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Jewish World Review August 4, 2005 / 28 Tammuz, 5765 Origin and meaning of ‘the tables were turned’; ‘polka dot’ vs ‘polka’ dance; ‘quarry’ in animal use as opposed to extracting minerals; the origin and many uses of ‘laying an egg’?
By
Editors of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Dear Editor:
As happens occasionally, I used an expression automatically when it
suddenly occurred to me to wonder just where it came from. This time
it was "the tables were turned." I've been trying to picture some
reason for rotating tables or turning them upside down, but no luck.
—J.L., Rapid City, S.D.
Dear J.L.:
The phrase "to turn the tables," meaning "to reverse the relation
between two parties so that each is in the other's circumstances,"
arose from the use of "table" to denote a game board. More
particularly, the board on which backgammon is played was formerly
referred to as "the tables."
In 1632, Dr. Robert Sanderson, an English deacon (the future bishop
of Lincoln), published a sermon in which he exhorted, "Whosoever
thou art that dost another wrong, do but turn the tables: imagine
thy neighbor were now playing thy game, and thou his."
Since he said "tables" and not "table," it's probably safe to say he
was thinking of backgammon rather than another board game like chess
or checkers. Backgammon had been known in England since medieval
times — in fact, the game itself was referred to as "the tables" —
and presumably Sanderson's allusion to it would have been easily
recognized.
Whether or not Sanderson originated the table-turning metaphor is
not known. There's no evidence that the "tables" were ever actually
turned and that players were compelled to switch sides in the middle
of a game.
The next recorded use of this figure of speech was during the
English civil war, in 1647, when political writer Dudley Digges
wrote a treatise titled "The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects Taking Armes
Against Their Sovereigne." Again evoking the image of the game
board, Digges wrote, "The tables are quite turned, and your friends
have undertaken the same bad game, and play it much worse."
Both Sanderson and Digges were royalists; the same year that
Sanderson was appointed regius professor of divinity at Oxford,
Digges had been named member of a delegation whose task it was to
provide for the defense of the university against the
parliamentarians, if necessary. Digges well may have been familiar
with the professor's published sermons. In any case, though the
royalists lost the war, the expression lived on.
Dear Editor:
Do you know the origin of "polka dot"? Also, do you know why the "l"
is not pronounced in "polka dot" but is pronounced in "polka" the
dance?
—J. K., Houston, Texas
Dear J.K.:
Explaining the origin of "polka dot" requires first an explanation
of "polka."
The word "polka" comes ultimately from Polish and means "Polish
woman." The most common of the stories about the origin of the dance
is that a Bohemian peasant girl created the hop-step-close-step
dance in the early 1830s. By 1835, it had made its way to Prague,
where it was named as a tribute to Polish women - thus the borrowing
of the Polish word. At one time some saw "polka" as a corruption of
the Czech word "pulka," meaning "half," which recognized the half
step in the dance, but our etymologists now reject that theory.
At any rate, the polka captured hearts in Paris and London by the
1840s and moved on to the United States. Today's polka, an
adaptation of the older form, is a significant part of American folk
dancing.
It was common in the 19th century for a craze like the polka to lend
its name enthusiastically to fashions, designs, or furnishings that
were part of the same culture. Polka hats and polka gauze did not
outlast the craze the way the polka dot and polka jacket did.
Conjecture about the dot centers on several possible connections,
one being to the dotted rhythm of the dance, another being to the
spots where partners placed their feet while dancing. All we can say
for certain is that the "polka" of "polka dot" comes from the name
of the dance.
Unfortunately, there isn't much evidence about the reason for
pronunciation difference between "polka dot" and "polka." In some of
our earlier dictionaries, the pronunciation at "polka dot" shows an
optional "l" sound as does the pronunciation at "polka" in our
present-day dictionaries. Exactly how it came to be that the "l" is
now pronounced in "polka" but not in "polka dot" remains a mystery
of the language.
Dear Editor:
Were ‘quarry’ as in a hunted animal and ‘quarry’ as in stone mine the same word originally? They are so different in meaning.
—C.B., Waterford, Mich.
Dear C. B.:
Not only are these two quarries very different in meaning, they are
also completely unrelated in origin.
The hunter's ‘quarry’ can be traced to a minor ceremony that was
once part of every successful hunt. The hounds were rewarded after
the kill with a part of the slain animal's entrails. The French word
for this hounds' portion was ‘cuiree.’ It was probably derived
from the word ‘coree,’ meaning ‘entrails’; but because the coree was often placed on the slain animal's skin and the word for skin,
‘cuir,’ was so like it, ‘coree’ was altered to an even more
similar ‘cuiree.’ ‘Cuiree’ was borrowed into Middle English as ‘querre’ or ‘squirre.’ The word for the entrails of an animal was then transferred to the animal itself. From this, the extended
sense developed, so that now anything pursued is its pursuer's
quarry.
The stone quarry takes its name from the building stones it
provides. No surviving Old French document contains the word
‘quarre,’ meaning ‘squared stone,’ but the existence of such a word in the spoken language of the time can be safely assumed. The
word is the logical link between the Old French ‘quarriere,’ the
word for a quarry, a source of squared stones, and its ultimate
source in Latin ‘quadrum,’ meaning ‘square.’
Dear Editor:
How did laying an egg get to be a bad thing? An egg is a source of
life and nourishment, but if a performer really lays an egg no one
seems to appreciate it very much. What happened?
—K.S., Great Falls, Mont.
‘Lay an egg’ is an Americanism. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, defines it as ‘to fail or blunder
especially embarrassingly.’ The phrase is used especially when
there's an audience to witness the fiasco, as in the theater, where
it means ‘to flop, to bomb, to leave the audience totally cold.’
It's uncertain how laying an egg came to mean what it does, but
there are a couple of theories about the phrase's origin. One is
that it comes out of World War I when to ‘lay an egg’ meant to
drop a bomb, hence, to bomb. (It's interesting to note that in
British English a ‘bomb’ is a big success, while in American
English it's a major failure.) Another theory about the origin of
‘lay an egg’ has the phrase growing out of the sports term ‘goose
egg,’ which refers to a failure to score, a zero. It's not clear
which of these, if either, is the true origin of the phrase.
A famous usage of ‘lay an egg’ may have been an understatement. A
headline in Variety after the 1929 stock market crash read, ‘Wall
Street Lays an Egg.’
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
