Who Put the Butter in Butterfly?

by David Feldman

  English lawyers and government officials had traditionally tied official papers together with red ribbon, which they called red tape even though it didn’t contain an adhesive. Papers were delivered rolled up with the distinctive red ribbon announcing the importance of the documents. What ex-asperated Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, who popularized this expression, was that these papers were again tied up with ribbon after every use, even when they were shelved for storage. Retrieving any official papers required the elaborate procedure of untying and eventually retying the red tape, a small but irritating and time-consuming inconvenience.

  Why Is Money Paid to Prevent a Secret from Being Exposed Called Blackmail?

  Blackmail is a Scottish expression that dates back to the sixteenth century. Northern areas of Scotland were subject to the plundering of pirates and other freebooters. Highland chiefs used to exact a tribute from landholders in exchange for protection against the looting of freebooters.

  The word mail had long meant “rent” or “tribute.” Even today, a Scottish tenant is called a “mailer.” But why blackmail? Two different forms of “mail” were made by tenants: Whitmal (i.e, whitemail) was payment in silver; blackmal (blackmail) was payment in labor, cattle, grains, or produce. As silver was considered a more desirable commodity than sacks of corn, blackmail seems to be another example of the use of black to denote “lower” or “inferior.”

  Many renters still feel that their monthly payments are more tribute to the landlord than fair compensation for worthy value, but today the word blackmail, has different connotations. The original Scottish term describes what we would now call a protection racket. The connotation of blackmail as the threat of exposure of a secret, and the payment as a bribe or hush money, was not widespread until the nineteenth century.

  Why Do We Turn Green with Envy?

  Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver report that green and pale were alternate meanings of the same Greek word. In the seventh century B.C., the poetess Sappho, used the word green to describe the complexion of a stricken lover. The Greeks believed that jealousy was accompanied by an overproduction of bile, lending a pallid green cast to the victim.

  Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare followed suit, freely using green to denote jealousy or envy. Perhaps the most famous such reference is Iago’s speech in Act 3 of Othello:

  O! beware my lord, of Jealousy;

  It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock

  The meat it feeds on.

  Although we are now more likely to ascribe the pallor of a friend to a questionable tuna fish salad sandwich rather than an emotional fit, green with envy remains entrenched.

  Submitted by Tony Drawdy of Bamberg, South Carolina

  Why Is an Inexperienced Person Called a Greenhorn?

  Green has long been associated with things young and immature. The question is: Why “greenhorn”?

  John Ciardi supplies the only plausible theory we have encountered. When young deer grow horns, a temporary skin surrounds the horn to protect the delicate growth (much as husks grow around the shells of nuts). Greenish fungus spores tend to grow on this temporary skin, which make the horns look green until the skin peels away completely.

  Why Is Our Little Finger Called a Pinkie? Why Is the Drink Called a Pink Lady?

  We have the Dutch to blame for this piece of baby talk. Pinck in Middle Dutch meant “small.” Their word for the little finger was pinkje.

  At least a pink lady is pink (although why it is called a “lady” probably has more to do with sexism—froth equals femininity—than linguistics). John Ciardi points out that the diminutive ending of pinkie is a redundancy, for it means, in effect, “small little finger.” At least the Dutch derivation explains why one finger has been singled out for its pinkness.

  Submitted by Steve Hajewski of New Berlin, Wisconsin.

  Why Do We Say, “Not a Red Cent”?

  Remember the days of yore (whatever the heck yore is) when U.S. coinage was made of real, identifiable metals? Pennies used to be made out of copper but now are an alloy of copper, tin, and zinc. The “red” in “red cent” was a reference to the hue of the original copper penny; the current alloy contains reddish but also golden and brown hues.

  Why Is an Unwanted or Useless Possession Called a White Elephant?

  The quintessential white elephant has several qualities in common: It is large and unwieldy; it is expensive (or at least extravagant for its category); it is a gift; and it is a gift that can’t be refused in the first place and then can’t be returned or destroyed for some reason. (Otherwise, who would want to keep a white elephant around the house?)

  All of these connotations stem from the original white elephants, a strain of albino (actually whitish-gray) pachyderms that were considered sacred by the Siamese. Any captured white elephant, became, by law, property of the emperor. Under no circumstances could white elephants be destroyed without royal permission.

  Any monarch worth his salt is besieged by assorted hangers-on, and a Siamese emperor devised an ingenious method to punish particularly obnoxious courtiers. He bestowed upon them the gift of one of the sacred white elephants.

  Unsuspecting courtiers probably could think only about the good news: the tremendous honor they had received. Rather soon, however, they recognized the bad news: They were saddled with a literal and metaphorical white elephant. At least that awful vase that your boss brought you when you invited him over for dinner is an inanimate object, one that can be dragged out of the basement or a closet if he should by some miracle ever be reinvited back. But real elephants do annoying things like eating and defecating and running around and tearing down fences.

  Recipients of the white elephants were not allowed to work the elephants. They couldn’t even ride them. Only the emperor was allowed to ride the white elephant, and the recipient was always aware that he must keep the elephant on hand in case the emperor decided he felt like a trot.

  But the recipients had a more pressing problem: They simply could not afford the upkeep of the elephant. So although the contemporary recipient of a white elephant is only emotionally scarred, the earliest victims were inevitably financially ruined.

  Oddballs: Words Whose Only Deficiency Is Their Inability to Fit

  into Any of the Other Chapters

  Why Is Every Fourth Year Called a Leap Year?

  This eighth-century English idiom has always seemed inappropriate. The year itself doesn’t leap; an extra day is tacked on to the year. “Leap-day year” might have been a more appropriate name.

  But there is a logical reason for the name. Divide the 365-day typical year by the 52 weeks. You will see that there is one additional day. Thus, in nonleap years, if a fixed-date holiday, such as Christmas, was held on a Tuesday, one knew that the next year it would fall on a Wednesday. But in a leap year, the festival would fall two days after the previous year’s. This skipping of a day is the “leap” in leap year.

  The year 2000 will be an exciting one for leap-year enthusiasts, for centennial years are leap years only when divisible by 400. The last centennial leap year was 1600, and it is doubtful that most of us will be around to enjoy the next one after 2000, in 2400.

  Why Is a Two-Week Period Called a Fortnight?

  The Anglo-Saxons believed that the night was a discrete entity from the daytime, and they measured the passage of time by counting the number of nights that had passed. Fortnight comes directly from the Old English feowertene nighta (“fourteen nights”).

  Fortnight has a quaint and obsolete feel to it, but no other English word is more precise. Those of us who subscribe to many magazines and journals are plagued by descriptions of their frequency: Is a bimonthly magazine one that is published twice a month, or once every two months? Is there necessarily a difference between bimonthly and biweekly?

  In the best of all possible worlds, biweekly would mean “once every two weeks.” We have another term, semiweekly, which is perfectly adequate to describe something produced twic
e a week.

  Even if we could standardize terms, a further problem still exists: There are more than four weeks in every month except for February (in nonleap years). A biweekly magazine would come out twenty-six times a year, but a semimonthly only twenty-four times a year. Subscribers aren’t always sure how many issues they are receiving.

  The simplest solution, I propose, is to bring back fortnightly as the term to describe “every two weeks.” The word has been around for about fifteen hundred years, longer certainly than any of these magazines confusing us about their frequency.

  Submitted by Pam Lebo of Glen Burnie, Maryland.

  Do Gunnysacks Have Anything to Do with Weapons?

  Nothing whatsoever. Gunnysack, imported into the United States around the Civil War, is an Anglicization of the eighteenth-century Hindu-Sanskrit goni.

  What we now call gunnysacks were originally made in Bengal. At first, goni referred to the material (jute and hemp) that was used to make the sacks, and then to the sacks themselves.

  What did goni mean in Hindu? “Sack.” That’s right. Americans have been running “sacksack” races at picnics for over a century now.

  Why Is Groping Around to Find the Right Words Called to Hem and Haw?

  Look up the word hem in your dictionary. The first definition will be something like “the border of a garment” or “a margin.” A subsequent definition will be something like “noun, the sound of clearing the throat.”

  Haw has several different meanings. (Did you know that a haw is a berry—the berry of a hawthorn tree?) One meaning, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, is “a conventionalized expression of the sound often made by a speaker when hesitating briefly.”

  So we evidently arrived at hem and haw by combining the actual sounds of two ways we stall when we don’t know what to say or are nervous about saying it. Both are examples of onomatopoeia, words formed by imitating the sound associated with the action or object being named. Buzz, for example, is simply the attempt to combine letters to echo the sound of a bee. Tinkle, with a Middle English lineage, was an attempt to sound like a small bell.

  Onomatopoeia, a popular word in spelling bees, has Greek origins and clearly doesn’t sound like any thing or person. The Greek onomatopoiia meant “to make words or names.”

  Is a Dandelion Named After Lions?

  Yes. The English had long called the dandelion a lion’s tooth, but in the sixteenth century, for some reason, they adopted the French name for the flower, dent de lion, which, appropriately enough, means “lion’s tooth.” Why the English would choose to borrow a literal French translation of a perfectly fine English expression and then proceed to mangle both the spelling and pronunciation of dent de lion I leave to an Anglophile prepared to explain the glories of English cuisine and the popularity of Rick Astley.

  Why would France and England call this flower, which is yellow but looks nothing like a lion’s tooth, a dandelion? The name refers not to the flower itself but to the surrounding leaves which are deeply indented and resemble teeth.

  What’s Right? Cattycorner? Kittycorner? or Catercorner?

  Catercorner has the pedigree. All are American regional variants of the French quatre (“four”). Catercorner was first recorded in 1519; its meaning, “the point diagonally across a square or intersection,” is exactly the same today as it was then.

  Catercorner has nothing whatsoever to do with cats, kitties, or any other felines, and the two alternatives represent only a few of the many regional variants (my favorite of which is the South’s caterwampus).

  Why Do We Say a Sudden Onslaught Was Executed in One Fell Swoop?

  Fell and swoop are both Middle English words, and the two words were combined to describe how a bird dives to capture its prey. The graceful and skillful action of a bird seems to contradict the meaning of fell, but “fell” has more than one meaning. The fell in one fell swoop is derived not from the verb meaning “to fall,” but from the same Middle English word, fell, that formed the root of felon.

  Fell in Middle English meant “cruel” or “terrible.” Swoop meant “snatch.” One fell swoop, then, accurately described the ruthless proficiency of birds of prey.

  Why Is a Pauper’s Burial Ground Called a Potter’s Field?

  After his betrayal of Jesus, Judas was left with thirty pieces of silver. Matthew 27:7 recounts that Judas, in remorse, flung the precious silver down to the ground. As any deliberative body is wont to do, the elders ruminated long and hard about how to spend the thirty pieces of silver that Judas had provided. “And they took counsel, and bought with them [Judas’s thirty pieces of silver to] the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore the field was called the field of blood.…” And Judas’s thirty pieces of silver were forever more referred to as blood money.

  Although the Bible doesn’t specify so, potter’s field probably got its name from the fact that before it was turned into a cemetery, potters had obtained their clay from this field. The original potter’s field lies outside Jerusalem and still is called Aceldama (“Field of Blood”)

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  Help!!!

  So, what’s the good word? Or phrase? What everyday expression have you been using without knowing why you say it? We are collecting more words and phrases for Imponderables and a possible sequel to this book.

  If you are the first person to send in a question about a word or phrase we answer in any of our books, we’ll send you a free copy of the book, complete with an obsequious acknowledgment of your contribution.