Books and worms an unusual pair

Since many of my recent columns have been devoted to a single theme or subject, I decided a completely random selection of words and phrases might be a welcome break, for both myself and my readers.

So in this piece I’m just going to ramble and pick out some of my favorites that don’t necessarily fit into a certain theme.

First I’m going to look into the origin of a word that fits right in with my love of reading, but threw me for a loop the first time I heard it. It’s ‘bookworm.’ Now as most everyone knows this refers to an individual who is constantly poring over books, a term I immediately realized described me to a T (more on this later), along with another phrase that had to do with my proboscis and my inordinate love of reading. As my dad used to say, on a regular basis, ‘Go outside and play. You’ve always got your nose stuck in a book.’

Well, I’d go outside all right, but to be honest, I would almost always manage to sneak out one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars series, or perhaps a Doc Savage, somewhere on my person, whereupon I would usually wander into the nearby woods and find a nice rock or log under a shady tree where I would promptly plop down to continue my reading.

I was reminded of this recently when I was looking through some of those old books stored in my basement and found remnants of leaves, twigs, bugs, and other materials I couldn’t identify, scattered through the pages. I must have been too interested in what waited on the next page to brush off the debris, or perhaps too enthralled to notice.

I knew I was a bookworm, of course, and didn’t really mind being called one at first, but imagine my chagrin when I eventually, due to my usual curious nature, found out that the word is an allusion to the maggot that eats holes in books, and lives both in and on their pages. Ouch!

Needless to say I wasn’t too happy about the appellation after that, even though, after giving it some thought, I realized I probably let any number of the insidious critters into the pages of my books during my woodland reading excursions. Oh well.

Now, on to the phrase I refereed to parenthetically earlier in my column, ‘to a T.’

This one has always been interesting to me because it is one that has generated more than one opinion on its origin down through the years, with the most common one being considered erroneous by those in the know, though it has been featured in some of our leading dictionaries. And that is the idea that the term should be attributed to the exacting nature of the draftsman’s T-square. But the problem with this explanation is that the phrase was in use before the T-square got its name.

‘To a T’ goes back to the 17th century in literary use, and was probably used in common speech long before that. The sense of the expression does correspond, however, with an older one, ‘to a tittle,’ which appeared almost a century earlier, meaning ‘to a dot,’ as in ‘jot or tittle.’

Here’s one that really piqued my curiosity the first time I heard it, and that’s ‘to the bitter end.’ Why would one end be more bitter than any other I wondered. Like many colloquialisms, this one is thought to come from a nautical term describing the end of a cable attached to the ‘bit.’ The Oxford English Dictionary lists this citation, ‘1867 Smyth Sailor’s Word-book 103: A ship is ‘brought up to a bitter’ when the cable is allowed to run out to that stop. When a chain or rope is paid out to the bitter-end, no more remains to be let go.’

And, as you may have guessed, now we have reached the bitter end of this column.

Charlie Johnson is news editor for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].