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: Spuddle

 Whew, Thanksgiving is officially in the rear-view mirror. However, other late fall/early winter holidays and celebratory occasions are tumbling in and I feel like I'm dashing about (at least, mentally) without getting much done. In other words, I'm spuddling around.

As for spuddle, this is what I have to say about that...

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I first saw spuddle on Facebook, where writer/good buddy Dani Greer posted the graphic below:

I decided sighting this word must be a Slang-o-rama sign from the Universe. Gathering what little energy I had, I poked around the internet and found spuddle listed as a "word of the day" on For Reading Addicts. I then bumped into it on Dictionary.net, which referred me to Wiktionary, which led me to a lengthy entry in Joseph Wright's The English Dialect Dictionary (1905). This last provided a number of definitions, some of which involve digging in the ground and plowing. At that point, I decided I was done digging for information on spuddle... at least, for now.

Welcome to December! May any/all of your celebrations be of the non-spuddling sort.

Must recover now, so I can do more than spuddle for Christmas
The Tired Dancer, by John Reinhard Weguelin (1879)
Internet, Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61888403

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Out of kilter

Now here's a phrase for these crazy days: out of kilter.

How perfect, right?

I think of it as a feeling of coming apart at the seams in a messy way, very much like the YouTube video of a washing machine going to pieces at the end of this post. (You really need to watch this video.)

However, I have no idea what a kilter is, and how this phrase came about.

Do you?
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If you're as clueless as I am, keep reading.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer provides a definition, an alternate phrase, and a shrug:

out of kilter. Also, out of whack. No properly adjusted, not working well, out of order. The first term, also spelled kelter, dates from the early 1600s and its origin is not known. The precise allusion of the variant, a colloquial term dating from the late 1800s, is also unclear. Possibly it relates to a whack, or blow, throwing something off, or some suggest, to wacky, that is, "crazy."

At least the Online Etymological Dictionary provides a definition of kelter to help us along:

"order, good condition," in out of kilter (1620s), apparently a variant of English dialectal kelter (c. 1600) "good condition, order," a word of unknown origin.

The Phrase Finder agrees that it is a variant of an older English dialect word kelter, meaning good health; good condition. He then adds:

In 1643, the English Protestant theologian Roger Williams travelled to America and made a study of Native American languages, especially Narragansett, an Algonquian language. He subsequently published A Key Into the Language of America, which was a glossary of the language he had heard, which included this comment: "Their Gunnes they [native Americans] often sell many a score to the English, when they are a little out of frame or Kelter."

... This is seriously out of kilter.

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: An arm and a leg

Hello all! I hope you are all staying healthy in these uncertain times. And what kind of a crazy place is this where toilet paper (of all things) has become a commodity as scarce as hen's teeth, and when one does find a pack of the precious paper, it costs an arm and a leg??

And when did things that fetch a pretty penny come to demand various appendages in payment in addition to the coin of the realm?
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The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer says that the idiom arm and a leg became widely known from the 1930s on, and probably had its origins in the 19th-century American criminal slang phrase if it takes a leg (that is, even at the cost of a leg), to express desperate determination.

Phrase Finder offers a more detailed theory:

'It cost and arm and a leg' is one of those phrases that rank high in the 'I know where that comes from' stories told at the local pub.... It is in fact an American phrase, coined sometime after WWII. The earliest citation I can find is from The Long Beach Independent, December 1949:

Food Editor Beulah Karney has more than 10 ideas for the homemaker who wants to say "Merry Christmas" and not have it cost her an arm and a leg.

'Arm' and 'leg' are used as examples of items that no one would consider selling other than at an enormous price. It is a grim reality that, around that time, there were many US newspaper reports of servicemen who had lost an arm and a leg in the recent war. It is possible that the phrase originated in reference to the high cost paid by those who suffered such amputations. A more likely explanation is that the expression derived from two earlier phrases: 'I would give my right arm for...' and '[Even] if it takes a leg', which were both coined in the 19th century. The earliest example that I can find of the former in print is from an 1849 edition of Sharpe's London Journal:

He felt as if he could gladly give his right arm to be cut off if it would make him, at once, old enough to go and earn money instead of Lizzy.

The second phrase is American and an early example of it is given in this heartfelt story from the Iowa newspaper the Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye, July 1875:

A man who owes five years subscription to the Gazette is trying to stop his paper without paying up, and the editor is going to grab that back pay if it takes a leg.

Interesting!

In any case, I hope that, if you are on the search for toilet paper, buying such does not involve losing limbs or handing over great amounts of capital.

Stay healthy, stay sane, and share with others less fortunate and/or more desperate, if you can.

It does seem a bit like this lately...
Image by bbasilico0 from Pixabay