Who Put the Butter in Butterfly?

by David Feldman

  Short shrift, then, refers to the inability to give a full confession or receive absolution, and the expression comes from the practice of not giving condemned prisoners enough time to shrive properly. Often they would be allowed only a few seconds to speak at the gallows before the executioner. In Richard III, Shakespeare alludes to the practice. The Duke of Gloucester, soon to become Richard III, has just sentenced Lord Hastings to death. The official in charge of the execution, Sir Richard Ratcliff, tells the wailing Hastings:

  Dispatch my lord; the duke would be at dinner:

  Make a short shrift; he longs to see your head.

  So although we have seen many long shrifts in movies and soap operas, no such expression has evolved, and short shrift has broadened its meaning to any context in which we allow little time or give insufficient attention to the matter at hand.

  Animals and Other

  Inhuman Words

  Why Is the Middle of Summer Called the Dog Days?

  No, dog days is not an invention of the greeting card industry to create a phony holiday for your canine pets. Nor is it an ironic reference to the fact that midsummer isn’t exactly Bowser’s favorite time of year.

  Dog days goes back to the Romans, who believed that in the hottest part of the summer, Sirius (the “dog star” and the brightest star in its constellation) lent its own heat to the heat of the sun (sirius means “scorching” in Greek). The Roman dog days, which they called caniculares dies (“days of the dog”), lasted from approximately July 3 to August 11, when Sirius is ascending. Over time, dog days has come to mean any expected long streak of heat.

  How Did the Butterfly Get Its Name?

  Despite the simplicity of its etymology (yes, the insect got its name from combining butter and fly), word experts have been arguing about the genesis of the word butterfly for centuries. Samuel Johnson claimed that the season when butterflies first appeared (spring) was when butter was also first churned. Others contended that the butter referred to the yellow color of its excrement.

  Two other explanations are far more likely. In England, the most common butterfly is the brimstone, which is butter-colored. William and Mary Morris offer a more tantalizing explanation: Medieval folklore tales included the myth that witches and fairies would fly and steal butter at night—in the form of butterflies.

  Submitted by Joan Wolf of West Babylon, New York.

  What Exactly Are Cooties, and Where Did They Come From?

  Kids throw around the word cooties without having the slightest idea what these vile imaginary creatures are. But since World War I, cooties has referred to head and body lice. Cooties comes from the Polynesian word for “parasite,” kutu.

  Why Is a Spider’s Handicraft Called a Cobweb?

  Cob is a short word with disparate meanings. Cob can refer to any small lump (e.g., a piece of coal), a horse, a gull, a swan, and, of course, a corncob. But cob has nothing whatsoever to do with cobwebs.

  In Old English, spiders were called attercoppes, literally “poison head.” Evidently the Anglo-Saxons believed that all spiders were poisonous. The word copweb appeared in Middle English to describe the net created by spiders, and over the years the spelling changed from copweb to cobweb. Try pronouncing copweb aloud and you will see the effort required to enunciate it properly. The English Penchant for slurring words probably explains why cobweb has endured.

  Submitted by Jean Hanamoto of Morgan Hill, California.

  Why Can Some People Get Your Goat Instead of Getting Your Mynah Bird or Getting Your Basset Hound?

  Although there is some dispute about how this colorful term for the uncanny ability of some people to rile us, annoy us, irritate us, vex us, and get under our skin, most lexicographers attribute the origins of get your goat to the world of thoroughbred horse racing. Horse trainers have long put a companion in stalls with high-strung thoroughbreds, particularly volatile stallions.

  Putting a horse of the same sex in the stall would lead to territorial battles; putting a horse of the opposite sex in the stall might, to put it politely, distract the stallion from the task at hand. Goats, among the most boring and least demanding of animals, soothed horses effectively.

  Horses tended to become attached to their goat roommates, so much so that rival barns sometimes would steal the goat of a rival the night before a race. The horse would become upset and presumably underperform the next day. So someone whose goat has been gotten is actually being compared to a horse rather than a goat.

  Why Is a Pedestrian Violation Called Jaywalking?

  When the colonialists first came to America, blue jays abounded along the Eastern seaboard. As more and more immigrants settled, the jays retreated to the countryside, until eventually jay became synonymous with “hick” in the mid-eighteenth century.

  Rural dwellers were often dumbfounded by the chaos of big-city traffic. They crossed in the middle of the street, crossed intersections on red lights after traffic signals were invented, and darted out on the street without looking for cross traffic. Jaywalking meant “hick-walking.” Today we need an antonym for jaywalking, a word to express the ruthlessly efficient kamikaze tactics of pedestrians exhibited by big-city urban dwellers.

  Submitted by Cynthia King of Morgan Hill, California. Thanks also to Sharon M. Burke of Los Altos, California.

  Why Are Some Beetles Called Ladybugs?

  While recently watching an episode of High Rollers (purely for educational purposes, of course), Wink Martindale posed this question:

  “True or false: All ladybugs are female.”

  “False!” said the contestant.

  We should hope so, or else these delightful creatures would be incapable of reproducing.

  How appropriate that the ladybug should be the one insect with uniformly positive associations, for the “lady” in ladybug was Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. Ladybugs were so honored, presumably, because of their contribution in eating harmful insects such as aphids and scale insects that are destructive to plants. Less publicized, however, is the fact that a few types of ladybugs actually eat plants themselves.

  In Great Britain, ladybugs are called ladybirds. In the United States, we might then have to rename them first ladies.

  Why Is an Outdoor Bazaar Called a Flea Market?

  The first flea market was held in Paris, but the concept spread throughout Western Europe. Originally, to be a flea market, the sale had to be outdoors and the goods secondhand. The assumption was that the old merchandise would gather fleas as well as customers.

  Submitted by Lenore Punk of Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

  Why Are Politicians Who Have Not Been Reelected but Are Serving Out Their Terms of Office Called Lame Ducks?

  Politicians are used to worse four-letter words than lame duck, but the meaning of these words is bleaker than any obscenity: You are being booted out of office and have to find a real job now.

  The original lame ducks were not ducks and not politicians but financial persons, members of the London Stock Exchange in the eighteenth century, who were clobbered by bears rather than embraced by bulls. Those who could not pay off their debts were booted out of their seats and referred to as lame ducks.

  By 1863 the expression was used to describe American officeholders, particularly holdover congressmen. The reason a duck was chosen, rather than an aardvark or a penguin, is probably because of a similar old hunter’s expression, “Never waste powder on a dead duck.” A congressman voted out of office was clearly wounded but far from dead, for although he might have lost an election, he didn’t yield his seat until March 4, plenty of time to sail through pork-barrel measures, punish old enemies, and generally create havoc without having to answer to his constituencies.

  The problem was so obvious that the Twentieth Amendment was created to resolve it. New congressmen now join the fray in January, and, of course, the Senate and House of Representatives have been totally efficient deliberative bodies ever since.

  Why Do We Say Let the Cat Out of the Bag Rather Tha
n Let the Gerbil Out of the Bag?

  Gerbil won’t work because this expression is not metaphorical. In medieval times, pigs were sold live at fairs and open markets. Pigs aren’t exactly docile, and they don’t cotton to standing still in stalls while shoppers eye their potential as bacon.

  Without room to house the pigs in pens, the only practical solution was for the sellers to tie up the pigs in burlap sacks. The customers couldn’t see what they were buying, and a gullible buyer—the type that today would see a three-card monte game in Times Square as an opportunity to enhance his financial security—might end up buying a cat rather than a pig. When the buyer finally opened his bag, the truth was revealed.

  The theory that some buyers were actually fooled is bolstered by another cliché, a pig in a poke. A poke is Middle English for “sack” or “bag.” This expression implies a blind guess, one that is as likely to turn “catty” as “porcine.”

  Why Does It Rain Cats and Dogs? Why Not Ostriches and Yams?

  We cast our lot, on circumstantial evidence, for the consensus view that this phrase goes back to Norse legends, which contended that animals had specific magical powers. Cats were reputed to have the ability to conjure up storms (visual representations of storms show witches taking the form of cats), and dogs were symbolic of wind. To Scandinavians, then, raining cats and dogs meant a violent storm with wind and rain, pretty much what it means to us today.

  Holt argues that the phrase probably stems from seventeenth-century England, when Jonathan Swift, in Polite Conversation, described the city’s gutters as full of debris—including cats and dogs.

  Why Is the Last Performance or Work of an Artist Called a Swan Song?

  Just about every author they have Cliff Notes for in Classics classes seems to have written about swan songs. Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Coleridge, Spenser, Shakespeare, and other, less stellar writers have referred to the legend of the dying swan. Although actual swans never sing, they were once believed to sing a beautiful melody just before they died. Socrates attributed the song to a display of happiness at its impending reunion with the god it served. Other ancient myths included that swans accompanied the dead to their final resting place (sort of a reverse stork) and that the souls of dead humans reside in swans.

  Because an artistic swan song always constitutes the last work of an artist, the allusion to the dying swan is apt. Of course, some artists are not worthy of a first song, let alone a swan song, as Samuel Coleridge commented:

  Swans sing before they die—’twere no bad thing

  Should certain persons die before they sing.

  Show Biz and All That Jazz

  Why Were Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do Chosen to Represent the Notes of the Musical Scale?

  If it were not for some modifications made in the seventeenth century, the hit song from The Sound of Music would have been “Ut-Re-Mi,” for our current octave was a modification of a hexachord scale called the “solfeggio system.” Invented by Italian Guido D’Arezzo in the eleventh century, the mnemonic used to remember the scale was borrowed from the first syllables of each line of an existing hymn to St. John:

  Ut queant laxis

  Resonare fibris

  Mi gestorum

  Famuli polluti

  Solve polluti

  Labii reatum

  When the octave replaced the six-note scale, a seventh note was needed, so the last line of the hymn was appropriated:

  Do was later substituted for ut because it is more euphonius, and ti was substituted for si because it is easier to sing. (Try it!)

  Is the French Apache Dance Named After the American Indians of the Same Name?

  Apache came into the French language before the dance; it was used to describe Parisian street thugs. The apache dance, then, mimics the violence of criminals rather than the ritual dances of Native Americans.

  But how did apache ever come to mean “criminal” in French? As if they don’t have enough to answer for with their devotion to Jerry Lewis and unlistenable popular music, the French have always been fascinated by James Fenimore Cooper’s tales of the Old West. Émile Darsy, a French journalist, was so impressed by Cooper’s hyperbolic descriptions of the Apaches’ great warriors that he thought that the comparison between them and the local street terrorists was apt. Although the Apaches were fine warriors, they hardly lived up to the malevolent image portrayed in Cooper’s work.

  Apache Indians got their name from the Zuni word meaning “enemy.” Since Apaches obviously didn’t see themselves as enemies, they originally called themselves dene, meaning “human being.”

  Who or What is the Allemande Referred to in the Square Dance Calls Allemande Left and Allemande Right?

  Allemande means “German woman” in French. A French dance called the allemande was popular in the late seventeenth century, and one of its steps quickly insinuated itself into square dancing in French Louisiana.

  Why Do We Say Break a Leg to an Actor on Opening Night?

  Right before an actor goes onstage on opening night, say, “Your makeup is dripping all over your shirt!” or, “By the way, Steven Spielberg is in the front row and he has come to see you,” and you are likely to be met with a measure of equanimity. But wish an actor “good luck” and you will be facing one frightened actor.

  A “good luck” is perceived by the superstitious acting community as a brazen act of tempting fate, so break a leg has come to be the ironic way of wishing “good luck” while stating the opposite. Our expression is a translation of a German expression used for the same purpose, Hals-und-beinbruch (“May you break your neck and your leg”).

  Some have speculated that break a leg is a reference to the “unlucky” actor John Wilkes Booth, who managed to break his leg while jumping onstage after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. But break a leg is recorded only in the twentieth century, and, most likely, if Booth were the inspiration, the phrase would have circulated earlier.

  Submitted by Joanna Parker of Miami, Florida, and Launie Rountry of Brockton, Massachusetts.

  Why Is a Prominent Person or Someone Under Scrutiny Said to Be in the Limelight?

  Before Thomas Drummond, theatrical productions had one major lighting problem: how to provide strong illumination that featured only one actor or one area of the stage. The solution was a limelight, invented in 1826 not to help the theater but installed in a lighthouse near Kent, England, to help guide ships at night.

  Lime was a crucial ingredient in utilizing Drummond’s lamp. One stream of oxygen and one of hydrogen were burned upon a cylinder of lime. When placed in front of a reflector or behind a lens, limelight yielded an intense stream of white light. The limelight provided by far the best way to focus on one actor at a time, and it remained so until the invention of the spotlight.

  Euphonious Words—And They

  Sound Good, Too!

  Why Are Laudatory Quotations on a Book Cover Called Blurbs?

  As a man of letters, I decry and condemn the proliferation of puffery perpetrated by purported professionals. Scan the back cover of just about any hardcover novel and you will see the laudatory quotes from other famous writers praising the “revelation” of the contents within and the “immortal genius” of its creator. A lot of self-congratulatory backslapping if you ask me, and precisely because I’ve never been able to get even an obscure writer to praise me (even off the record), I am a totally objective observer on this issue.

  Blurb, which contains only one letter too many to be a four-letter word, was coined by American humorist and illustrator Gelett Burgess (1866-1951). Burgess is probably best remembered for one of his intentionally humorous pieces of doggerel:

  I never saw a purple cow.

  I never hope to see one.

  But I can tell you anyhow,

  I’d rather see than be one.

  Understandably cynical about an industry in which this quatrain could “make” his career, Burgess insistently, but with good humor, lampooned the publishing industry. (He once jok
ingly defined blurb as “to make a noise like a publisher.”)

  At a dinner party given by the Retail Booksellers’ Association in 1907, copies of his new book Are You a Bromide? were distributed to the storeowners for the first time. The cover, with a drawing by Burgess, depicted a sickly-sweet young woman and facetious praises of her supposed charms. Burgess named his model Miss Belinda Blurb.

  Even in 1907, “blurbs” were prevalent on book covers, even if they hadn’t been named yet. Burgess wrote his own parody of the blurbs for his own back cover of Are You a Bromide?, and the name of the insipid cover girl was transferred to the intentionally inflated enconiums found on the back of the book.

  No doubt Burgess would be sad to find that, if anything, blurbs have proliferated since his death. But he is resting easier knowing that he is now perhaps better known for the word he coined than for his rhyme about the purple cow.

  Why Is a Pattern of Crossing Lines Called a Crisscross?

  Originally, crisscross was actually Christ-Cross. In the sixteenth century, European education was primitive. Only the three R’s and religion were taught to youngsters. Children were taught from a hornbook primer that contained a few numbers for arithmetic, the Lord’s Prayer, a few words for spelling lessons, and the complete alphabet. Above the alphabet was a small cross, which was called the Christ-Cross.

  Right below the Christ-Cross was the alphabet line; the alphabet line, because of its proximity to the cross, became known as the Christ-Cross Row. Eventually, Christ-Cross Row was changed to Crisscross row, presumably because the alphabet itself contained no religious content. The changeover is easier to understand when one realizes that the “i” in Christ-Cross was a short “i,” pronounced like the “i” in Christmas and crisscross rather than the long “i” in Christ or bicycle.