Wednesday WOLF - Pot Calling the Kettle Black

I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications. I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of another acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF. Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

In case you're not a smartass like me, I'm going to give you the best sarcastic idiom of the ages: That's the pot calling the kettle black. Oh, how I love that one! It's the socially acceptable way of calling someone a hypocrite.

First off, what does it mean? And secondly, where does it come from?

The idea behind the insult is that the pot (which is the color black) is taunting the kettle for being... black. And by the way, this has zero racist connotations - when the phrase was coined pots and kettles would've been black, not silver.

However, I recently came across another interpretation of it, which I thought was quite interesting. In this version, rather than the pot and kettle both being black, the pot is sooty because it is usually placed directly on a fire, whereas a kettle retains a shiny silver sheen because it's typically on top of a stove. When the pot looks at the kettle, it sees its own reflection and accuses the kettle of a fault that belongs solely to the pot. Got that? We also call it projection. But that's not as much fun to say.

The earliest written use of this saying comes from Don Quixote:

"It seems to me," said Sancho, "that your worship is like the common saying, 'Said the frying-pan to the kettle - Get away, blackbreech!' You chide me for uttering proverbs, yet you string them in couplets yourself."

Later on, Shakespeare would rephrase and use the same idea in "Troilus and Cressida," when Ajax condemns Achilles for faults he himself possesses. Ulysses (one of my favorite literary smartasses) says, "The raven chides blackness."

So now you know, and don't you feel better for the knowing?

Wednesday WOLF - Don't Pronounce the H!

I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications. I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of another acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF. Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

Here's an interesting little bit of language history that I happened upon the other day, involving silent letters.

I've always been kind of amused at the fact that you don't pronounce the "h" in ghost. It's kind of funny, if you think about it. It's there... but you never hear it, and no one dare say it... Oooooo. Anyway, why is that pesky letter there?

People were writing long before the dictionary existed. Mostly it was the monks who did the copying and writing of books, and pretty much everyone wrote words however they felt they should be spelled. Likewise, the printing press existed before the dictionary, and we ended up in the same situation. Lots of people from all different kinds of backgrounds were printing in the English language, but bits of their own heritage were filtering in to the mix.

The word ghost was originally spelled without the "h," nice and phonetically. But printers from Holland tossed an "h" in there because that's how they spelled it, and for some reason, it stuck.

Interestingly enough, the printers weren't only tossing in letters because of cultural differences. They also liked nice straight lines (who can blame them?) and so if they had to knock an extra letter off of a word or two in order to get a nice, tidy justification, they'd go for it. Words like, logic, magic, and music used to have a "k" at the end, but they got nicked.

In 1755 Samuel Johnson had enough of arbitrary spelling, and made the first English Dictionary. Shortly after the American Revolution, Noah Webster waged his own kind of war against the English by writing an American Dictionary, in which he knocked the "u" out of words like color, flavor and honor.

How do I know all this? Well, it's because I read books. Most of this stuff was news to me, I learned it from THE WORD SNOOP by Ursula Duborsarsky. If you're as big of a nerd as I am, you might want to check it out.

Wednesday WOLF - The Skin of My Teeth

I'm such a big nerd that I tend to look up word origins in my spare time because I'm fascinated by our language. The odder the origin, the better. I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications. I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of another acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF. Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

Recently I hit a deadline by the skin of my teeth, and my nerd brain immediately said, "Hey, what's that mean?" So, librarian section of nerd brain went to work and Religion Major section of nerd brain was humbled when I discovered the answer.

Turns out we get this handy-dandy close call reference from poor long suffering Job. Quoting Job, 19:20 (NIV) "I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped with only the skin of my teeth." If you're not familiar with Job's story, basically the man lost everything he had - family, wealth, possessions, health - but it seems he still had good teeth so that says a lot of the Biblical era dental hygienists.

Other translations have the verse reading as, "by the skin of my teeth," but either one translates the same. Old Job was saying he'd escaped something "by a very small margin" as we don't actually have skin on our teeth. If you do, I suggest your visit a Biblical dental hygienist, apparently they knew how to handle that. There is some argument that perhaps Job was referring to his gums being the only part of his body not covered in boils, which may or may not be the case, but the translation remains the same as the gums would compose a small margin of his body.

Either way, I doubt it was much consolation to him at the time that he was coining a phrase.