A former newspaper reporter who has lived in Franklin for nearly 40 years, Marjorie is active in several Franklin and Hales Corners organizations.
The storm that blew through Franklin last week littered our yard with branches. Most of the time I feel blessed to live in the midst of stately oak trees, though in fall, knee-deep in leaves and rake in hand, I can understand why so many retired folk go condo hunting. Luckily, the storm wasn’t nearly as violent as the weathermen predicted. Cleaning up the aftermath, though, required much bending over to pick up sticks and branches. “There are more sticks here than you can shake a stick at!” I thought, amusing myself with this wordplay. And then immediately I started wondering where that phrase came from.
As soon as I came inside, I decided to check Google – or, as we commonly say these days – I “Googled” it. This time even Google couldn’t come up with a definitive answer, but it introduced me to an interesting website that promised to send me “a phrase a week” for free. I signed up. In the meantime, I checked out the origin of other phrases I use like, making something “from scratch” and “For crying out loud!” I’ll include abbreviated explanations of these three phrases at the end of this blog, but if you want to try some word sleuthing yourself, check out www.worldwidewords.org or www.phrases.org.uk.
“Did you ever Google yourself?” a Franklin friend, Gerry Galewski, asked as we were discussing this whole new world of blogging and Googling. I had, as a matter of fact, and I was amazed to find that Google had already discovered I was writing this blog for CNI NOW. I also learned there was another Marjorie Pagel, born Dec. 28, 1921, who later married Henry Schneiderjan. I didn’t learn much more about this woman who shares my name except that she was (and possibly still is) from somewhere in Texas and probably not related to me.
The English language has always been a living entity, changing through the years according to the way people use it. No matter how much language purists try to keep certain words out of the dictionary, it is impossible to dictate “rules” of usage. Editors of dictionaries and other reference books are constantly challenged to decide which new words (like “blog” and “wiki”) should be added to the newest editions and which words are just trendy. “Keeping Up With the Web’s New Lingo,” recently published in Business Week, discusses some of these challenges.
(See www.businessweek.com/techn/content/apr2007/tc20070412_788838.htm.)
A person has to be careful with all this information at our fingertips. There is, after all, the backyard to be tended to – I missed some of the sticks – and dinner to be made. Google and Wiki can’t be bothered with mundane tasks like those.
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More on word origins, as promised:
“Shake a stick at”: This phrase, prefaced with “more than” has come to mean “plenty” or “more than you can count” (like those sticks in our yard.) It was first recorded in August, 1818, in the Lancaster Journal of Pennsylvania: “We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at”. In 1835 Davy Crockett wrote in his Tour to the North and Down East, “This was a temperance house, and there was nothing to treat a friend that was worth shaking a stick at”.
“For crying out loud” is a “minced oath” – in other words, something people say when they feel like swearing but choose something less offensive. It’s a cousin to another minced oath, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Its first recorded use is 1924 by Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, a cartoonist who also had a reputation for coining words. (See Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson.)
The phrase, “to make from scratch” has its origin -- not in the kitchen but in the sports world. As early as 1778 the word “scratch” referred to a line drawn to indicate a boundary or starting line. In the world of boxing, the opponents had to come to a “scratch” line before they could begin pummeling each other. (For more information, check http://www.adrian.edu/news/contact/f02/knowitallf02.php.)
