Made In America - Bill Bryson [47]
In addition, there were scores more that have since fallen out of use: ground and lofty (once a very common synonym for fine and dandy), happify, to missionate, to consociate (that is, to come together in an assembly), dunderment (bewilderment), puckerstoppled (to be embarrassed), from Dan to Beersheba. This last, alluding to the northernmost and southernmost outposts of the Holy Land, was in daily use for at least two hundred years as a synonym for wide-ranging, from A to Z, but dropped from view in the nineteenth century and hasn’t been seen much since.
Sometimes the meaning of nineteenth-century neologisms is self-evident, as with to move like greased lightning or to have a close shave. To go haywire evidently alludes to the lacerating effect of that material once a tightly wound bale is loosed, and to talk turkey may owe something to a once popular story about an Indian and frontiersman who often went hunting together. According to this tale, each time they came to divide the kill, the frontiersman would say, ‘You may take the buzzard and I will take the turkey, or if you prefer I will take the turkey and you may take the buzzard.’ After several such episodes, the Indian interrupts the frontiersman and says, ‘But when do I get to talk turkey?’ or words to that effect. The story is of course apocryphal, but it was widely told as a joke and thus perhaps is responsible for the popularity of the phrase.
More often, however, we are left with words and phrases that seem to have sprung from nowhere and that do not mean anything in particular – even steven, fit as a fiddle, easy as a lead pipe cinch, to take a powder, to peter out, to paint the town red, to talk through one’s hat, to josh, to root hog or die. Explanations are frequently posited but all too often on unpersuasively flimsy evidence. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that josh may be connected to the humorist Josh Billings, but in fact the term was current at least as early as 1845 and Josh Billings was unknown outside his neighbourhood until 1860. To face the music, first recorded in a publication called the Worcester Spy, may allude to a soldier being drummed out of service or possibly it may have some theatrical connection, perhaps to a nervous performer having to face the audience across the orchestra pit. No one knows. The mild expletives doggone and doggone it both date from the early nineteenth century, though no one has any idea what they meant. The mystery deepens when you realize that the first recorded citation has it as ‘dog on’t’, reminiscent of the earlier ‘a pox on’t’ and other like formations.
Phoney has been linked to any number of possibilities, from the Gaelic for ring (fauney or fawney; the explanation being that a street vendor known as a fauney dropper would show the gullible purchaser a ring of genuine quality, then slip him a cheap fauney) to an unscrupulous businessman named Forney. Ballyhoo, blizzard, hunky dory, shanty, conniption fit (at first also spelled caniption or kniption), bogus, bamboozle and many