Makes perfect sense until you think about it - La Grange Daily News
By Andrea Lovejoy, columnist La Grange News
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Andrea Lovejoy
Seriously. The venerable WSJ had a front-page story headlined Some in Lizzie Bordens hometown think her legend is out of whack.
Folks in Falls River, Mass., it seems, are still split over whether the spinster Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden hacked her stepmother and wealthy father to death in 1892. The Falls River historical society is about to release a 995-page book on all things Lizzie.
Still, what drew me to the story was not a fascination with Bordens guilt or innocence. It was the headline.
I had, that very morning, been pondering another unsolved mystery. Why, for Petes sake, do we say out of whack?
What is a whack anyhow?
I decided to find out and discovered a wonderful but wacky online subculture of dedicated word nerds, more of them than you can shake a stick at.
Their priorities may seem out of whack, but these folks have more fun than a barrel of monkeys attempting to trace the origins of everyday expressions, phrases like more fun than a barrel of monkeys, shake a stick at and out of whack.
Best I can tell, the more sense the explanation makes, the less likely it is correct.
Case in point: You may have heard someone older than dirt describe an outcome or occurrence as better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Well, yeah, most things are, but whered the saying come from? Someone with a taste for the classics suggested Homers Odyssey in which Odysseus and his buddies save themselves from the Cyclops by putting out his one eye with a sharp stick.
Made sense to me, so, naturally that theory is viewed as quite wrong.
Nobody really knows where the expression came from, but they are positive Homer had nothing to do with it. (Lizzie Borden should be so lucky.)
OK, so what about out of whack?
Michael Quinion of World Wide Words offers a heavily researched suggestion. The phrase, he said, first appeared in American newspapers during the latter half of the 19th century. Another phrase in fine whack was commonly used to describe something that was, well, fit as a fiddle. It follows then that out of whack would mean the opposite something that was not in fine form or not working well. (My back is out of whack.)
That was all very interesting, but I still dont know what a whack is.
Might as well try another one.
Why, bless Pete, do we say dead as a doornail?
Why not just dead as a nail? Or dead as a doorknob?
I examined every door in my house and found nary a nail, living or dead.
Thats because my home is not a medieval castle and dead as a doornail is a medieval expression, dating to at least 1350.
The usual explanation, says World Wide Word, is that a doornail was one of the heavy, studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly the phrase refers to the especially large nail on which the knocker rested.
A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any expression; the one on the knocker would be especially dead, because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.
But then, in the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, another word nerd suggests its a simple matter of carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of wood (like a door) and then flatten the end over on the inside so it cant be removed (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead because you cant use it again.
Sounds plausible, but nobody really knows for sure.
So what about for Petes sake and Bless, Pete?
Both refer to St. Peter, of course. For Petes sake is what word nerds call a minced oath a subcategory of euphemism used to avoid swearing when expressing surprise or annoyance. Jiminy Cricket (Jesus Christ) and Gadzooks (Gods blood) are others.
Thats the truth, for Petes sake. I swear.
But Im still wondering. What about that barrel of monkeys? How fit is a fiddle?
And exactly how old is dirt?
Stay tuned.
Andrea Lovejoy is former editor of LaGrange Daily News.
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