I had to look (them up)

When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter. If there is a pen nearby, I’ll make a note, saving the word or phrase for a quiet afternoon of researching. 

For example, a writer discussing literary criticism was complaining about “smarty-pants intellectuals.” I could see why the genteel author chose “smarty-pants” rather than “smart-ass intellectuals,” but why is the seat of smarts in the seat of the pants? And where do “smarty-pants” and “smart-ass” come from? “Smarty-pants,” it turns out, is attested from the early 1900s as a term for a know-it-all and “smarty” (sans pants) goes back to the mid-1800s. It shows up in Mark Twain, for example, where Tom Sawyer refers to a “St. Louis smarty” who thinks too highly of himself. Smart-ass comes later, arising in the mid-twentieth century and similarly referring to a smug display of knowledge. Perhaps it comes from the earlier smart-alecky, which was used in the 19^th century.

In another book, a thriller featuring a lawyer who gave up her career as a mixed-martial artist, I fixed on the phrase “cleaned my clock.” It’s a bit of American slang referring to a thorough physical thrashing, and by extension any overwhelming defeat. Since we talk about the face of a clock, the underlying metaphor here is clear: a sound defeat, say in the boxing ring, could involve having one’s features rearranged. The phrase sometimes showed up as “fixed one’s clock” or “stopped one’s clock”, and the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1895, describes an avicide:

The man approached the bird and struck it a deadly blow with the stock of his gun…‘Old Frank [sc. a heron] ha’ done me out of many an eel—the warmint—but I ha’ cleaned his clock now.’

The present-day meaning is thankfully less fatal.

In a review of another noirish suspense novel, I spotted the phrase “hard-bitten,” used to describe a world-weary protagonist. Is it supposed to refer to someone who has been bitten hard by life? It turns out that “hard-bitten” was first used of dogs that were resolute in their biting, a usage from the 17^th century. By the early 19^th century, the phrase could refer to people who were “tough,” “resolute,” “hardened by experience,” or “cynical.” A citation from 1819 refers to “Some hard-bitten fellow [who] assailed the orator with a line from Swift, ‘Fine words—I wonder where you stole ’em’,” and another from 1857 described some cricket players as “such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows, that their young adversaries felt rather desponding [sic] as to the result of the morrow’s match.” 

Hard-bitten carries a sense of having been chewed up by life, and I wondered how it compared with “hard-boiled.” That phrase, of course, originated with eggs, and has been used that way since the late 16^th century (and later in the 19^th century to refer to hard-boiled peas, hard-boiled pudding, and hard-boiled dumplings). In the early 19^th century, we find ideas referred to as “hard-boiled” and, by the late 19^th century, people as well, including those who were tough, cynical, ruthless, or callous. By 1928, we find examples like this blurb from Century Magazine: “A hard-boiled, two-fisted, super-sleuth of the secret service tells the story of his adventurous dealings with the underworld of all nations.” I think of the contrast this way: hard-boiled is cynical toughness and a world-weary detachment; hard-bitten is a toughness arising through struggles. 

One final puzzler (for now) is the phrase “eat your heart out.” Cannibalistic zombies aside, it can be a boastful expression (“eat your heart out, bro”) or can be used to indicate actual grief. In English it originally meant the latter: to suffer pangs of longing, regret, and envy, a usage that goes back to the 16^th century and seems patterned after a Greek expression. So we find this from 1651: “A man that eats out his heart with worldly cares, will never sleep an happy sleep.” And in this example from 1707, without the out, we find: “He eat his valiant Heart to see the Prey He thought his own, so bravely snatch’d away.” By the late 1950s, a U.S. variant had emerged indicating that the addressee is likely to be annoyed or envious, as in this from 1958: “The boy, after noting my pained expression after his good run, yelled over to me: ‘Eat your heart out, coach.'” The meaning and point of view of the phrase has shifted from an indication of anguish to an expression of triumph. 

A productive afternoon’s research.

_{Featured image by Aashish Chandra via Unsplash.}