I’ve always been interested in this quirky expression, which is used to describe someone who is very happy. The Phrase Finder explains “…that open clams give the appearance of smiling.” The full phrase is “…as happy as a clam at high water,” because high tide is when clams are apparently safest from predators. The expression is particularly popular in coastal areas of New England, but is used everywhere. The first citation found was in a frontier memoir dated 1833.
Category Archives: Expressions
Picnic Time
Summer is coming and it will soon be time for picnics. As reported by Word Detective and confirmed on NPR, “picnic” first appeared in English in 1748. It seems to have come from a French word “piquenique,” which appeared in 1692. This was a nonsense rhyming word and roughly meant to pick a trifle. The first picnics were what we today would call pot-luck dinners. Only in the mid-19th century did “picnic” come to mean a meal eaten outdoors. For wealthy Victorians, a picnic was hardly a “trifle”. They staged elaborate outdoor gourmet meals on tables set with linens and crystal; all tended by servants. My sense of today’s usage is that “picnics” carry prepared foods away from home, while “barbeques” include cooking and occur in the back yard.
An unpleasant rumor spread in the late 1990’s, confirmed by Word Detective and Snopes, that the word originated as a racist term related to lynchings. I wonder how a pleasant family-oriented “picnic” inspired such a rumor?
Stigma
A web site called “Breaking Stigma” explains that the word “…traces back to the late sixteenth century when they would mark people (with a visible brand or cuts) for certain crimes…” “A great representation of this kind of mark would be within the book, ‘The Scarlet Letter’.” Stigma is used in current language to indicate a person who is ostracized because of some behavior, crime, medical condition, or anything else that could cause disgrace or forced isolation from others.
Redneck
This is a term that creates a personal emotional response. I’ve heard it referred to describe “ignorant white farmers” who had their lower faces and necks burned red from exposure to the sun while working their fields. Many of my older relatives matched that description, but they were not ignorant. The “intellectuals” who characterized my relatives as “ignorant” would not have a clue how to plant and grow crops while they nourished themselves on food being produced by “rednecks.”
Regardless of my personal reactions, the term has become, according to Wikipedia, to be “…a derogatory slang term…” My relatives were poor, and they probably didn’t keep up with the literature read by “high society.”My observation is that they were hard working people who knew how to grow crops. That knowledge and skills kept the non-productive “intellectuals” from starving. Of course that didn’t stop high society from demeaning the people working in the fields.
Copycat
Slate gives a detailed explanation that the origin of this term did not come from “…someone who copies, like a cat, but a jerk prone to imitation.” The article gives references to writers, including Shakespeare, using versions of “copycat.” Constance Harrrison wrote in 1887, “Our boys say you are a copy cat, if you write in anything that’s been already printed.” The term evolved from the word cat being was used in medieval times as an insult based on the idea that cats “…were associated with all sorts of evil and mischief.”
Break the Ice
The Phrase Finder explains the expression means to “break down social formality and stiffness.” The original meaning was “to forge a path for others to follow” and refered to breaking ice to allow navigation. The expression had a resurgence with the development of special ships designed for exploration in the polar regions. Mark Twain wrote a version of the expression in 1883.