Unexpected words

When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins. 

Here are a handful of expressions that have sent me to the dictionary: “shades of,” “craned her neck,” “sported a new hat,” “madcap kids,” “stool pigeon” and “moniker.” They all put my reading on pause. When I encountered them, I pondered a bit, jotted down the words so I’d remember to research them, and got back to what I was reading.

Here’s what I learned.

Shades of is related to shadows and to shadow-like nuances. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from about 1818, shades of was used, “in humorous invocation of the spirit of a deceased person,” with the implication that the deceased person would be horrified or amazed at what was going on. The dictionary notes that it is no longer exclusively humorous and can now refer to some person or thing that is reminiscent of a present happening. So to say “shades of Bruce Springsteen” would be to invoke the Boss’s image or music as a point of comparison.

To crane one’s neck is from 1799, according to the OED, and means “To stretch (the neck) like a crane,” and it even has the variant to crane one’s head. The crane in question is the bird, of course, though cranes for lifting have been around for millennia (think Archimedes or the Egyptian pyramids). But the mechanical ones have only been called cranes since 1487, also getting their name from the bird.

The verb to sport is fearsomely complicated and has nothing to do with football. It wends its way back to disport, meaning “to divert, amuse or entertain” often with a reflexive. Over time sport came to refer to the act of amusing oneself or frolicking, often outdoors. Sport also developed the meaning of “to display” something ostentatiously or to say something publicly. Since about 1778, it could mean “to wear”, and the OED gives the example of “Some macaroni Barristers [who] have presumed to sport Bags and Pig-Tails.” “Macaroni barristers” refer to ones wearing fashionable Italian and French styles—eighteenth century hipsters.

Madcap, it turns out, began as a noun, with a first citation from 1589, meaning a madman, and within a few years the word was also used as an adjective. The suggested etymology is mad + cap, where cap has the metaphorical sense of “head.” And the OED points us to such similar uses as goose-cap, huff-cap, and fuddle-cap for a simpleton, a swaggerer, and a drunk. All are now obsolete. 

When I hear stool pigeon, I think of a criminal who snitches on cohorts to make a deal. But it turns out to refer back to the practice of using a decoy bird tied to a moving stool to attract its fellows. The OED treats stool pigeon as US usage from about 1804 to indicate first a literal decoy and later an informer. An 1804 citation refers to a turtle “exhibited like a stool pigeon to a parcel of geese, in expectation that it would encrease the flock” and in 1844 we find “Those secret partners, by gamblers, are termed ropers, or stool-pigeons: their business is to delude the inexperienced into their dens of iniquity.” A few years later, we get an 1850 citation that “The senior high constable of Philadelphia … recollected that Harry White … who he had been lately using as a ‘stool pigeon’, or secret informer, had informed him … that ‘a big thing’ was coming off shortly.”

Moniker is still a bit of a stumper to me. The OED gives it as “origin uncertain” with an earliest citation from 1851. One suggestion is that it arose from a slang usage for eke-name (meaning nickname). Other ideas relate it to the words monarch or monogram. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, in The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937), suggests its origin can be found in the mixed language Shelta (sometimes called Tinker’s Cant or simply The Cant). Macalister posits the Shelta word munika meaning name, and this idea is developed further in a 2007 essay by William Sayres called “Moniker: Etymology and Lexicographical History.” That’s the latest word on moniker.

Since I started writing this piece, I’ve come across new words and phrases to puzzle over and research: cheapskate, right as rain, beck and call, chockful, and bespoke. I’m off to the dictionary again.

_{Featured image by Paul Melki via Unsplash.}