Category Archives: Miscellany

Off the Hook

Posted on by

I’ve noticed this expression has a new meaning lately.  Urban Dictionary notes it’s currently slang for something so new and fresh it is like the latest fashion right off the store’s shelf or hanger.  The meaning has expanded to anything cool or exciting.

Wiki.answers.com says the older meaning comes from fishing slang; if you’re on the hook you are caught, trapped, or obligated.  Off the hook means you escaped.  Phrase Finder has several definitions, including some no longer in use.  But I found no origin for the phrase.

What Strikes Your Fancy?

Posted on by

“Strike your fancy” is a phrase that is hard to pin down.  I did not find the exact phrase “strike your fancy.”

Word Detective says “‘fancy’ is, etymologically, the same word as ‘fantasy,’ simply in a shortened form…. Filtered through Latin and Old French, ‘fantasy’ first appeared in English in the 15th century… [When] the shortened form ‘fancy’ began to be considered a separate word in the 16th century, it took on this sense of ‘whimsical notion’… By the late 16th century, ‘fancy’ had specifically come to mean ‘taste, preference in matters of art or appearance.”  This made me think of the cat food brand “Fancy Feast.”

“Interestingly, the adjective ‘fancy-free’ originally, in the 16th century, meant ‘free from amorous entanglements,’ … but now it’s simply used to mean ‘carefree’.”  There may still be many people who would agree that love and worry go together.

Indian Giver

Posted on by

Pbs.org recently posted an article that included this:

[A] strange old phrase, “Indian giver.” Surely the phrase bespeaks a problem of cross-cultural understanding. The earliest record of this expression dates to Thomas Hutchinson’s 1764 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony where a footnote explains that an Indian gift “is … a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” We still use this, of course, and in an even broader sense, we call those friends “Indian givers” who are so uncivilized as to ask us to return the gifts they’ve given.

Word Detective agrees, though the site dates the phrase to the early 19th century.  The Phrase Finder cites 1765 for Hutchinson’s history.

Straightdope.com refers back to the PBS source and wanders into politics – Cecil is always fun.

The Best Way to Help the Poor

Posted on by

Here is a news item that makes sense to me.  “There’s a charity called GiveDirectly that just gives money to poor people in Kenya.  There are no strings attached.  People can spend the money on whatever they want, and they never have to pay it back.  The idea behind this is straight out of Econ 101:  Poor people know what they need, and if you give them money, they can buy it.”  I’ve seen similar sentiments in other places.  There is a saying:  “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.  Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”  GiveDirectly goes beyond that:  “Give a man [or woman] the money and he’ll decide to fish, or maybe to sell bait, repair boats, start a restaurant, or make fish-scale jewelry.” Continue reading →

Conspiracy Theory

Posted on by

I recently ran into an article about the origin of the term “conspiracy theory“.  A recent book has stated that “The term was… put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination”.
I didn’t find “conspiracy theory” on Word Detective, Phrase Finder, or World Wide Words. But the article’s author suggests a source I have not used: “you can actually push the date back even farther using a more recently developed tool, Google Books.” He presents a usage in 1870 from a debate over mistreatment of inmates at insane asylums. (There is another striking phrase within the quoted material: “sprinkle hells with rose-water.”)

Detroit May Be Blazing a Trail for Us All

Posted on by

Detroit has been in the news because of its looming bankruptcy. Certainly the flight of manufacturing from America’s Rust Belt, poor city management, and crime all contribute to its decline. But at the root of the city’s woes is a loss of population.
I wonder if Detroit is a window into the future. I have posted before about predictions that the total world population will top out and begin to decline within this century and maybe within a lifetime. One interesting article says “we are now exactly in the middle of perhaps the greatest demographic change in recorded history… It’s entirely possible that in little more than a generation world population will stop growing, and that our children will live to see a planet with many millions, maybe a billion, fewer people on it than there are now.” Continue reading →