From the Royal Navy things “Above Board” were on or above the upper deck and so open for all to see.

During World War ll the Royal Air Force launched a famous raid against the German dams in the Ruhr Valley in 1942 putting together its now famous 617 ‘Dambusters’ Squadron. Following the successful completion of this mission the squadron went on to conduct many difficult and dangerous bombing assignments throughout the war. As with the ‘Dambuster’ mission they often used specially developed weapons and bombs. One of these was a 2000 lb. monster of a bomb  called a “Blockbuster” i.e. able to take out an entire city block, a term now strangely used in retail sales and as the name of a video rental chain. Go figure.

“The Bitter End”  was a Royal Navy term referring to the inboard end of the hempen anchor cable which was secured to the bitts.

Outside the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, SC is a wooded swampy area  known to the marines as “The Boondocks”. The word entered common usage following WW ll.

Knights in the Middle Ages were not always the heroic figures of chivalry they are often portrayed. Many in fact were little better than murderers, thieves, and especially kidnappers and extortionists (and worked for the highest bidder and were known to be “Freelancers”). As these independent knights often could not afford to hire help to keep their equipment in order they painted their chain mail black to keep it from rusting. If one were to be ransomed off by one of these fellows he was said to be “Blackmailed”.

The story is told about St. Martin of Tours, a compassionate fourth century soldier, who encountered a shivering beggar on a cold winter night. Having no money in his purse, this soldier took off his cloak and slashed it with his sword to give half of it to the beggar. Later that night he saw a vision in which Jesus Christ was wearing the half-cloak. As a result of this experience he became a Christian and was baptized. Ultimately he left the army to devote his life to the church. In time he became the patron saint of the French kings of the Middle Ages. St. Martin’s cloak (cappella) was carried into battle by the kings as a banner signifying “the presence of God.” But since the cappella was a sacred relic of the church, a priest went along as custodian. This keeper of the cloak, or cappellanus, also tended the king’s religious needs, and from his office was derived that of “Chaplain.” The depository for the cloak became the “Chapel,” the place of worship.

“Chow”  is a Chinese word meaning food and was used by American and British servicemen who had served time on the old China station at the turn of the 20th century.

Andersonville was a notorious Southern prisoner of war camp during the American Civil War. Conditions were brutal and caused the deaths of many. One area of the camp was open but guarded by riflemen in towers. Along the ground was drawn a line and if one crossed it he was shot. It became known as the “Deadline”. 

When a Roman legion performed badly in battle every tenth man was selected for execution as punishment. The legion was then said to have been “Decimated”.

“The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”  is common metaphorical expression meaning “in a quandary”. In a Royal Navy wooden ship, the “devil” is the top plank or strake immediately below the sheer strake, and a person working over the ship’s side below this plank was working in a very uncertain position.

Along with Davie Crockett and Jim Bowie at the Alamo were 80 Scottish mercenaries who sang a then popular English folk song ‘Green Grow the Rushes, Oh”. After hearing this song the Mexicans started calling Americans “Gringos”.

“Grog” is the mixture of one-eighth of a pint (1 gill) of rum with two parts of water issued as a daily ration in the Royal Navy to all ratings below Petty Officer of and over the age of 20 years who desire it. In 1740 Admiral Vernon (commonly known as “Old Grog” because of the cloak he habitually wore, made of a coarse kind of taffeta called Grogram) introduced the watered-down  sailors’ rum; the watered rum accordingly soon achieved the name of Grog which also gives us the expression “Groggy”.

U.S. Marines serving in China at the turn of the 20th century observed Chinese labour gangs at work who often used a chant (“Gung Ho” meaning ‘work together’) to keep the rhythm going at their collective task. Adopted by the Corps it entered common English usage following WW ll as a term meaning ‘enthusiastic’.

 In the Royal Navy condemned rope was cut into short pieces and offered for sale as “Junk”. The name is derived from a species of bulrush of which ropes were formerly made.

From the Royal Navy comes the common slang expression “Let the Cat out of the Bag”, meaning “The secret is out”, from the practice of keeping the Naval cat o’ nine tails in a red baize bag and not removing it until the offender was secured to the gratings and there was no possibility of a reprieve.

“Perks” is a Royal Naval abbreviation of the word “Perquisites”, referring to allowances, either in money or in kind, given with any particular office or appointment.

“Pipe Down” The old routine Royal Navy order for “Lights Out” at the end of the day derived from the order to ‘put down smoking pipes’,  now used freely to mean ‘be quiet’.

“Point Blank meaning extreme short range. “Blank” was the old name for the bullseye on an archery target: “point” is understood to have meant “aim”

During the American Civil War northern soldiers were often required to sleep outdoors while on the march which caused a lot of unnecessary discomfort and disease. As a solution the U.S. Army issued small A-frame style two man tents that were easily carried by the men. Their resemblance to dog houses were not lost on the men who first called them ‘dog tents’ and later “Pup Tents”.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

The old wooden battle ships of the Royal Navy were classified into “rates” as follows:

First rate - 100 or more guns 

Second rate – 90 to 100 guns 

Third rate – 80-84 guns

Fourth rate – 60-74 guns

Fifth rate – 32-40 guns 

Sixth rate – less than 32 guns

From which we  derive our slang terms for measures of worth.

The traditional Royal Navy morning awakening cry is ‘Rouse and Shine’. Today it is often improperly quoted as “Rise and Shine”.

Although frequently used as a euphemism for a more ribald and insulting term, this is really an old Royal Navy expression casting aspersions on a man’s parentage. In the days when women were allowed on board during a ship’s stay in port, the gun decks were often the scenes of debauchery; and if a male child was born from such a union he was called a “Son of a Gun”.

Soldier’s coats traditionally fell to the ankles allowing it to also be used as a blanket. During WW l however the bottom of  the British soldier’s coat often collected a great deal of mud from the trench bottoms making them heavy and very uncomfortable. To alleviate this problem new coats were issued now cut off at the knees. They became known as “Trench Coats”.

The first clocks stable and accurate enough to be used for navigation at sea were quite small, and were often carried in an officer’s pocket enabling him to know exactly when to change the watches aboard ship. These became known as ‘watch clocks’ then changed on shore to ‘pocket watches’ and now referred to simply as “Watches”. 

“Wrist Watches”  were another development from the First World War. Officers found that it was very difficult extracting their pocket watches from the layers of clothing they had to wear so an enterprising watch maker in England made a type able to be strapped to the wrist and consulted easily.

“Zero In” is another U.S. Marine Corps term meaning to ‘sight’ in a rifle, adjusting the sights to compensate for the distance to the target and the speed and direction of any cross wind.

If you know of any more please write me!

Most slang “blows into town” one day and will “split” for the “boonies” or the “boneyard” the next, leaving everyone “high and dry”.  However, some slang terms actually end up going “establishment” and “make the scene” permanently – only thing is, then it’s no longer slang.

Most slang lasts about as long as a used paper plate.  For instance, “way out” is definitely “out in the cold” right along with “groovy”.  Although “cool” still hasn’t actually gone “stone cold”. Slang has even invaded Wall Street with it’s scruffy insolence by making it’s appearance when the market is “k.o.’d”, “crashed” and leaving it “zonked”.

Of course the “rule of thumb” here is that slang that gets taken up usually ends up getting used up.  This of course leaves one “caught wearing knickers” when they think they are the “cat’s pajamas”.  That would really be the “pits”..How “Gross”!

Etymologists, people who study the origins of words, have a hard time “tagging” slang.  In fact the word “slang” is even considered slang.  It is thought to have come from the Norwegian word “Slenja”, as in “slenja-namm” which means nickname.  Or perhaps it came from “slenja-kjefton” which means “sling the jaw” (or abuse).

Slang is what can be called the beggars’ or thieves’ language.  For instance, “sham”, “banter”, “bamboozle”, “doggerel”, “Cockney”and “Yankee” all come from uncertain origins but they are nice to have around.  In fact “nice” used to be a slang term, too.

Slang words have even been known to change meanings as they are being used.  A “riot” in the 1950’s was a “gas” (a funny person or event), but “gas”, meaning empty tank has been around since 1847.  “Soul” was slang for a deep kiss in the 1950’s, but by the 1970’s it became an icon for style and sensitivity of African Americans.

“Bust” once referred to a womanly form, but changed meaning in the 1930’s by also meaning a “police raid” or “arrest”.  A “heavy” used to be a villain in the 1940’s, but came to mean very depressing in the 1970’s.  “Funky” used to mean smelly, but in the 1940’s, Louis Armstrong referred to jazz music halls as “funky butt halls”, making it stand more for the “earthy” and emotional qualities of jazz musicians.

Historically, slang has always had it’s “roots” in subcultures who have “coined” such words just for the fun of it.  Take for instance, “hootenanny”, “copacitic” and “pizzazz”.  Sometimes slang words were used where no other word existed before – such as “rubberneck”, “overkill”, “mainline” and “yesman”.

So, to “wrap this up”, let me just say that slang is still alive, doing well, and continually providing new terms such as “surfing the web” and “snail mail”…”lol”.  Until next time, “catch you on the flip-flop”.

Other articles by Bren Parks include:

• And I Quote: Writers on Writing
• Foreign and American Brand Name Flops
• Slogans, Quotes and Political Statements Gone Awry
• Press Cover Ups: The White House
• Famous Last Words
• More Famous Last Words

So writes Helen Garner in a piece entitled “Moving Experience” – an essay about shifting house that appeared in the September 2005 issue of that excellent magazine, The Monthly.

Conk out. The phrase pulled me up, took me back to my childhood. I realised that I hadn’t heard it for years. Things used to conk out all the time when I was a kid: cars conked out, refrigerators conked out, even I conked out sometimes. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it means to cease to operate, to break down, to give up the ghost. But where/ when /how did the phrase arise, this phrasal verb?

The word conk refers to the nose or hooter. It was certainly in common use during my childhood and adolescent years – the forties and fifties. I recall an expression: a punch up the conk, and it was linked in my mind with the Goons. A google search quickly confirmed my recollection; there was a whole program about conk punching. It was called :The Mysterious Punch-up-the-Conker and was first broadcast in February , 1957. The famous Neddy Seagoon threatens the announcer (Wallace Greenslade) :You’ll get a punch up the conk, Wal!

And in his usual suave style, Greenslade responds:
Mr. Seagoon, the practice of punching BBC announcers up the conk was outlawed in 1773.

But what’s the etymology of conk, conk out and “a punch up the conk”? I figured that the terms were of English origin, so I picked the brains of Wendy Bennett, a writer of English origin. Her guess was that conk out derived from the popular pastime of English village boys, the game of conkers. To make a conker, you threaded a string through a horse chestnut. The aim of the game is to smash the other player’s conker – that way, your conker became a “king conker”, a conqueror of others. A king conker was a very hard horse chestnut that could split other conkers.

As with so many folk etymologies – inspired guesses by the folk about how words first arose – Wendy’s explanation was very plausible, but, it turned out, incorrect.

The word conk has been in common use since the early 1800s. The OED records its first appearance in print as 1812. It’s a slang term, and it means nose.

Conkers has been around since 1877. The SOED defines it succinctly as follows:

A boys’ game, orig. played with snail shells, now with horse chestnuts through which a string is threaded, the object being to break that held by the opponent.

But here the plot thickens. Conk out doesn’t rate a mention in the Shorter Oxford. The Funk and Wagnall does mention it, however. Not unsurprisingly, the term is claimed as having US origins, and is defined as an informal expression meaning “to stall or fail”, and as US slang meaning “To suddenly become weak and tired.”

By now, I was conking out myself. With my strength ebbing, I consulted an online Etymological dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/

It yielded me the following information:

To conk out:

as in conk out, 1918, coined by World War I airmen, perhaps in imitation of the sound of a stalling motor, reinforced by conk (v.) “hit on the head,” originally “punch in the nose” (1821), from conk (n.), slang for “nose” (1812), perhaps from fancied resemblance to a conch shell.

Words – don’t you just love them!

Yet linguistically, serge and silk come from the same source. The words originated in the Far East, in China – in the Chinese word si, which meant silk. The word was brought to Europe along an ancient route that was known as the Silk Road, by the silk traders. The Greeks referred to the Chinese as Seres – that is, the “silk people”. Variations of the word are evident in numerous ancient languages: in sirghe (Manchurian) and sirkek (Mongolian); it is the source of the Latin word sericum, and the Gaelic word siric; in the Russian word shelk and the Lithuanian word shilkai; and more recently, in the French word sarge, the Danish word silke and the English word silk.

The English word serge obviously has clear links with the French word sarge; and sarge, interestingly enough, derived from the Latin expression lana serica – which translates literally as “wool or the Seres” – wool of the Chinese people.

How do I know all this? I’ve been dipping into the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins. The book was first published in 1990 in hardback; this is the first paperback edition. And for wordaholics, this is a welcome reissue.

In its introduction, Ayto writes:

“The average English speaker knows around 50,000 words. That represents an astonishing diversity – nearly 25 times more words than there are individual stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky. And even 50,000 seems insignificant beside the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked at from an historical perspective, the diversity becomes more apparent than real. Tracing a word’s development back through time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items were formerly one and the same word. The deep prehistory of our language has nurtured little word seeds that over the millennia have proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary.”

So we discover that serge and silk are cousins, almost brothers; and denim is a second cousin. How? The fabric which has come to be called denim was simply serge – a coarse material used in the making of working clothes. When gold was discovered in America, the gold rushes ensued; there was a need for strong working pants, and that is where jeans originated. At the time, the French city of Nimes was a major producer of serge, and the Americans imported large quantities of the stuff. Prior to shipping, the bales or serge were stamped : Serge de Nimes which meant serge from Nimes. Over time, this became shorted to “de Nimes”, which eventually became denim.

But why should denim trousers come to be called jeans? It’s a similar story. The French weren’t the only ones who could produce cloth. The Italian city of Genoa produced a cotton fabric which came to be known as jean fustian – which literally means “cotton fabric from Genoa”. And the word jean was derived from the Old French name for Genoa: Janne.

Dungarees, a sufficient popular form of apparel to spawn a song back in the 50s – Pat Boone’s Dungaree Doll – completes the trifecta; they derive their name from the Indian city in which they were made: Dhungaree. Gabardine on the other hand comes from Old German, and originally meant pilgrim’s garment.

I remember having to learn page after page of Greek and Latin roots in preparation for my Matriculation – University entrance – exam, back in 1960. It was dreary work, committing to memory a whole lot of lifeless words from the page. Back in those days, our teachers told us that English was derived mainly from those great products of Classic civilisation: the Greek and Latin languages. In fact, the sources of English – and in fact all of the world’s languages – go back much further than the empires and civilisations of the expansionist Greeks and Latins. The Romance languages – Italian, Spanish, French; the Germanic languages – German, Dutch, English; the languages of Scandinavia; Greek; even the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit – all derive from a language that dates back to prehistoric times, a language which linguistic historians have named Proto-European.

The development of languages has been a history of borrowings – humans have traded words in much the same way as they have traded goods. Languages are in a constant state of flux, and this is especially true of the English language, which has drawn on almost every other language to build up its astonishing lexicon.

Of course, many of our words come from Latin – words like abbot, prime, procrastinate, the names of the months; and the Greek language has been plundered over the past four centuries, especially when we sought new words for new things: telephone, television, photograph.

And the meaning of words is in a constant state of change. My father used the word grouse to mean complain or grumble; by the 60s, the word was in everyday use as a term of approval:

“How was the movie?”

“Grouse!”

Already I’ve made a few discoveries, and been reminded of a few things I’d forgotten. For instance:

The word “girl” – which Shakespeare spelled in a delightful variety of ways, including ghirl and gherl – has a long, though clouded history. It may have derived from the Scandinavian languages, which have the word gurre, meaning lamb. Originally the word girl simply meant child, rather than female child; hence, in the 15th century, writers referred to knave-gerlys, meaning male child.

In the 1500s, bully meant sweetheart. It is thought to have come from a Dutch word: boele, meaning lover. A hundred years later it meant “fine fellow”, later still, “blusterer”; in the 18th and 19th century, bully was used to refer to a pimp. However, its current meaning : bully = someone who harasses or physically intimidates another – has been in use for nearly two centuries. I wonder how it relates to “bully beef”?

Buxom originally meant obedient, capable of being bent. The word from which it derived – buhsum – also gave rise to the English word bow – the bent wood and string construction used for firing arrows. Over several centuries, the word buxom has moved toward its present day meaning as follows: beginning as “compliant” and “obliging”, it became “lively and jolly”, then “healthily plump and vigourous”, and finally “large breasted”. It is most likely also the source of bosom.

Yuppie emerged in the 1980s, as an acrostic: Young, Upwardly mobile. The 80s gave us many such words: dinks – Double Income, No Kids. There’s nothing new in this, of course. The word news comes from just such a source: North, East, West, South. And the second word war term: snafu = Situation Normal – All Fucked Up – is another example.

Googol is an interesting one. In the 1930s, the American mathematician, Edward Kasmer, wanted a word to express an unimaginably high number. He asked his 9 year old nephew, who suggested googol. It means: 10 to the power of a hundred. (I still much prefer squillions, myself.)

The Bloomsbury Dictionary tells the histories of over 8000 words. Each entry is a short story. And whilst each history is brief – most are 100 to 200 words – the writing is clear and concise, and entertaining too. It is a great source book, a reference well worth adding to the writer’s shelf.