The Word Detective

Time 2020-07-26 06:07:49

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Search The Word Detective and our family of websites:This is the easiest way to find a column on a particular word or phrase.To search for a specific phrase, put it between quotation marks. (note: JavaScript must be turned on in your browser to view results.) Columns from 1995 to 2006 are slowly being added to the above archives. For the moment, they can best be found by using the Search box at the top of this column. If you would like to be notified when each monthly update is posted here, sign up for our free email notification list.   Trivia All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use. Any typos found are yours to keep.And remember, kids,Semper Ubi Sub Ubi TWD RSS feeds ColumnsComments September-October 2015 Issue Semper Ubi Sub Ubireadme:As observant readers will have noticed, this issue of TWD spans two months, rather than the usual one (although the most recent issue was also a two-monther, and a bit late to boot, as is this one). I apologize for the delay, but my MS has made my vision very unreliable lately, making getting anything done quite difficult. On a good day, my visual field resembles an old analog TV with bad reception: constant visual noise and fluctuating sharpness. On a bad day it s all that plus flashing lights at the edges and big patches of fog or (my fave) total blackness drifting across my field of view. My eye-hand coordination has also decreased to the point where I make constant typos even with my new two-finger hunt-and-peck. Continue reading this post Hackneyed So go to the source and ask the horse.Dear Word Detective: I recently made the mistake of reading a review of a TV show I watch every week, in which the reviewer mocked the show for what he called its hackneyed characters and plots. I inferred that what he meant by hackneyed was lame, which my show is absolutely not, but what exactly does hackneyed mean and where did it come from? Dan Gordon, LA. My show ? Awesome, dude. You are a True Viewer, not some channel-hopping dilettante. I, too, watch and love things the reviewers mock. Unfortunately, most of my shows get canceled in mid-season, which really isn t fair. Most recently, I was happily watching Allegiance on NBC, a show about a polymath CIA analyst who discovers that his parents (and sister!) are evil Russkie spies. It was an addictive (albeit deeply silly) show, but NBC pulled the plug after just five episodes. You can watch the rest of the season online, but it s really not the same. Hackneyed today is most often used to mean commonplace, overused, trite, banal, or cliched ( Most commentary on political web sites consists of hackneyed rants delivered to the bored faithful ), simply tired or worn out ( Bob s boss was growing weary of his hackneyed excuses ), or weary and cynical ( Many of the reporters at City Hall were hackneyed veterans who barely raised an eyebrow at the Mayor s resignation ).The initial meaning of hackneyed when it first appeared in English in 1767 was, however, simply for hire, and thereby hangs a tale or, more precisely, a horse s tail. Today London contains a borough called Hackney, a bustling urban neighborhood. But back in the 14th century, Hackney was a separate village surrounded by pastures ideal for grazing horses. The horses bred in Hackney were perfect for riding (called ambling horses as opposed to work or war horses), and the villagers developed a successful business renting them out. So successful was their rent-a-horse business, in fact, that soon any horse for hire became known as a hackney, and the term gradually spread throughout western Europe.From meaning a horse for hire, the term hackney eventually came to mean just about anything for hire, and low-wage servants and prostitutes were also known as hackneys in the 16th century. But the most important development in the word was the rise of the hackney coach, a horse-drawn coach that could be hired by anyone who could pay. These hackneys eventually evolved into the classic black London cab still known as a hackney. And that, folks, is why taxicab drivers in New York City are called hackies and their cabs are called hacks. By the mid-18th century, hackneyed had acquired both its boring, common and weary, jaded senses, most likely drawn from, respectively, the ubiquity of hackney coaches and the worn-out state of overworked carriage horses. The sense of hackney meaning simply for hire, plus a touch of trite, banal, gave us the hack writer who churns out uninspired prose ( hack work ), especially a journalist who habitually recycles hackneyed conventional wisdom. Slough of despond  The worst part was that the pigs seemed to find it amusing.Dear Word Detective: I recently happened to encounter a former coworker of mine waiting for a bus, and I asked him how he d been doing. He responded that he had been in a slough of despond for a month or two after he lost his job, but is now working again and feeling better. It would have been awkward to ask him what slough of despond means, but I gather it has something to do with depression. What say you? Cliff S.Funny you should ask. Just the other night I was taking an evening stroll down our rural road when I noticed one of the local honor students driving his daddy s giant pickup truck directly at me. I stepped off the side of the road, lost my footing, and landed, face down, in a damp drainage ditch. Directly downhill from a pig pen. A real pig pen, with real pigs. I m writing this, incidentally, in the shower, where I ve been since that night. I may come out in a week or two.This sad tale is relevant to your question because Christian, the protagonist in John Bunyan s 1678 allegorical epic Pilgrim s Progress, endures a similar mishap (sans the pickup truck, of course). In Christian s case, the locale is a fetid bog known as the Slough of Despond, into which he stumbles, and then sinks and becomes trapped, weighed down as he is by the several hundred pounds of his sins he s carrying in a rucksack. It s a long story, but he s rescued by a dude named Help and it all turns out OK in the end. The great thing about Pilgrim s Progress is that it s easy to keep the characters straight because they all have names (Obstinate, Pliable, Help, Evangelist, etc.) that describe their character or function in the story.The Slough of Despond in Bunyan s tale is a metaphor, of course, and Bunyan depicted the Slough as the repository of humanity s sins and moral failures ( the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run ). But many subsequent writers, from Emily Bronte to Somerset Maugham to John Steinbeck, have used Slough of Despond to mean either a prolonged state of extreme depression or a material state of dire poverty and suffering.The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines slough (which rhymes with cow ) as A piece of soft, miry, or muddy ground; especially a place or hole in a road or way filled with wet mud or mire and impassable by heavy vehicles, horses, etc. A mudhole, in other words. The OED draws a blank on the origin of the word, but suggest it may be rooted in the Scots word slunk, which means the same thing and is of equally obscure origin. This slough, by the way, is unrelated to the verb slough, pronounced sluff and meaning to throw off or shed like dead skin or simply get rid of, which comes from Germanic roots meaning peel. To despond, of course, means to lose heart, lose confidence, become without hope and despondent. It comes from the Latin despondere ( de, away, plus spondere, to promise), and originally meant to surrender, yield, (i.e., promise away ), but the sense today is of giving up hope. Thus a despondent person is seriously stuck in the mud and can only hope that helpful Help dude is on the way.

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The Word Detective answers reader questions about word and phrase origins, grammar, usage, and the history of the English language. Stories about cats, kittens, dogs, other unusual pets, country living and computer maintenance are also featured.

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