Slips of the Tongue

 

[On 22 January 2026, I posted “Fossil Words,” another word-focused piece among several on the subjects of words and writing that are on Rick On Theater.  I return to that topic now, focusing on word errors of various sorts that I find curious and interesting.  I hope you will find them so, too.

[On “Fossil Words,” I admitted to being a “wordie” and a “language geek.”  Now ROTters will see more proof of that confession. One note, however: I have interrupted the two articles to add more examples of the type of tongue-slips they discuss.] 

“SPOONERISMS, MONDEGREENS AND
OTHER COMMON LANGUAGE ERRORS”
by Thomas Moore Devlin 

[The article below was posted on the website Babbel on 11 September 2020.  Babbel is a German company operating a subscription-based language-learning app and e-learning platform (www.babbel.com).  The company is headquartered in Berlin, operating as Babbel GmbH, and has an office in New York City, Babbel Inc.]

Is that thing you just said an eggcorn or a mondegreen?

Everyone makes occasional mistakes when they’re talking. Even if you’ve spoken English since birth, it won’t stop you from tripping over a phrase once in a while. And though these slip-ups might seem random, there are certain mistakes that tend to happen over and over. So much so, that they even have names, like spoonerisms (errors that happen when you’re talking) and mondegreens (errors that happen when you’re listening). We decided to look at these categories of linguistic lapses to see what they are and why they happen. Here are the backstories behind our mouths’ many missteps. 

Spoonerisms

What are they? This is when two sounds in a phrase are switched. While spoonerisms are usually a mistake, they’re sometimes used to create a fun play on words, like in Shel Silverstein’s Runny Babbit.

[Native Chicagoan Sheldon (“Shel”) Silverstein (1930-99) was a writer, cartoonist, songwriter, and musician.  He started out as a cartoonist, publishing work in Playboy and the military publication Stars and Stripes (he’d been drafted into the army in 1953 and served in Japan and Korea until 1955; his cartoons appeared in the Pacific edition of the paper), before turning to children’s books, which earned him several awards. (He used “Uncle Shelby” as a pen name for his early children’s books and adult satires. He wrote, drew, or composed his later works as “Shel Sivertstein.”) Silverstein’s the author and illustrator of numerous books, including The Giving Tree (Harper & Row, 1964), Where the Sidewalk Ends (Harper & Row, 1974), A Light in the Attic (Harper & Row, 1981), and Falling Up (HarperCollins, 1996). His books have been commended for their appeal to both adults and children.

[Silverstein’s poems are often darkly humorous, irreverent, and populated with invented characters, such as the “Bloath” in Where the Sidewalk Ends, who dwells “[i]n the undergrowth” and “feeds upon poets and tea.” Silverstein’s poems and stories are accompanied by his simple yet energetic pen-and-ink illustrations. The Giving Tree, a fable about a lifelong relationship between a boy and a tree, has become a classic in the canon of children’s literature and has sold over five million copies.

[As a songwriter, Silverstein wrote “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone,’” recorded by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show (1972); “The Unicorn,” for the Irish Rovers (1968); “A Boy Named Sue,” for Johnny Cash (1969); and “Queen of the Silver Dollar,” which Emmylou Harris covered on Pieces of the Sky (1975). Silverstein collaborated with playwright David Mamet (b. 1947) on Oh, Hell!, a pair of one-act plays staged at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 1989, and the screenplay Things Change (Columbia Pictures, 1988).  The two men and Elaine May (b. 1932) also composed a trio of one-acts called Three Plays by Chicagoans, presented at the Goodman Theatre in 1983.]

Example: Saying “mand bembers” instead of “band members.”

Where does the name come from? Spoonerisms are named after William Archibald Spooner [1844-1930; British clergyman], who was a professor at the University of Oxford. He was a widely beloved man with entertaining quirks. One such quirk is that he would often mix up letters, which is why his name became forever attached to this phenomenon. You can find many quotes attributed to him on the internet — most famously calling for a toast to the “queer old dean” instead of the “dear old queen” [that would be Queen Victoria (1819-1901; Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: 1837-1901)] — but most of the time those are inaccurate. While it’s documented that Spooner did have funny slip-ups, many of the quotes allegedly “by” him are manufactured in the same way that many quotes are erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill [1874-1965; British statesman and writer; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1940-45 and 1951-55] or Mark Twain [pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835-1910; writer, humorist, and essayist].

Why do they happen? The way your brain turns ideas into words is complicated, and there’s plenty of research still to be done on the whole process. It seems, though, that spoonerisms occur because of a problem in your “speech plan.” A speech plan is basically the plan that your brain makes to move your mouth to emit sounds that convey what you want to say. When you say “chocolate” for example, your brain has to tell your mouth how to move to go from the “ch” sound to the “k” sound to the “l” sound to the “t” sound, with vowels in between. This process is generally seamless — you probably have never had to think about where to put your tongue and when — but sometimes your brain gets mixed up. And these mix-ups are often because you have two possible speech plans and your brain isn’t sure which to use, so it splits the difference. Once in a while, this will result in a spoonerism.

[Two possible reasons you might need to think about how to make speech sounds are when you’re first learning a new language or taking on an accent with which you hadn’t grown up (e.g.: an American actor playing a British character—or vice versa). Someone suffering from aphasia might also need to do this.]

§ § §

I first learned about spoonerisms in middle school.  We had study halls scheduled during the school day, but occasionally the period would run twice as long as normal.  Such an occasion was dubbed a “double study hall.”  One afternoon, one of my teachers announced that that day, we’d have a “duddy stubble hall.” 

The teacher laughed at her mistake and explained that that was what was called a spoonerism, and explained what that was and even where the name came from.  Since that day—probably around 65 years ago now—I’ve never forgotten the word or the expression “duddy stubble hall.”

Here are some more examples of spoonerisms:

First, some examples attributed to the Reverend Spooner (remembering Thomas Moore Devlin’s admonition above)

“Kistomary to cuss the bride” (Customary to kiss the bride)

“The Lord is a shoving leopard” (Loving shepherd)

“You have tasted a whole worm” (Wasted a whole term)

“Is the bean dizzy?” (Dean busy?)

“Mardon me padom, you are occupewing my pie” (Pardon me madam, you are occupying my pew)

Some other instances:

A lack of pies (Pack of lies)
Shake a tower (Take a shower)
Chipping the flannels (Flipping the channels)
Wave the sails (Save the whales)
A blushing crow (Crushing blow)
Fight a liar (Light a fire)
Doggy fay (Foggy day)
Birty dirds (Dirty birds)
Bad salad (Sad ballad)
Cat flap (Flat cap) 

§ § §

Mondegreens

What are they? This is when you hear something incorrectly, but it ends up making sense to you anyway. Often, they happen with music or poetry.

Example: One famous example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple [Haze]” [1967], where the line is “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but many people have misheard it as “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”

Where does the name come from? The name “mondegreen” originated in a 1954 Harper’s [Magazine] essay, in which author Sylvia Wright [1917-81] mentions mishearing a line in the poem “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray” [may date from as early as the 17th century]. The line actually said “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray / And laid him on the green,” but she had heard “And Lady Mondegreen.” In that reading, it would be a double murder, instead of a murder and a funeral.

Why do they happen? There’s some debate about what causes mondegreens. Most psychologists agree that they often happen in music because it’s a one-sided medium, there’s often very little context, and singers and poets use words and phrases that not everyone will be familiar with. The disagreement is how the brain comes up with the incorrect hearing. Steven Connor [b. 1955], a professor of English at the University of Cambridge, has argued that if your brain can’t make sense of a lyric, it will simply fill in what would make the most sense. On the other side of it, psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker [b. 1954] has said often the mondegreens make less sense than the original phrase. Therefore, he says mondegreens are not necessarily what makes the most sense, but instead is what the brain most wants to hear. Either way, they have become a funny cultural phenomenon.

§ § §

Mondegreens I learned about many years later, but still sometime back in the ’80s or ’90s.  I came across one somewhere, though I don’t recall where, and someone parsed it and provided the name and source of the term.

Some More Music Mondegreens:

“Hold me closer, Tony Danza” (“Hold me closer, tiny dancer” from Elton John’s song: “Tiny Dancer”)

“The girl with colitis goes by” (“The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” from The Beatles’ song: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”)

“Wrapped up like a douche” (“Revved up like a deuce” from Manfred Mann's Earth Band’s song: “Blinded by the Light”)

“There's a bathroom on the right” (“There's a bad moon on the rise” from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song: “Bad Moon Rising”)

“Lorraine is gone” (“The rain is gone” from Johnny Nash’s song: “I Can See Clearly Now”)

Other Common Examples:

“And to the Republic, for Richard Stands” (Pledge of Allegiance: “. . . for which it stands")

“José, can you see . . .” (National Anthem: “O, say, can you see . . .“).

“Spit and image” (“Spitting image”)

§ § §

Eggcorns

What are they? Similar to mondegreens, eggcorns occur when a common phrase is changed to another similar- or identical-sounding phrase.

Example: Saying “for all intensive purposes” instead of “for all intents and purposes.” 

Where does the name come from? The word was coined by linguist Geoffrey Pullum [b. 1945] in 2003. It is itself an eggcorn of the word “acorn.” 

Why do they happen? While malapropism are word replacements that render a statement entirely nonsensical, an eggcorn tends to make at least some sense. The phrase “deep-seated,” for example, is often replaced by “deep-seeded.” While it’s not technically correct, it’s pronounced exactly the same way by Americans and the meaning of the original term — that something is particularly deeply placed — is still there. Eggcorns also sometimes happen because a phrase is antiquated, and so the speaker is unfamiliar with the original term. An example of this is people calling something the “death nail” instead of the more proper “death knell,” because who says “knell” anymore [see ‘knell’ in “Fossil Words” (22 January 2026)]?

§ § §

‘Eggcorn’ was new to me; I never heard it before I started this post.  Of course, it‘s the newest of the slips of the tongue, the name only having been coined 22 years ago.

By the way, Devlin states that the name ‘eggcorn’ is, itself, an eggcorn—for the word ‘acorn.’  He doesn’t relate how the word came to be coined.  I looked it up, and the story is that linguist Geoffrey Pullum, in conversation with a fellow linguist on a linguistics blog, learned of a woman who’d mistakenly written “egg corn bread” in an 1844 letter when she meant “acorn bread.”

Pullum realized there was no formal name for this specific type of mistake—where a word is misheard but replaced with a phrase that is both phonetically similar and semantically logical.  He suggested using ‘eggcorn’ as the name for the category because it was the perfect, self-referential example, since the new word sounds nearly identical to ‘acorn’ in many dialects and an acorn is roughly egg-shaped and is a type of seed or grain, much like a kernel of corn.

Eggcorn Examples:

For all intensive purposes (Correct: For all intents and purposes — Suggests the purposes are thorough or “intensive.”)

Old-timer’s disease (Correct: Alzheimer’s disease — Plausible because the disease primarily affects older people.)

Nip it in the butt (Correct: Nip it in the bud — Implies stopping someone with a physical "nip," whereas the original refers to stopping a plant from blooming.)

Deep-seeded (Correct: Deep-seated — Makes sense as something planted deep in the ground, though the original refers to a position or “seat.”)

Mute point (Correct: Moot point — Suggests a point that is silent or has no voice, though ‘moot’ actually means ‘debatable’ or ‘irrelevant.’)

Doggy-dog world (Correct: Dog-eat-dog world — A playful but logical mishearing of a cutthroat environment.)

Pique my interest (Correct: Peak my interest — While ‘pique’ means to stimulate, ‘peak’ implies reaching the highest level of interest.)

Ex-patriot (Correct: Expatriate — A person living outside their native country might be seen as a ‘former patriot.’)

Escape goat (Correct: Scapegoat — Someone who “escapes” blame by shifting it to another.)

§ § §

Freudian Slips

What are they? These are speech errors that are caused by someone’s unconscious mind slipping up to the surface. Today, the term has been generalized by some people to refer to any speech error.

Example: Freudian slips don’t have many general examples because they are supposed to be connected to a single speaker’s innermost thoughts. For an example from pop culture, there is an episode of Friends [TV sitcom, NBC, 1994-2004; 7 May 1998: “The One with Ross's Wedding: Part 2”] where Ross is getting married to Emma. During his vows, however, he says he would “take thee Rachel,” which is the name of his ex-girlfriend. The implication in the episode is that he still had deep feelings for Rachel, and thus the error ruined the wedding.

Where does the name come from? Sigmund Freud [1856-1939], the famed 20th-century psychologist from Vienna, Austria, is renowned for connecting actions to deep, unacknowledged desires. This phrase comes from his work in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens; 1904], a book that has an exhaustive list of errors that he argues carry great significance.

Why do they happen? While certainly a giant in the field of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud is largely discredited today. Cognitive psychologists [expert in the study of the mental processes involved in perception, learning, memory, and reasoning] tend to believe that, for the most part, there are more innocent explanations for the slips of the tongue (some of which are mentioned in the other sections of this article). People are more likely to make mistakes when they’re tired or distracted, meaning sometimes the brain, like any other part of the body, simply erred. But there is something tempting about the idea that someone’s true feelings could be given away by a misplaced utterance.

If Freudian slips are a real phenomenon, though, they are very difficult to test. How does one research the innermost thoughts of someone? Well, in 1979, they decided to try with a strange study. Researchers collected a number of “heterosexual males,” who were split up into three groups. The first group, the control, was met by a middle-aged professor and told to repeat word pairs that were designed to encourage spoonerisms, like saying “mack bud” instead of “back mud.” The second group did the same thing but instead of a middle-aged professor, they were met by a female lab assistant wearing “a very short skirt and sort of a translucent blouse.” The second group was more likely to make sexual spoonerisms (“fast passion” instead of “past fashion”), but they made the same number of mistakes overall. The third group was back with the middle-aged professor, but they were told that there was a chance of receiving an electric shock at some point during the study, though that didn’t actually happen. The electrified third group, like the seduced second group, made more mistakes related to their stimulus (“cursed wattage” instead of “worst cottage”). The results would seem to match the theory that people’s mistakes are influenced by what’s on their mind.

There is some evidence, then, that if something is particularly weighing on you, it could cause some sort of mistake in your speech. But the vast majority of mistakes likely don’t have such a strong subtext. When you ask someone for “pashed motato,” it’s not because there’s something in your subconscious that switched around the letters. Even without the psychological underpinnings, though, verbal slips can be a source of plenty of entertainment.

§ § §

One night in a performance of a play when I was an MFA candidate in grad school, a word came out of my mouth that wasn’t in the script. I was playing a solder, the commander of a unit in combat in which I was mortally wounded. 

I was captured after the battle and when I surrendered to the victorious officer, I was supposed to say, “I beg you to treat my soldiers as men of honor.”  What I said that night, however, was “I beg you to treat my soldiers as men of iron"!  I don’t know where that even came from. Was it a Freudian slip . . . or just a flubbed line?

The actor playing my foe was standing face-to-face with me, a few inches apart at center stage. As I spoke those nonsensical words, I knew I was screwing up, but it was too late to stop, and the other actor—a pro from New York City, by the way—had a look of perplexity and, yes, fear, on his face which he was fiercely trying to hide from the audience seated on all four sides of our environmental performing area.

We nevertheless went on as if I’d said the most appropriate thing imaginable! (Later, I attributed the slip to the title of the Polish movie Man of Iron, but Andrzej Wajda’s film didn’t come out until 1981 and the show in which I misspoke was performed in 1976.)

Here are various examples and types of Freudian slips:

The Ex-Partner Slip: Calling your current partner by your ex's name, suggesting lingering feelings or comparisons.  (This, of course, is the basis for the humor/drama in the Friends example Devlin uses above.)

The “Mother” Joke: A standard definition of a Freudian slip is: When you say one thing but mean another.  The joke version changes it to: “A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.”

Unhappy Greeting: Saying “I’m sad to meet you” instead of “I’m glad to meet you” when you actually dislike someone.

Work Blunder: Telling a boss “I'm excited to stop working here” instead of “start.”

Sibling Mix-up: Calling one child by their sibling’s name.  (My mother never called me by my brother’s name, or vice versa, but when she got pretty old, she did call me by my father’s name, though he’d been dead for nearly 20 years by then.)

“Bald” Egg: A waitress saying, “Here’s your bald egg” instead of “boiled” egg—to a customer who has a noticeably bald head.

[Thomas Moore Devlin is the editorial lead, and he has been at Babbel for over six years.  He studied linguistics in college, and also has a background in English literature.  He now lives in Berlin, where he spends most of his free time walking around and reading an unhealthy number of books.]

*  *  *  *
“WHAT IS A MALAPROPISM?
THE DEFINITION WITH EXAMPLES”
by Steph Koyfman

[Also on Babbel, posted on 7 February 2020, comes a second article on another category of word errors.]

For all intensive purposes, malapropisms are a fun figure of speech — 
and they can teach us something important about language. 

When Welsh Conservative leader Andrew Davies [b. 1968] told the Tory Party conference [Birmingham, England, 5 October 2016] “we’ll make breakfast a success,” he wasn’t referring to baked beans and blood sausage. What he meant to say was “we’ll make Brexit a success.” And when he made this verbal fumble, he wasn’t just providing the internet with more easily memeable content — he was unwittingly demonstrating a particular figure of speech known as malapropism.

What’s A Malapropism?

Merriam-Webster defines a malapropism [also often called simply a ‘malaprop’] as “the usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase; especially: the use of a word sounding somewhat like the one intended but ludicrously wrong in the context. 

This last bit is key, because a malapropism isn’t just any old verbal slip-up. By comparing the “wrong” word with the one intended, it’s often very easy to see (or hear) how the mistake was made in the first place. A pretty common example is “for all intensive purposes.” It sort of sounds right, but the correct phrase is “for all intents and purposes.” Close, but no caviar.

The word “malapropism” actually comes from a 1775 play by Richard Sheridan [1751-1816; Anglo-Irish playwright] called The Rivals. The character Mrs. Malaprop was famous for her verbal gaffes, which included such gems as “contagious countries” instead of “contiguous countries” and “reprehend” instead of “comprehend.” The name Mrs. Malaprop, in turn, comes from the French term mal à propos, which means “inappropriate” or “poorly placed.”

You might also hear this referred to as a Dogberryism, after the character Dogberry in [William] Shakespeare’s [1564-1616] Much Ado About Nothing. Dogberry was also responsible for many iconic turns of phrase, such as “comprehended two auspicious persons” instead of “apprehended two suspicious persons.”

What Can They Teach Us?

The average malapropism provides us with entertainment value, and that, in itself, is something. But they also signal something important about the way language works.

Philosopher Donald Davidson [1917-2003] had a lot of thoughts about malapropisms. In his 1986 paper “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” he argues that malapropisms are proof that the brain often grasps the meta-structure of language and can correct for mistakes within, even if they distort the literal meaning of certain words. In other words, we have the ability to understand the intended meaning of a phrase, even when it’s slightly garbled.

Davidson distinguishes between “prior theory,” how a listener is prepared to interpret the speaker, and “passing theory,” how the listener actually interprets what’s said. The speaker also has a “passing theory,” which is what they intend with their statement. For communication to occur, both passing theories must coincide. And ultimately, what this means is that at its core, there are no hard and fast rules, or even rote consistency, in language. Davidson writes,

“For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities. A passing theory really is like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely. There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data in any field—for that is what this process involves.”

Another neat feature of the malapropism? There are linguistic methods to the madness. Linguist Jean Aitchison [b. 1938] noted that malapropisms often preserve the part of speech of the “correct” word, and they also often have the same number of syllables and pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. She argues that this suggests the part of speech “is an integral part of the word, and tightly attached to it,” and that, by extension, “the abstract meaning of a word is tightly attached to its word class.”

What Do Malapropisms Look Like In Various Languages?

Many famous malapropisms weren’t necessarily the intentional work of playwrights like Shakespeare — they come from public figures making unintentional mistakes that will probably haunt them forever.

Here are a few examples of famous malapropisms in English:

“Create a little dysentery [instead of ‘dissent’] among the ranks.” — Christopher Moltisanti of The Sopranos

“No one is the suppository [repository] of all wisdom.” — Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott

“He was a man of great statue [stature].” — Former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino

“It’s not rocket fuel [science].” — Former Scottish First Minister Henry McLeish

“Weapons of mass production [destruction].” — Former U.S. President George W. Bush

“He eludes [exudes] confidence.” — Former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, referring to Barack Obama

Do malapropisms exist in other languages? But of course! One Spanish malapropism is so popular that it’s become a common expression in Spain. Former Miss Spain Sofía Mazagatos [b. 1974] once said that she preferred bullfighters who were “in the candelabra” (estar en el candelabro) instead of “in the candlestick” (estar en el candelero), a turn of phrase that means “very famous.”

Also in Spanish, the words pecado (sin) and pescado (fish) are dangerously similar. It wouldn’t be terribly hard to conflate the two and say that you’ve “committed a grave fish.”

In German, the word for Sisyphean task (Sisyphosarbeit) and “syphilis work” (Syphilisarbeit) are also close enough to create a live wire of verbal peril.

Essentially, any word that shares a similar sound, part of speech, and/or metric structure could replace the “correct” word and create a malapropism. The result is that we simultaneously understand the intended meaning and find humor in the mistake. And once in a while, there’s something kind of appropriate about an inappropriately placed word.

§ § §

True malapropisms are unintentional, but many writers invent them to create humor.  Here a few literary and character examples:

“The very pineapple of politeness” (instead of pinnacle) — Mrs. Malaprop, The Rivals

“Illiterate him quite from your memory” (instead of obliterate) — Mrs. Malaprop, The Rivals

“She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile” (meant alligator) — Mrs. Malaprop, The Rivals 

“Comparisons are odorous, palabras” (meant odious) — Dogberry, Much Ado About Nothing

“You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch” (instead of sensible) — Dogberry, Much Ado About Nothing

“. . . he is indited to dinner to the Lubber's-head in Lumbert street . . .” (instead of invited) — Mistress Quickly, Henry IV (Part 2)

“If you be he, sir, I desire some confidence with you” (meant conference) — Nurse, Romeo and Juliet

“Capital punishment is a detergent to crime” (meant deterrent) — Archie Bunker, All in the Family

Some real-life blunders:

Mike Tyson once said he might “fade into Bolivian” (instead of oblivion)

Justin Bieber noted he didn’t want a tattoo look inspired by the “Sixteenth Chapel” (instead of the Sistine Chapel)

Yogi Berra was famous for saying, “Texas has a lot of electrical votes” (rather than electoral votes)

George W. Bush famously coined the term “misunderestimated” (for underestimated)

Richard J. Daley, the former Chicago mayor, once recommended “Alcoholics Unanimous” to those with drinking problems (instead of Alcoholics Anonymous)

Some ordinary malapropisms:

Don't take me for granite (instead of taken for granted)
Wolf in cheap clothing (instead of wolf in sheep’s clothing)
Dance a flamingo (instead of dance a flamenco)
Photogenic memory (meant photographic)

[Steph Koyfman is a senior content producer who has spent over five years writing about language and culture for Babbel.  She grew up bilingually and had an early love affair with books, and, later, studied English literature and journalism in college.  Koyfman also speaks Russian and Spanish, but she’s a little rusty on those fronts.]

§ § §

One of the lingual slip-up that isn’t covered in either of the two articles I reposted above is the folk etymology.  These occur when unfamiliar words are altered over time to resemble more familiar ones, rationalizing their form based on mistaken assumptions.  Common folk etymologies were often driven by mishearing, foreign borrowing, or attempts to make sense of old terms.

Here are notable examples and types of folk etymologies:

‘Asparagus’ became ‘sparrowgrass’ when English speakers altered the Latinate name to sound more familiar

Bridegome became ‘bridegroom’ when the original gome (‘man’) was replaced by ‘groom’ (‘stable boy’) because the former word became extinct

Cucaracha became ‘cockroach’ when the original Spanish pronunciation was mangled to sound like ‘cock’ and ‘roach’

The Algonquian otchek became ‘woodchuck’ when the indigenous name was altered to fit English words

The French chaise longue (‘long chair’) became ‘chaise lounge’ when the foreign word was reinterpreted as ‘lounge.’  It didn’t hurt that ‘lounge’ is a perfect anagram for the French word longue.

The Middle English agnail was changed to ‘hangnail’ because it usually appears on the side of a fingernail

The Middle English shamefast changed to ‘shamefaced’ because ‘fast’ in the sense of ‘fixed’ or ‘firm’ (as in “hold fast”) was no longer common; it was rationalized to ‘faced’ because an embarrassed person’s face often turns red.

§ § §

Another type of speech error that wasn’t covered is the malaphor.  This is an informal term for a “mixed idiom”—specifically when someone unintentionally blends two separate aphorisms, idioms, or clichés into one nonsensical (and often humorous) phrase.

The name itself is a portmanteau word of malapropism and metaphor, coined by writer Lawrence Harrison (1932-2015) in 1976. 

One rather interesting occurrence of a malaphor had an interesting repercussion.  In 1988 at the Democratic National Convention, Ann Richards (1933-2006), then the Texas State Treasurer, famously said, “Poor George, he can't help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth,” during her keynote address.

Richards was actually mocking then-Vice President George H. W. Bush (1924-2018; 43rd Vice President of the United States: 1981-1989; 41st President of the United States: 1989-1993), not his son George W. Bush.

George H. W. Bush had a good sense of humor about the jibe; after winning the presidency, he sent Richards a small silver foot-shaped pin as a “peace offering.”  The consequence, some historians believe, was that this public skewering of the elder Bush motivated his son, George W. Bush (b. 1946; 43rd President of the United States: 2001-09), to run against Richards for Texas Governor in 1994—a race he won.

Examples of malaphors (you should recognize easily the two clichés mashed together):

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
“He said it off the top of his cuff.”
“It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake.”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“You hit the nail right on the nose.”
“He’s burning the midnight oil from both ends.”
“I can read him like the back of my book.”
“That train has sailed.”

TV malaphors:

      “How the turntables . . .” (The Office)
“Get two birds stoned at once.” (Trailer Park Boys)
“If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards.”  (Futurama)
“That kind of buzz we should avoid in droves.” (The Sopranos) 

Movie malaphors:

      “Eat my rubber!” (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation)
“It’s spilled milk under the bridge.” (Margin Call)
“You sowed your own poison, man!” (Pineapple Express)

[Catachresis is the closest to a "catch-all" term for all these speech and word errors.  It refers to any use of a word that’s not correct or defies conventional meaning.  While it’s sometimes used as a rhetorical device for poetic effect (like "blind mouths" in John Milton’s 1637 pastoral elegy “Lycidas”), it technically encompasses any strained or “incorrect” application of one word in place of another.]

Fossil Words

 

[In paleontology, the study of the forms of life existing in prehistoric times, a fossil is any preserved evidence of ancient life, including shells, imprints, burrows, coprolites, and organically-produced chemicals.  This includes the mineralized (converted to a mineral; petrified) remains of an animal or plant.

[Fossil words are words that have largely fallen out of common use but still survive in idioms and set phrases.  Evan Porter, a professional writer with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Towson University (Towson, Maryland), explains how this happens:

Though English has technically existed for well over a thousand years, today’s modern version of the language is nearly unrecognizable from its roots in Old [mid-5th century (around 450 CE) to the late 11th century (around 1066 or 1150 CE)] and Middle English [1100/1150 to 1500].  Over time, words and phrases evolve and transform in both pronunciation and meaning.  New words are created, and many older words die out.

Some antiquated words, however, manage to survive the passage of time even if they're not regularly used in everyday conversation or writing.  How can they hold on without ever actually being used?  By being “fossilized.”

“A fossil word is a word that appears primarily in the context of a specific phrase.  Words can become fossilized either because they grow antiquated or because they're replaced by other words in common speech.  But the phrase in which they appear remains,” says author and etymologist Jess Zafarris in a TikTok video[.]

—“19 nearly-extinct 'fossil words' that only survive hidden inside these specific idioms,”

Upworthy, 10 December 2025

[Etymology, which is an important aspect of the formation and eventual fossilization of fossil words, is the study of the sources and development of words and their components.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may know that I’m both a wordie and a language geek.  (I even contributed a few times to William Safire’s [1929-2009] “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine [1979-2009].)  When I was working on the recent post on “Sign Museums,” and I was looking into the history of Moxie, the soft drink popular in New England, and the etymology of the noun ‘moxie’ that came from the drink’s name, I came across Jess Zafarris’s blog Useless Etymology, I found it attention-grabbing. 

[Oddly perhaps, I’d never heard of fossil words.  After reading Zafarris’s book excerpt on the subject, I decided to share it with ROTters.  So, first, here’s her brief discussion of fossil words, followed by a few additions from other sites I located on the ’Net.]

“ETYMOLOGICAL EXCAVATION: WHAT IS A FOSSIL WORD?”
by Jess Zafarris 

[Posted on Useless Etymology, Jess Zafarris’s blog, on 11 November 2025, this article is drawn from her 2025 book, Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds (Chambers, 2025), an exploration of unusual word histories.]

A fossil word is a word that primarily appears in the context of phrases or idioms. It typically comes attached to other words. The phrase survives even when the word itself becomes antiquated and rarely appears on its own.

Think about the phrase “to and fro.” “Fro” was a preposition and adverb meaning “away” or “backwards.” It almost never appears on its own, but “to and fro” remains in wide use.

Another example is the word “bated” in the phrase “bated breath.” It’s a past participle form of the word “abate” [to make or become less in amount, intensity, degree, etc.] but that form is not typically used in English unless it’s attached to the word “breath.”

Although the word “bide” can still be found independently in some English dialects [to mean ‘to endure,’ ‘stay,’ or ‘wait’], it’s heavily associated with the phrase “bide one’s time” in American English. It’s related to the words “abide” and “abode,” and both are from the Old English bidan, meaning “to stay, live, or remain.”

“Lam” is rare outside of the phrase “on the lam,” and its origin is a bit mysterious. In the Elizabethan era it was both a verb meaning “to beat,” and a noun meaning a heavy blow, so “on the lam” which was originally American crime slang, might imply the same thing as the term “beat it” does when it comes to running away. It’s also thought to be related to the word lambast. To “lambast,” which was originally pronounced and spelled “lambaste” (and still is in some cases, depending on your region) combines that lam verb, to “beat,” with a 17th century sense of the verb “baste,” which comes from Old Norse [spoken across Scandinavia and spread through Viking settlements, including the British Isles, from roughly the 8th to 13th centuries] and also means to thrash someone.

Both spic and span are fossilized in the phrase “spic” and “span.” A spic is a nail, and span is a word for a wood chip. The phrase refers to something that’s freshly cut by a workman’s hands, like a brand-new nail from a smith or perhaps like a fresh cutting from a lumberjack. Both of these are Germanic and probably from Old Norse. “Span new” is recorded as a variation on “brandnew” in the 1600s.

“The whole shebang” is another etymological mystery. We do know that Walt Whitman [1819-92] used the word “shebang” as a word for a shelter in his 1862 prose work “Specimen Days”:

“Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes.”

It may also be related to various words for taverns; in Irish, Scottish and South African dialects, a speakeasy or illicit tavern might be called a “shebeen.”

The “lo” in “lo and behold” is a generic Old English exclamation. It’s probably an imperative of the word “look” or in Old English loken. But you might also use it as a greeting, or if you’re surprised, or if you need to express joy or grief. Sounds like it’s all about tone of voice.

“Caboodle” is fossilized in the phrases “kit and caboodle” and “the whole caboodle.” The first of these phrases is predated by similar terms such as “kid and cargo” and “kit and boodle.” An earlier version of the phrase “the whole caboodle” was simply ”the whole boodle.” “Caboodle” and “boodle” both mean “collection,” with the ca- on caboodle probably operating as an intensifier, implying a really big boodle. Both are thought to be from the Dutch ter[m] boedel, meaning “property.” The “kit” in “kit and caboodle” is, of course, the modern word for any collection of items used to repair, maintain, or make another item, or all the clothes and equipment needed to perform a task or play a sport [this usage is common in British English]. It too is probably Dutch in origin, from the term kitte meaning a “wooden vessel” or a wooden ship. Hence “kit and caboodle” implies “the whole ship and its cargo.”

Sometimes fossil words are only semi-fossilized. The word “figment” can certainly be used independently to describe something invented, but it most often appears in the phrase “figment of your imagination.” The word “inclement” is rarely used outside of the phrase “inclement weather,” from the Latin [clemens, clementis], “mild, placid.” “Turpitude” rarely appears outside of the phrase “moral turpitude.”  This word is from the Latin turpis meaning vile, foul or ugly. So moral turpitude is utter depravity and vileness.

Another form of semi-fossilization: The word “dint” is a predecessor to the word “dent,” which remains in use as a word for a small indentation or defect. You may have read this word in historical or fictional accounts of people wearing armor; a small indentation in armor is often a dint rather than a dent. Similarly the little indentations in coconuts are often called dints instead of dents. But there’s also the idiom “by dint of,” meaning “by means of,” and in this context dint is fossilized because this is the only scenario in which “dint” has this definition. But both usages have the same origin: A dint (or in Old English, dynt) was a blow dealt in a battle, just like we see in the armor sense, so in the context of the phrase “by dint of” it suggests the force by which a blow or other action is carried out. So, you might receive a dint in your armor by dint of fighting in a battle. “Dent” came along later (early 14th c.) from the same etymological source as “dint,” but “dent” became the preferred spelling in the 15th century due to influence from Latin-derived words like indent and indentation.

Much ado about ado

Another fossil word worth a more detailed excavation is “ado.” Nowadays, it’s most often found in the phrases “without further ado” and “much ado about nothing,” which survived thanks to the name of the Shakespearean comedy. But did you know that the word “ado” is a contraction—and an infinitive?

As you probably know from your grade school grammar lessons, an infinitive is the base form of a verb, the form it takes when it’s not conjugated [to inflect (a verb) for each person, in order, for one or more tenses; to vary the form of (i.e., to inflect) a word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.]. In English, we pair unconjugated verbs with the word “to” to create the infinitive.  An infinitive phrase is something like “to walk,” “to go,” “to speak,” or “to do.” The word “to” usually acts as a preposition, but in infinitive phrases, it acts as what we call a particle [known as the sign of the infinitive]. This usage of the word “to” came around in Middle English as an adaptation of the word “to” in the Old English dative case.

[The dative case is the grammatical form for the indirect object of a sentence, the person or thing that receives the direct object or who benefits from the action. Modern English doesn’t have the dative case in the declensions (the inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives); we use the objective case (the accusative case in languages such as Latin, German, and Russian) with a preposition such as ‘to’ or ‘for’ to form a prepositional phrase: I gave the letter to her; or I gave her the letter.

[(In the examples, the pronoun her and the prepositional phrase to her are the indirect objects; the direct object, the person or, in this instance, the thing acted upon, is the noun the letter. In German, the sentence would read: Ich gab ihr den Brief; the word ihr is the dative case of sie, the nominative or subjective case of the pronoun ‘she.’ The phrase den Brief is the direct object and is the accusative or objective case of der Brief.)]

But English also has some influence from Old Norse thanks to the Vikings. For an example of why this matters with the word “ado,” let’s take a look at Norwegian, which is a modern Nordic language. Norwegian infinitives are generally introduced by the particle å, which is cognate with the English word “at.”

So, if Middle English had had more influence from Old Norse, our modern infinitive particle could very well have ended up being “at” rather than “to.” So instead of “to speak” or “to walk,” we could have ended up having “at speak” and “at walk” as infinitives. And that’s exactly what’s happening with the word “ado,” which is a contraction of “at” and “do.”

So why does “ado” mean a commotion or a big deal? Well, you know how sometimes when there’s a lot of drama or commotion, or someone throws a big event, we sometimes say that it’s “a big to-do” or “a whole to-do”? Using this infinitive like this i[t] literally suggests that there is a lot to do or a lot that has to be done.

In the phrase “a big to-do,” the infinitive phrase “to-do” is cosplaying as a noun. “Ado” functions the same way, but it uses that Norse-influenced infinitive structure, with “at” in place of “to,” and then it’s contracted to “ado.” Ado is the older word, first recorded in Norse-influenced areas of northern England, and “to-do” arose later in the 16th century, taking over in a lot of contexts.

[Jess Zafarris’s Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds is available for purchase from various online (Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and physical retailers.  It provides an accessible deep dive into etymology for a general audience and covers topics like ‘astronaut’ meaning ‘star-sailor,’ ‘companion’ meaning ‘sharing bread,’ and the etymology of ‘trivia,’ making it an engaging read for word lovers.  

[Zafarris presents this with wit and whimsy, arguing that understanding word origins provides “superpowers” for language.  Reviewers praised it for debunking common myths and highlighting the global, cross-cultural influences on the English language. 

[Zafarris, a popular etymology content creator, is known for her TikTok posts (@jesszafarris) and blog (uselessetymology.com), where she shares similar content.]

*  *  *  *
EXAMPLES OF ENGLISH FOSSIL WORDS

champing

Phrase: champing at the bit (excited for something)

Definition: This is just a variation of “chomping.” Often, people will in fact say “chomping at the bit” instead, but this is considered an eggcorn, which is a language mistake often caused because someone has heard an idiom incorrectly.

vim

Phrase: vim and vigor (full of life)

Definition: Energy, excitement. But you’d never say someone is full of just “vim.”

kith

Phrase: kith and kin (friends and family)

Definition: a person’s friends, acquaintances and basically anyone you know who isn’t covered by “kin.” Kith has also found a second life as the name of a retail establishment.

[Established in 2011 in New York City, Kith (sometimes stylized as KITH) is a lifestyle brand and specialty retailer that offers seasonal collections of men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel, accessories, and footwear. It now has outlets all over New York, the U.S., and the world.]

loggerheads

Phrase: at loggerheads (in a heated, dead-locked dispute)

Definition: a foolish person. Today, the word only survives as the name of a certain breed of turtle, a certain breed of bird and a few locations in England. It’s not entirely clear how “at loggerheads” started referring to two people having a disagreement.

deserts

Phrase: just deserts (to get what one deserves)

Definition: what one deserves. Sometimes — but rarely — someone will refer to “deserts” without the “just,” yet they’re almost always a pairing. The fact that “deserts” (the comeuppance) is pronounced differently from “deserts” (the biome) leads many people to mistake it for “just desserts.”

wedlock

Phrase: out of wedlock (in a state of not being married)

Definition: in a state of being married. This word fell out of fashion because it’s simple enough to say that someone is married or not. But the euphemistic phrase “a child born out of wedlock” (which is still frowned upon in many parts of the world) has kept this word alive.

knell

Phrase: death knell (a sign of the end of something)

Definition: the sound of a funerary bell. Historically, people would literally ring a bell to alert the world that someone has died. Sometimes this was called a “passing bell” or a “death bell.” This isn’t a particularly common practice anymore, but it lives on in this idiom.

dudgeon

Phrase: in high dudgeon (enraged)

Definition: a state of indignation. No one seems to be in low dudgeon anymore, though.

hither

Phrase: hither and thither (all over the place), hither and yon (in disparate directions), come hither (come here, usually seductively)

Definition: toward this place. “Hither” is one of the rare fossil words that has survived in multiple different phrases. In most other contexts, “hither” is pretty easily replaced by “here,” which is similar but not the same. “Here” refers to an exact location, but “hither” refers to a direction toward an exact location.

petard

Phrase: hoist by their own petard (to be destroyed by your own weapon)

Definition: a small bomb. “Hoist” also isn’t particularly common, and it means “to be raised” (usually by pulleys, but sometimes by a petard). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the works of William Shakespeare are the source of a number of idioms that hold fossil words. The phrase “hoist with his own petard” was originally used in a speech in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 4).

[The original spelling of Shakespeare’s line was “hoist with his own petar” (no d).  This may have something to do with the etymology of the word, which is derived from the French word péter, which means ‘to fart.’ It’s a reference to the noise the small bomb makes when it explodes.]

ken

Phrase: beyond one’s ken (outside of one’s knowledge)

Definition: a person’s knowledge. While this word is not very common in English, you’ll find it in Scots as a verb meaning “to know.”

amok: from the Malay word amuk; often seen in the phrase “run amok,” ‘to run about with or as if with a frenzied desire to kill.’ Hard to be amok without running.

ruth: ‘pity’ or ‘compassion’; used in “ruthless,” meaning ‘lacking compassion.’

wreak: ‘to inflict or execute’ (punishment, vengeance, etc.); primarily used in “wreak havoc,” ‘to cause considerable confusion, disorder, or damage.’ Hard to wreak without havoc.

asunder: ‘into separate parts; in or into pieces’; as in “torn asunder,” meaning ‘to be pulled or ripped violently into separate pieces’

bandy: really two words: meaning 1: ‘to pass from one to another or back and forth’; ‘give and take’; ‘trade’; ‘exchange’ as in “bandy about”; meaning 2: from a Scots word, bandy, meaning ‘bowed’ or ‘curved outward,’ “bandy-legged” means ‘bowlegged’

beck: from Middle English bekken meaning ‘to signify’; ‘beckon,’ ‘beck’ means ‘a gesture used to signal, summon, or direct someone’ and appears in the expression “at one’s beck and call”; the verb form “beckon” is still common in non-idiom-specific use

betide: ‘to happen to’; ‘come to’; ‘befall’; as in “woe betide you/us/them”

eke: from Middle English eke (‘to add to,’ ‘augment’; ‘to increase’); used in “eke out,” meaning ‘to obtain with difficulty or effort’

fettle: as in “in fine fettle”; the verb, ‘to fettle,’ originally meant ‘to put things in order,’ ‘tidy up,’ ‘arrange,’ or ‘prepare,’ so to be in fine fettle means to be 'in excellent health, spirits, or condition,'  The original verb remains in specialized use in metal casting ('to remove sand from a casting'; 'to repair the hearth of an open-hearth furnace').

helter skelter: 'in a haphazard manner'; 'without regard for order,' as in “scattered helter-skelter about the office”; Middle English skelten, ‘to hasten’

madding: ‘’making mad’; ‘maddening’ as in “far from the madding crowd”

math: from Middle English, ‘a mowing’; ‘aftermath’: what comes after the mowing, usually of strongly negative connotation, implying a preceding catastrophe

scot: in Middle English, a local tax, originally paid to the lord or ruler and later to a sheriff; historically in Britain, “scot free” meant “exempt from royal tax or imposts.”  By extension, it later came to mean “without consequences or penalties” or “free without payment.”

sleight: an artful trick; sly artifice; a feat so dexterous that the manner of performance escapes observation; the phrase “sleight of hand” refers to the skill in feats requiring quick and clever movements of the hands, especially for entertainment or deception.

shrive: “To hear or receive a confession”; preserved only in inflected forms occurring only as part of fixed phrases: ‘shrift’ in “short shrift,” meaning “to give little and unsympathetic attention to,” and ‘shrove’ in “Shrove Tuesday,” the final day of Shrovetide, which marks the end of the pre-Lenten season; it’s observed in many Christian countries through participating in confession, the ritual burning of the previous year’s Holy Week palms, and finalizing one's Lenten sacrifice

wend: as in “wend your way,” meaning “to proceed on your way,” although its former past tense “went” is still in use as the past tense of “to go”

yore: “time long past,” as in “of yore,” usually (but not exclusively) “days of yore”

[To fill the list out, I added some fossil words from posts from Babbel. Reddit, and Wikipedia.

[I have several other posts on ROT that cover words and etymologies (e.g.: “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations” [4 July 2010]), as well numerous posts on writing.]

Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations

*

BLOOMERS

Most people know that bloomers were long, baggy pants which narrowed to a tight cuff at the ankles. They were worn beneath a skirt to preserve a woman’s Victorian decency. Some people may even know that the name comes from Amelia Bloomer (1818-94). Amelia Jenk Bloomer didn’t actually invent the garment, which dates back to the early 1850s. Originally, they weren’t very popular except among early feminist reformers. Newspapers used the term ‘bloomers’ as an insult, in fact. Amelia Bloomer, a women’s rights advocate and temperance campaigner, promoted the wearing of the garment that came to bear her name. In the 1850s, Bloomer began publishing her views in a newspaper she started, The Lily, to which Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the renowned suffragist, later contributed as well. In Lily, Bloomer advocated a change in women’s dress to less restrictive standards. When activist Elizabeth Smith (“Libby”) Miller invented the loose trousers bound at the ankles, intended to permit women be more active, it was publicly adopted by Fanny Kemble, the great actress (much, I imagine, as Kate Hepburn made pants for women acceptable and chic). Elizabeth Cady Stanton was Miller’s cousin, and when the costume’s inventor wore the trousers on a visit to Stanton, the suffragist adopted them as well. Stanton in turn visited Bloomer in the costume, and Bloomer began promoting the new garment in her newspaper. Bloomers, as they began to be called, didn’t meet with great success either in the press or on the street. Women wearing them were ridiculed and teased mercilessly and Amelia Bloomer abandoned the costume in 1858 for the newly introduced crinoline, which she felt performed the same service for women as bloomers. Amelia Bloomer went on to campaign for women’s suffrage and dress reform; though less well-known than Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (who also wrote for The Lily), she’s counted among women’s rights’ leading voices. The original bloomers didn’t last long in popularity, but they were revived in a shorter version, fastened just above or below the knee, which became popular in the 1910s and ‘20s.

BLUETOOTH

The term Bluetooth for the technology for exchanging data among different devices has an odd derivation. It’s an anglicized version of the Danish Blåtand, the nickname of the 10th-century King Harald I of Denmark (c. 936-85/86) who united contentious Danish tribes into one kingdom. The implication of the current usage is that Bluetooth technology does the same with communications devices, joining them to one common standard.

CARAN D’ACHE

When I was a high school student in Geneva, we used pens, pencils, and artists’ supplies from a company called Caran d’Ache. Founded in 1924, the company took its name from the nom de plume of the French satirist and political cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré (1858-1909). Poiré, born in Moscow (his grandfather had been an officer in Napoleon’s army who, having been wounded in the Battle of Borodino, remained in Russia), adopted the pseudonym because, appropriately for the writing-instrument company, it’s a phony-French transliteration (it has no meaning in French at all) of the Russian word karandash—which means ‘pencil’!

FLUSH TOILET

It is a frequently told account that the modern flush toilet, one of the most useful conveniences of technical advancement, was invented by a man felicitously named Thomas Crapper. Contrary to popular belief, the device was not invented by Thomas P. Crapper (1836-1910). In fact, the flush toilet has origins back as far as pre-history. Even the modern device has been around since as early as the 18th century. What Crapper did do, though, was invent many improvements for the toilet he produced at his company, Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd., of London. Crapper was a plumber, appropriately enough, and started his business in 1866. In the 1880s, Crapper & Co. began manufacturing a valveless toilet based on a 1819 design of Alfred Giblin. The company received a royal warrant and the name Crapper became synonymous with toilets. Isn’t that a wonderful legacy? (Believe it or not, the similarity to a vulgar colloquialism is a coincidence. The vulgarism crap dates back to Middle English and is related to the Dutch word krappe. Word!)

FOO FIGHTERS

To most people today, Foo Fighters is the name of a ‘90s rock group. How may of us know the original use of the phrase, which dates back to World War II—and a mysterious phenomenon? The band took its name from the term ‘foo fighter’ that was used by Allied pilots in WWII to describe various UFO’s or mysterious mid-air occurrences seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operations. In 1945, Time magazine carried a story called "Foo-Fighter" in which it reported that "balls of fire" had been following Army Air Force night fighters. The pilots had named them "foo-fighters," using a corruption of the French feu (‘fire’) for the name. (There had apparently been earlier reports from French pilots in Indo-China.) According to Time, the pilots reported that the mysterious lights followed their planes closely at high speed. In other reports, from the Pacific, the "ball of fire" resembled a large burning sphere which "just hung in the sky," though it, too, sometimes followed the airplanes. In all the reported cases, however, no aircraft was alleged to have been attacked by a "ball of fire." Various explanations were offered for the sightings, but the point here is that the term reaches back to a history unrelated to the rock band or its music.

FRESNEL LENS

The Fresnel lens was originally developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1828) for lighthouses. It was first used in 1823, but has since survived as a common lighting instrument in theaters. The lens has a unique appearance because the curved face has been cut back to form a stepped appearance. This was inspired to prevent the cracking to which thicker, curved lenses were prone due to the high heat generated for the bright light of a spotlight (for both stage and lighthouse application). The effect of the step lens is twofold, however. In addition to the resistance to cracking during use, the Fresnel spotlight has the desirable attribute of not having a hotspot in the center, a characteristic of other types of spotlights (such as the ellipsoidal spotlight, often called a leko). The unusual aspect of the story of the Fresnel spot is not its original invention or its use in theaters, but how it came to be adapted for another purpose in between those two uses. During World War II, when aircraft carriers were becoming an important element in naval warfare, especially in the Pacific, naval strategists began noticing a threatening phenomenon. During night landings, too many pilots were being blinded by the lights illuminating the flight deck and crashing, costing lost lives and vital aircraft. They set naval engineers, among them a close family friend who when I was growing up was like a second father to me and my brother, began searching for a solution to this serious and fatal problem. They came up with an adaptation of the Fresnel spotlight (which had not yet become common in theaters). Lighting the flight deck with this lens allowed the bright illumination that the pilots needed to see the ends of the carrier decks but eliminated the hot spot that blinded them as they came in to land. Once the carriers were fitted with the new lights, crashes from light-blinded pilots virtually ceased and the important weapon of the Pacific war went on to help defeat the forces of the Empire of Japan. (It was in part the success of the naval application of the Fresnel, its lack of a hotspot, that brought the instrument to the attention of stage lighting designers and technicians and it was once again adapted for a new, more peaceful use.)

FRISBEE

A frisbee, as almost everyone knows, is a plastic disk-shaped toy that players throw and catch. This trademark (for Wham-O, now generic) sometimes occurs in print meaning “a throw-and-catch game played with this toy.” The disk itself predates the patent by several decades, but when the toy was sold to Wham-O in 1957, the name Frisbee was attached to it, and the toy became a phenomenal success. Many games have been devised for the frisbee, including frisbee football. It was named after the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, originally owned by William Russell Frisbie, because the first frisbees were created by fastening two pie plates together, bottom side out, to make the aerodynamic flying-saucer shape.

GERRYMANDER

The verb ‘to gerrymander’ means to divide (a geographic area) into voting districts so as to give unfair advantage to one party in elections. The noun means an act, process, or an instance of gerrymandering, or a district or configuration of districts differing widely in size or population because of gerrymandering. The word was formed from the name of Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) plus [sala]mander (from the shape of an election district created while Gerry was governor of Massachusetts). The term, coined by a reporter, first appeared in the Boston Centinel in 1812. Curiously, though the word gerrymander is pronounced with a soft g as in gin (jerri-), the Massachusetts governor’s name was pronounced with a hard g as in go (gherri).

GREEN ROOM

The green room is the space near the stage of a theater (or, nowadays, sometimes a TV studio) where actors can wait for their entrances or relax after their exits. The designation occurs as far back as the mid-17th century, though it only exists in English; no other language uses the color green in its name for the actors’ waiting area. (It is also the term for the director’s critique session after a performance or rehearsal because those sessions are often conducted in the green room. (Even theaters without an actual green room use the term, though the waiting area might be just a corner of the wing or backstage area and the director’s green-room session might be held on stage or in the auditorium.) The most common explanation for the name is that the space was originally painted or carpeted in green. There are, however, other derivations for the name, some of them clearly apocryphal. One that I heard back when I was in college asserts that the name was given to the space because the first theater person to use it for the now-common purpose was named “Mr. Green.” I’ve never found any source for this etymology, even as a rumor.

KNICKERBOCKER

Because I recently did some reading about Washington Irving, I got curious about the name Knickerbocker. I wondered if the name used as a nickname for New Yorkers, especially those of Dutch origins, came from the name for the pants or if there was a family name from which it derived, or if it meant something in Dutch. It turns out that it's entirely made up. Irving popularized it as a nickname for people and things New York, but he took it from a friend named Herman Knickerbocker. Herman Knickerbocker, in turn, was descended from an early Dutch settler in New Amsterdam, but that man made the name up when he arrived here. As far as I can tell, it was never a real name until then and it may not even have an etymological meaning in Dutch. (I didn't find one.) The pants were named after the Irving character so that use doesn't date any further back than the mid-19th cent. (The German for the knee-pants we call knickerbockers or knickers is Kniebundhosen, literally 'knee-bound trousers.' I don't know what the Dutch word for them is.) Virtually everything in New York that used or uses the name Knickerbocker, including the basketball team, owes the use to Irving; he invented the entire "tradition" out of whole cloth: it has no actual historical provenance! (In fact, Irving popularized the name through a kind of hoax: he created an imaginary missing person named "Diedrich Knickerbocker," which eventually became one of his frequent pseudonyms, in one of his newspaper columns and kept the story going until it went viral—as we'd say today.)

LUDDITE

A Luddite (or luddite) is a member of a group of British workers who between 1811 and 1816 rioted and destroyed labor-saving textile machinery in the belief that such machinery would diminish employment. It now means anyone who opposes technical or technological change. The word was formed from the name of Ned Ludd, a possibly fictional English laborer who was supposed to have destroyed weaving machinery around 1779.

MAVERICK

A maverick is an unbranded range animal, especially a calf that has become separated from its mother, traditionally considered the property of the first person who brands it. It has come to mean someone who refuses to abide by the dictates of or resists adherence to a group; a dissenter (as famously made a campaign attribute of Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, in the 2008 election). The word was most likely coined from the name of Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-70), a Texas cattleman, lawyer, and politician. Various accounts of the origins of the term held that Maverick came to be considered independently minded by his fellow ranchers because he refused to brand his cattle (though his reasons for not doing so may have been unconnected to any independent-mindedness). Born in South Carolina, Maverick moved to Texas and settled in San Antonio in 1835, the year Texas declared independence from Mexico. Maverick was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, was elected mayor of San Antonio, served in the House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas and the Texas State Legislature after statehood. (Descendants of the Maverick family objected to the use of the label by the Republican ticket in 2008 on the grounds that Sen. McCain wasn’t a true maverick.)

MONDEGREEN

A mondegreen is a misheard song lyric (or other phrase) where the words are misinterpreted to have an entirely different meaning than originally intended. Some examples are: “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear” (“Gladly the Cross I’d Bear,” from the hymn of that title). “A girl with colitis goes by” (“A girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” from Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds by the Beatles). “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” (“Excuse me while I kiss the sky,” from Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix). “Who knows what evil lurks in the hot cement” (“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” the catchphrase for the radio show The Shadow). The term was coined in Harper’s magazine in November 1954 by writer Sylvia Wright who took the name ‘mondegreen’ from her childhood misconstruction of a phrase in the ballad "The Bonnie Earl O’Moray": Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen. The correct line reads: They have slain the Earl of Moray / And laid him on the green.

MURPHY'S LAW

Murphy’s Law is the humorous axiom which states that anything that can possibly go wrong, will go wrong. Though the “law” goes back many decades before World War II, it was later named after Captain Ed Murphy (1918-90), an aircraft engineer and Air Force officer, who in 1949 said of a technician, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he will."

THE OSCAR

The Oscar is, of course, the golden statuette awarded annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for achievement in movies. The statuette was named after Oscar Pierce, a Texas rancher. The Academy was founded in Hollywood in 1927, the same year it began giving the awards for “outstanding performance in the various fields of the motion picture industry.” For the first four years it was given out, the statuette had no name. But in 1931, when Margaret Herrick, later the secretary of the Academy, first saw the golden figure, she remarked that it “reminds me of my Uncle Oscar,” who apparently had no connection with, or interest in, the cinema. A newspaper columnist overheard Herrick’s remark and wrote in his next column, “Employees have affectionately dubbed their famous statuette ‘Oscar.’” (Pretty much everyone knows that the Tony Award is named after Antoinette Perry, 1888-1946, an actress, director, producer, and theater activist. The Obie is simply short for ‘Off-Broadway”; the name of the Emmy Award is a feminization of "immy," the slang name of the image orthicon tube, a component of early TV cameras. The names of the other well-known awards are pretty obvious, I think.)

PAPARAZZI

A paparazzo (it’s usually plural, however) is a freelance photographer who doggedly pursues celebrities to take candid pictures for sale to magazines and newspapers. The word is derived from the name of the character Signor Paparazzo, a press photographer who would go to great lengths to take pictures of American movie stars in La Dolce Vita (1960), a movie by Federico Fellini (1920-1994). (Why Fellini chose the name Paparazzo for his character is in dispute, but it’s interesting to note that it is a real surname in Italy.)

PUMPERNICKEL

This one’s probably apocryphal. It’s certainly “folk derivation,” but it’s fun to contemplate. During one of the 19th-century incursions of Napoleon’s forces into Germany, the general was served a dark, coarse bread that was native to the region where he was stopping. “What’s this?” inquired the Frenchman, turning his nose up at the peasant food he was being offered. “C’est pas bon pour moi,” he declared. “C’est bon pour Nicole!” Nicole was the name of the general’s horse. The local Germans, ever ready to please their conqueror, named the bread pumpernickel in his honor. [Dictionaries and encyclopedias provide a much more prosaic etymology for the bread’s name. Readers can look it up for themselves and make their own choices.]

SIDEBURNS

Sideburns are growths of hair down the sides of a man’s face in front of the ears, especially when worn with the rest of the beard shaved off. (Very long sideburns which extend all the way to the corners of the mouth are called muttonchops for their resemblance to that cut of meat.) The facial-hair style was named for Ambrose Everett Burnside (1824-81), an American general and politician known more for his side-whiskers than for his career in the Union Army, which included defeats at Fredericksburg (1862) and Petersburg (1864). (In the 1860s, beards were so much the fashion for men that there had at one time been a standing order for military officers to wear them. Back in the 1960s, when the 100th anniversary of the Civil War was a frequent topic of articles and books, I remember a speculation someone published that the success of a Civil War general was directly proportionate to the amount of facial hair he wore. The bigger and more elaborate the general’s beard, the more successful he was in the field. Burnside, with only a mustache and side-whiskers, was a spectacularly ineffective field commander! For the record, Ulysses S. Grant had a bigger beard than Robert E. Lee.)

SCUTTLEBUTT

‘Scuttlebutt’ is the nautical slang word for gossip or rumor. It’s seeped into more general use so that we can occasionally hear landlubbers with no connection to the sea use it. But how many of us know where the term comes from? Here’s the explanation: The slang use is related to the more common civilian expression ‘the water cooler’ because the scuttlebutt was the barrel on the deck of an 18th- or 19th-century sailing ship from which the sailors drank water. The ‘butt’ is the barrel or cask. (Remember that in Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, when he was still Duke of Gloucester, had his brother George, Duke of Clarence, drowned in a malmsey butt—a cask of wine.) A scuttle is a small hatch or opening; in this case, it's the hole used to ladle out the water. (When sailors want to scuttle a ship—sink it deliberately—they open all the hatches and drill additional holes to let the water in.) The sailors gathered around the water barrel for a break in their work and exchanged the day’s gossip—just as office workers today gather around the water cooler to the same effect.

SPATS

Anyone who’s studied costume—or has a thing for turn-of-the-20th-century clothing styles—probably knows what spats are. They were a fabric shoe accessory covering the instep and ankle of men’s footwear at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. (Movie buffs will remember that the character played by George Raft in 1959’s Some Like It Hot was called “Spats” Colombo because he sported the shoe covering.) Some marching bands still use spats as part of their uniforms. But does anyone know where the name comes from? It’s short for ‘spatter-dashers’—because their original intent was to protect expensive and hard-to-clean leather shoes from getting splashed with mud and manure from the horse and carriage traffic in the unpaved streets of the cities.

LE VASISTAS

Un vasistas is the French word for a transom window. The way I heard it, it’s a common element in Alsatian houses but wasn’t known in Germany at the time of one of the periodic transfers of that territory from French control to German. A German occupier, pointing up at the unfamiliar window on an Alsatian home, inquired, “Was ist das?” (What’s that?). The Frenchman whom he’d asked, not understanding the question, thought the German was telling him the word for the window in German. So the French adopted the “German name” for the architectural element, calling it le vasistas.

VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT

Theater students are familiar with Verfremdungseffekt as the German term coined by Bertolt Brecht to describe his various techniques for making the familiar seem new and strange to his audiences. Though the word, which Brecht made up, is frequently translated as ‘alienation effect,’ that’s really a misleading expression. Brecht never wanted to alienate the audience in the sense of making them unfriendly or hostile. What he wanted was to let the spectators see old ideas and images as if they were new and unfamiliar, to de-familiarize what they were seeing so they would actively contemplate it anew, with a fresh perspective. In German, the verb that means ‘to estrange’ is entfremden. (The adjective fremd means ‘strange’ or ‘foreign.’) The verb for ‘to alienate’ is befremden. Verfremden is a word that doesn’t really exist, except in Brecht’s specific usage. Ver- is a prefix that sometimes means ‘to become . . . ,’ especially when affixed to an adjective. (Alt means ‘old'; veralten means ‘to become obsolete’—literally ‘to become old.’ Ander means ‘other’ or ‘different’; verändern means ‘to become different’—or ‘to change.’) So, verfremden (-ung is the German gerund suffix) would mean ‘to become strange’ or ‘to become unfamiliar.’ But all that’s less interesting than where Brecht got the term in the first place. He didn’t actually invent either the word (he coined the German translation) or the concept. Russian playwright Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1939) introduced Brecht to the concept of priëm ostranneniya, literally, ‘device’ or ‘method for making strange,’ a phrase coined in 1914 by Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) which Brecht rendered into German.

VOKZAL

Some of you may know that the Russian word for a railroad station is vokzal. (Two Russian flicks: Belorusskiy vokzal, 1979: “Byelorussian railway station”; Vokzal dlya dvoikh, 1982: A Railway Station for Two.) The derivation of the word, as explained to me by my Russian teachers in the army, was that when the emissary of Tsar Nicholas I was traveling in Europe to gather ideas for the country’s new rail system, he visited Britain. The imperial representative’s train stopped at Vauxhall and the man saw the large sign along the platform with the word ‘Vauxhall.’ He assumed that this was the English word for ‘railroad station’ and adopted it for the Russian system. (The Russian language has always liberally borrowed words from other languages, especially German, French, and English.) If you pronounce ‘Vauxhall’ in Russian, you get vokzal, but I’ve always wondered if there isn’t another, equally plausible (or maybe more so) explanation. The German word for the waiting room of a railway terminal is Volksaal (‘people’s hall’) which, like Vauxhall, comes out vokzal in Russian. (Normally I’d go with the explanation of the experts—my Russian teachers were all native speakers born in Russia—but in this case, I have to wonder if my etymology isn’t as valid as theirs. You be the judge.)