This column is rated ?G?

Today?s column is brought to you by the letter ?G.? I?m going to feature phrases and words beginning with the seventh letter of the alphabet, and some of the popular explanations as to their origins.

The first one is one I have heard all my life, ?going south,? as in, ?Bill?s business venture is rapidly going south this year.? It generally means whatever project it describes is failing, usually miserably. This one makes a warped kind of sense, but comes from what I consider a strange source. South is associated with the downward direction because that?s how it?s depicted on maps. North is up, and south is down. Of course down is pretty much universally linked with poor performance, hence, going south is going down, which isn?t good, especially for things like airplanes, swimmers and revenue, for example.

Here?s one that I?ve always found interesting, ?going to the dogs,? as in, ?You know, Fred can?t seem to keep a job these days. He?s really going to the dogs.? This one is said to come from the practice of throwing waste food to dogs from the dining tables of the rich in medieval times. These scraps were considered of no other use. Thus, when someone is described as ?gone to the dogs,? he is regarded as worthless.

Here?s a word origin I find interesting. I?ve always wondered why we say ?good-bye.? One origin I love for this word is that it came from ?God bye,? which was, in turn, derived from ?God be with you.? Makes sense to me, and means a lot more since I now know its benevolent origin.

And here?s an origin of a term for a piece of furniture I always found sort of strange. The ?grandfather?s clock.? Oddly enough, this one comes from a piece of music, an 1878 song by Henry Clay Work, entitled ?My Grandfather?s Clock.? A line in the song ran, ?My grandfather?s clock was too tall for the shelf, so it stood 90 years on the floor.? Soon, people began referring to any floor-standing clock as a ?grandfather?s clock.? Before the song, this type of clock was known as a ?long case.?

And here?s a particularly gruesome one, with an equally gruesome explanation. It?s ?graveyard shift,? which means to work during the early hours of the morning. As in, ?Man, I hate working this graveyard shift. I can barely stay awake.? This one goes way back, all the way to the 1500s. Back then, as legend has it, England was running out of places to bury people, so they would dig up coffins and take the bones to a ?bone house,? and then reuse the grave. My, those efficiency-minded British.

Now, and this is where it gets gruesome, apparently one out of 25 coffins would have scratch marks on the inside, which made it obvious they had been burying some people while they were very much alive, alive enough to want out of the coffins anyway. So they got the ingenious idea of tying a string to the wrist of the corpse, leading it through the coffin and up through the ground and then tying it to a bell. Of course, someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night ? graveyard shift ? and listen for the bell. Oddly enough, a couple of other phrases are thought to have come from this practice, being ?saved by the bell? and ?dead ringer.?

And the last of my ?G? phrases is one that is pretty self-explanatory, ?gum up the works.? I used to think this meant getting chewing gum into something mechanical, but apparently I was wrong, though pretty close in a way. It is actually related to the red gum or sweet gum tree found in the eastern U.S. Early settlers chewed the sticky sap, particularly children, who loved the sweet taste. But getting the stuff out of the tree was pretty much impossible to do without getting it all over one?s clothes, hair and everything else, thus ?gumming up the works.?

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