Snake Oil

Once upon a time there were bottles of snake oil. Now, it exists only in a figurative sense.

Historically, snake oil came to America via the Chinese laborers who were building the transcontinental railroad. For them, snake oil was a traditional folk liniment used to treat joint and muscle pain that actually had a connection to snakes (venom).

Rival American "medicine" salesmen used the term generically for things marketed as miraculous remedies whose ingredients were usually secret, and it was definitely a negative term.

Some of that snake oil and those other "medicines" were effective, though it might have been a placebo effect. But that's true of many modern quick cures too.

Shoot the Moon

"Shoot the moon" is an English idiom. A hundred years ago, it was similar to the phrases "bolt the moon" or "a moonlight flit" or even the older "shove the moon" which are now obsolete. It meant to remove one’s household goods by "the light of the moon" in order to avoid paying the rent or to avoid one’s creditors. This British expression also applied to other stealthy departures or a related action to sneak, abscond, take flight without meeting one’s responsibilities.

Today, when someone says that someone will "shoot the moon" is to go for everything or nothing. It is similar to the phrases "to go for broke,""to go whole hog," and "to pull out all stops." In all cases, one would take a great risk.

The idiom suggests that there is as much of a chance of success as there is shooting (a bullet, arrow etc.) and hitting the Moon.

 the moon with a arrow or rifle bullet – set one’s sights high and trying for something that one wants badly, but for which realistically the probability of success is not good.

"Shoot the moon"comes from the card game ‘hearts.’ Hearts is a point-based game and most of the time the goal is to acquire the least number of hearts possible. But if you choose to risk shooting the moon and wins all the hearts and the queen of spades in the course of play, you can deliver a crushing blow to their opponents. However, if this move fails, you put yourself in an almost irrecoverable position.

I'm not a card player and I came upon the term through a 1982 movie Shoot the Moon starring Albert Finney and Diane Keaton.It's a good but depressing film about a marriage falling apart. The director, Alan Parker, is British and the film's writer, Bo Goldman, is American, so I'm not sure if the old British or modern definition applies to the film. The husband would like to skip out on his marriage. Is it about a time in the marriage when it's "all or nothing?"  Unclear to me.

What Are We Commencing at Commencement?

Why do we call a graduation ceremony “commencement” when commence means "to begin" and the event marks the end of college?

Someone asked "Grammar Girl", Mignon Fogarty, that question and she gave two possible, but somewhat unsatisfying, answers.

One explanation is in the "every end is a beginning" category - commencement marks the beginning of a student's new professional/adult life.

The other explanation goes back to those medieval universities when a student entered as an "apprentice" and at the end of that apprenticeship could officially commence in a profession as a master or doctor.

She references The Founding of Harvard College that says that a person needed a license to lecture/teach and that entry into this masters of arts guild included a ceremony called commencement (Latin inceptio which is where we get "inception").

People - well, some people - do like to argue about word origins and this page suggests a theory that it had to do with your dinner seating.

I'll tell you why graduation is called Commencement (and no, it's not because it's the beginning of your "real life"). In the large halls where students and faculty ate, the faculty used to eat at table on a raised platform at one end of the long line of tables at which the students sat. When the students finished their course of study and graduated, they became fully-fledged members of the University and equals of the faculty. Consequently, at the grand banquet with which they celebrated their graduation, faculty and former students (both the newly-graduated and alumni) ate together as equals. They shared tables, or, in the Latin of the time, they ate at a commensa, a common table for all. This is why, not so long ago, Commencement and Reunion took place at the same time and why the University Dinner was the high point of the graduation events.

That also sounds farfetched and commenters seem to feel that lacking more evidence we should go with the tradition of the inceptio ceremony of initiation for the new scholars into the fellowship of university teachers in medieval Europe.

Now, when did tossing your graduation cap come about and why is it called a mortar board?  That's another post to come...

Chapters

We have all read books with chapters and probably not given any thought to the word or the origin of the word and the practice of dividing up a text. It has been used for over two millennia. Cato the Elder’s “De Agri Cultura” (“On Farming”), from the second century B.C.E., was organized in numbered units with titles.

A piece in The New Yorker brought the word and origin to my attention through the story of a historian and scriptural scholar dying in a monastery in 735 AD.

In that English monastery, known as Jarrow, that scholar, known as the Venerable Bede, was dying. With only his young scribe, Wilbert, to help him, he was determined to complete his Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospel of John. Bede worked in the most important scriptorium of his era.

The scribe told Bede that “one chapter still remained” and Bede, knowing he was close to finishing, dictated the remaining words and then died.

The Latin word Wilbert used in telling his master that only a portion remained was capitulum. Bede's work was to produce capitula which were divisions of scriptural texts with the inclusion of headings or summaries.

The word went into many languages: Spanish capítulo, French chapitre, Czech kapitola, German Kapitel, Romanian capitol, Italian capitolo,and eventually the English chapter.

Once the concept was accepted and expected, texts such as the Biblical Gospels needed divisions in their previously continuous text.

An elaborate system of small sections cross-indexed among the different Gospels was used well into the Middle Ages, but it was hardly easy to use. There were over 300 sections in Matthew and Luke each. And deciding where to divide turned out to be also a kind of editorial  interpretation.

From this we get the phrase "chapter and verse," meaning an exact reference or authority, as in "She can give chapter and verse on current legislation." Though used for many things that have no connection to the Bible, this usage is based on the idea that proof of an idea can be found in the Bible, and cited by its chapter and verse.

A story from the 13th century, perhaps apocryphal, credits a an English member of the theological faculty, Stephen Langton, with trying to create a simpler chaptering of the student Bible with fewer divisions of a more consistent size. These "Langton chapters" gave the Bible a more narrative style.

Some editors, such as the printer William Caxton in 1485, divided texts like Thomas Malory’s King Arthur tales, “Morte d’Arthur,” into chapters.

The novelist Henry Fielding  (Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews compared "those little Spaces between our Chapters” as being like “an Inn or Resting-Place, where he may stop and take a Glass, or any other Refreshment, as it pleases him.” The titles for the chapter were then comparable to the inscriptions over the inn's door telling us what we would find inside.

Today we just expect chapters to break up our reading in fiction and non-fiction.

Some chapters have become phrases in themselves. Most people who are not trained in the law are still aware that "Chapter 7" means bankruptcy and that "Chapter 11" is the section of the code that gives a company protection from creditors for a limited period to allow it to reorganize.


We also use "chapter" figuratively, as in "starting a new chapter in her life."

Gumshoe Detectives and Galoshes

You may have heard the term "gumshoe" became a nickname for a detective, particularly a private, rather than police department, detective or a "plainclothes" officer.

The word existed before its slang usage. Originally, gumshoe referred to a shoe with a rubber sole. Though it might refer to rain boots or galoshes (more on that later), in this context it refers to what we would call today sneakers. A gumshoe would be a private detective in the sense that a rubber-soled shoe would give the wearer the ability to walk stealthily.

At the turn of the century 20th century,  "to gumshoe" meant to sneak around quietly as if wearing gumshoes. It could be to rob or, conversely, to catch thieves.

Apparently, a "gumshoe man" was originally slang for a thief, but then around 1908 "gumshoe" seems to have meant a detective, as it has ever since. Some dictionaries list uses from 1908 as gum, gumfoot, gumboot, gumheel, gumshoe artist and gumshoer as also meaning a private detective.

That other gumshoe footwear, galoshes, is a word that comes through French and Latin from Greek and originally meant a shoemaker's last. This was the literal "wood" + "foot" that a shoemaker used to form the leather around as a form.

The original galoshes are not very similar to what you would be shown if you asked for them in a store today. They were once English style clogs with a wooden sole and fabric/leather) upper.  By 1572, the term also applied to "a Gallage or Patten" which was an overshoe with a shaped wooden base to raise the wearer's good shoes off the ground in wet weather. "Goloshes" appears to be the older spelling of galoshes used previously in Great Britain.

In modern usage, galoshes are outer shoes worn in inclement weather to protect the inner shoes and keep the feet dry and are almost universally made of rubber.

Some fashionable galoshes - via sharperliving.co.uk