other hand, calling a confrontation in the middle of main street before the turn of the 20th century a showdown probably isn't accurate.

I did find at least one written example of showdown in the "Draw, pardner!" sense in a 1895 book Second Book of Tales by Eugene Field, in a short story titled "The Wooing of Miss Woppit." I've included the snippet where it appears below, because the stilted Western vernacular is rather fun to read:

And finally, here's a little four-minute clip from  the 1958 movie Showdown at Boot Hill with Charles Bronson. This scene features, yep, a showdown... not on the street, but rather in a hotel restaurant. The end result (bad guy down, good guy standing) is about what you'd expect from a Western movie of this vintage. 

Enjoy!

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Bailiwick

"That's not my bailiwick" is something my mother used to say, and I'll admit that this statement pops to mind on occasion (although these days one is more likely to hear "not in my wheelhouse"). So, what is a bailiwick anyway? I truly have no idea. So, let's subject it to the Slang-o-rama microscope!

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The Online Etymology Dictionary is always a good place to start. And yep, here's what they say about the noun bailiwick:

mid-15c., "district of a bailiff, jurisdiction of a royal officer or under-sheriff," a contraction of baillifwik, from bailiff (q.v.) + Middle English wik, from Old English wic "village"... The figurative sense of "one's natural or proper sphere" is by 1843.

I checked my hardcopy of The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology by Robert K. Barnhart, which says pretty much the same thing, with 1843 being its first appearance (in the figurative sense) in "American English." Vocabulary.com offers a bit more detail for definitions and so on:

A bailiwick is an area of knowledge in which a person or institution has control or expertise — as in "My bailiwick is international relations." There is a faintly old-fashioned, even pedantic air to the term now, so use with caution.

Bailiwick also can mean a geographical area over which someone or some body has legal or political control, though this is a less common meaning nowadays... Britain's central criminal court, the famous Old Bailey, is so named because it lay on the ancient bailey or wall that defined the original City of London.

If you want to do a deep dive into the non-idiomatic origin and use of this word, check out this Wikipedia entry which even includes a list of existing geographical bailiwicks. But hey, since this particular entry doesn't offer a dive into the slang aspects, it's not in my bailiwick....

The Bailiwick of Guernsey? Not what we're looking at here in Slang-o-rama.
Bailiwick of Jersey flag: CC BY-SA 3.0, Link      Hand image: RegioTV from Pixabay

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: When push comes to shove

 Now here's a phrase for the ages: When push comes to shove. I can so easily imagine/hear my Silver Rush protagonist Inez Stannert thinking/saying this.

But... could she/would she, in the 1880s? 

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The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer defines this phrase as meaning "when matters must be confronted, when a crucial point is reached." (Goodness knows Inez has many such moments.)

This is what that dictionary has to say about the origin of when (or if) push comes to shove:

This term comes from rugby, where, after an infraction of rules, forwards from each team face off and push against one another until one player can kick the ball to a teammate and resume the game. Its figurative use dates from the 1950s.

1950s?? Uh-oh. Let's check some other references, because 1950s sounds way too recent.

American Slang 2nd Edition by Robert L. Chapman defines the phrase a little differently—a touchy situation becomes actively hostile; a quarrel becomes a fight—and places its use by 1958. (Yikes!) Ah, but The Grammarphobia blog comes to my rescue with a post that points to its use in the 19th century:

The expression “when (or if) push comes to shove” originated in 19th-century African-American usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED labels it colloquial—more likely to be found in speech than in formal writing—and says it means “when action must back up words” or “if or when one must commit oneself to an action or decision.” 

People generally talk about a problem before finally doing something about it. So think of talking as the “push” and acting as the “shove.”

The expression wasn’t recorded until the 1890s, according to OED citations, but no doubt it was used conversationally for years before it ever showed up in print.

Oxford gives a hint of the reasoning behind the saying in this 1873 citation from Thomas De Witt Talmage, writing in the United Methodist Free Churches’ Magazine: “The proposed improvement is about to fail, when Push comes up behind it and gives it a shove, and Pull goes in front and lays into the traces; and, lo! the enterprise advances, the goal is reached!”

Ooooh, I think I'll go with the OED as the final say in this, and trust that perhaps at some point my fictional characters would have bandied that phrase amongst themselves in the 1880s. Because, yes, the phrase shows up in my eight books. I'm not going to tell you where, though. I'll leave that as an exercise for you, dear reader. (If you figure out where this phrase appears in my Silver Rush series, feel free to contact me... I might have a "little something special" for you when you do!)

When an argument devolves to "push comes to shove," don't push it!
A literary argument on the second tier, from 'Theater sketches,' published in Le Charivari, February 27, 1864
Artist: Honoré Daumier (French, Marseilles 1808–1879 Valmondois) 

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Haywire

 Ever had those times when you've had life go haywire, as in "become wildly confused, out of control, or crazy" (definition courtesy of The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer)?

Well, I'm here to tell you all about it....

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... or at least, about the etymology of this bit o' slang!

Ammer offers that go haywire "alludes to the wire used for bundling hay, which is hard to handle and readily tangled." She also places its first appearance in the first half of the 1900s, which is a pretty wide swath of time. For historical fiction writers, there is a big difference as to whether this phrase entered common use in 1901 vs 1950.

Let's see what other references have to say about going haywire...

The Online Etymology Dictionary has this nice entry, starting with its more prosaic definition:

haywire (n) "soft wire for binding bales of hay," by 1891, from hay + wire (n.). Adjective meaning "poorly equipped, makeshift" is 1905, American English, from the sense of something held together only with haywire, particularly said to be from use of the stuff in New England lumber camps for jury-rigging and makeshift purposes, so that hay wire outfit became the "contemptuous term for loggers with poor logging equipment" [Bryant, "Logging," 1913]. Its springy, uncontrollable quality led to the sense in go haywire (by 1915).

So, 1915, eh? Could I then have a character go haywire in a story set during in the early days of Prohibition, for instance?

Not so fast, says The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology by Robert K. Barnhart, which places the first recording of go haywire in 1929. The Guardian has folks chiming in, offering various dates from "early 1900" to a more recent use in 1940s. 

Enough of this wishy-washy waving of hands. Time to bring out the big guns: Google Ngram. Running down the list of  references, I found a 1916 utterance of this problematic phrase in Nick of the Woods by "Alaska Blacklock" (a pseudonym of George Edward Lewis). In his tale of the still-wild Northwest frontier, the idiomatic term gone haywire is used in dialogue as a bit of wordplay-with-a-wink with the noun haywire:

Hey! (or should I make that "Hay!" 🤣 )... 1916 (or so) works for me! 

Hay wire in a lovely green field or haywire in a crazy day? Depends on how you're feeling!
Left image by Mikhail Timofeev from Pixabay; Right image by David Bruyland from Pixabay

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Draw a blank

 I'm a little late on Slang-o-rama this week as my mind drew a blank. So, I finally decided draw a blank would be the bit o' slang I'd tackle this week....

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Draw a blank, or fail to find or remember something, is from the early 1800s and alludes to "drawing a lottery ticket with nothing on it (so one cannot win a prize)"—at least according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.

American Slang, 2nd Edition (Robert L. Chapman) draws some distinctions in definition and first use, noting that to draw a blank meaning "failing completely in recall" harkens from the 1940s (!!), while tthe meaning of "get nothing, have a negative result, fail," was in use by 1825.

The Grammarist begs to differ, placing its origin back in the days of Queen Elizabeth I:

The phrase draw a blank dates back to the 16th century in Tudor England, when Queen Elizabeth first ran a lottery for the people. Names would be written on slips of paper and put into one box, and a second box would be filled with a mix of prizes and blanks. Two slips would be selected, one from each box, and you’d be paired with a prize or a blank, hence the phrase drawing a blank.

Checking The Phrase Finder, I see they agree with The Grammarist, while also expanding on this explanation.

It's still a little unclear to me as to whether one of my 19th century characters could declare they'd drawn a blank on remembering something or other. I dove into Google Ngram, but didn't see any quotes that would use the phrase in the sense of "can't recall." Oh dear! Have I used this idiom in one of my Silver Rush mysteries? I'm drawing a blank... 

Did I or didn't I?
Image by Anemone123 from Pixabay

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Whooperup

I was looking at words from "long ago and far away" and bumped into whooperup. At a guess, I thought it might describe a sound one might make while celebrating, and might perhaps be a bit of Old West slang (as in, "The cattle drive is over, let's head into town and whooperup."). Nnnnot quite.

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According to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, whooperup is a noun meaning "a second-rate singer who produces noise rather than music." Green's notes it's of British origin and offers up a first-use date of 1909. Dusty Old Thing adds a few more adjectives with the definition of "loud and disorderly people engaged in discordant song."

Turning to Google's Ngram, I did find one reference to whooperup in an 1891 issue of Outing: An Illustrated Weekly Magazine of Sport, Travel, and Recreation (Vol. XVIII) in a chapter titled "Harry's Career at Yale." So perhaps we can nudge this non-musically-inclined word back into the 19th century...

Whooperups, whooping it up.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay