But bean meaning head is primarily an American word, and a violent one. It first crops up in baseball slang, in connection with attempts to hit people in the head with a pitch. In 1905 a sportswriter wrote that the distinguished Native American pitcher Charles Albert “Chief” Bender “places much reliance on the bean ball.”
This was back before batters wore any sort of head protection. Not until 1971 did the major leagues make hard plastic batting helmets mandatory, and even when you’re wearing one of those, having a hardball thrown at your head is a lot like being shot at. One major leaguer and several minor leaguers have been killed by beanballs, and quite a few prominent players have suffered brain damage. Part of the game. Christy Mathewson was not only one of the greatest pitchers but also an esteemed Christian gentleman (never played on Sunday) and high-minded straight arrow. In 1912 there was published under his name a book, which conceivably—he was class president at Bucknell—he wrote. According to that book, Pitching in a Pinch: or, Baseball from the Inside, when a rookie came to bat, the catcher would warn him against the pitcher’s “mean ‘bean’ ball … . There’s a poor ‘boob’ in the hospital now that stopped one with his head.” Then the catcher would call for the beanball, and if it drove the rookie away from the plate, “Bing! Up comes another ‘beaner.’” If the rookie showed fear again, the catcher would conclude, “He won’t do. He’s yellow.”
I’ll bet it’s that Bing, more than the shape of a bean, that gave rise to heads being called beans. Bam. Bong. Boink. OED cites six examples of bean meaning head, 1905–1924, and every one entails violent cranial contact—even one from Wodehouse: “Have I got to clump you one on the side of the bean?”
Christy Mathewson describes a battle of wits between Bender and the Giants’ Freddie Snodgrass. Snodgrass had managed to reach base twice by getting hit harmlessly. When he came to bat next, “the Indian showed his even teeth in the chronic grin” and told Snodgrass to look out.
“Then Bender wound up and with all his speed drove the ball straight at Snodgrass’s head.”
Didn’t hit him that time. Got him out on the next couple of pitches, though.
Ty Cobb, who was vicious but shrewd, called Bender the most intelligent pitcher he ever faced, and Mathewson praises Chief Bender as “brainy.” (Wouldn’t you think we’d know where the word brain came from? OED tells us brawn was “originally a part suitable for roasting,” and therefore from an old Germanic word meaning to roast; but brain we are able only tentatively to associate, maybe, with a Greek word for forehead.)
According to Bender’s biographer, Tom Swift, he was paid less than half what other star pitchers on his own team made, and he endured a lot of bigoted razzing—derisive war whoops, that sort of thing. I checked his record for hitting batters. In the 1903 season, as a rookie, he hit one (not necessarily in the head, of course) roughly every 10 2/3 innings. I’d say he was establishing a reputation, like in prison. If he had kept up that pace, he would have set the all-time record for hit batsmen, and maybe killed one of them. But over the other fifteen years of his career, he hit only one batter every 352/3 innings. The great paleface pitcher Walter Johnson, who was said to be at pains to avoid hitting batters for fear he would kill them, hit one every twenty-nine innings, which is slightly more often than Bender’s lifetime average even including his formidable rookie year.
Getting back to the comestible bean, you might like to know that an old cowboy term for beans is “prairie strawberries.”
bearless
Doesn’t mean without bears. Doesn’t mean anything now, but before becoming obsolete it meant, according to OED, barren, not bearing anything.
Compare toadless.
beauty, depth of
What a poor tragic sap was Sir Thomas Overbury, the first person known to have written that beauty is only skin deep. It’s in his poem, first published in 1614, “The Wife”:
And all the carnall beauty of my wife
Is but skin-deep, but to two senses known;
Short even of pictures, shorter liv’d then life,
And yet the love survives, that’s build thereon:
For our imagination is too high,
For bodies when they meet, to satisfie.
Pretty much as a result of that poem, Overbury was murdered—poisoned bit by bit, like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, only terminally. In Overbury’s notorious story, the closest equivalent to the Cary Grant character was in on the poisoning. To top it all off, Overbury seldom gets credit for his skin-deep line. Anne Somerset never mentions it in her absorbing 524-page book about the case, Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I. What is worse, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations credits the image not to Overbury but to John Davies of Hereford, who borrowed it for a heavy-handed spoof of Overbury’s poem, “A Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overburie’s Wife”:
Beauty’s but skin-deepe; nay it is not so:
It floates but on the skin beneath the skin,
That (like pure Aire) scarse hides her fullest flow:
It is so subtill, vading, fragile, and thin:
Were she skin-deepe, she could not be so shallow
To win but fooles her puritie to hallow.
That came out in 1616, by which time Overbury was dead. He had attained great influence in King James’s profoundly corrupt court and had shared that influence with a flaxen-haired young man named Robert Carr, who, if you don’t mind a weak chin, was quite pretty. Then Carr fell for a woman, Lady Frances Howard, countess of Somerset. Her portrait sustains her reputation as one of the most beautiful women in the court.
When Carr met her she was already married, but to a man who—there were two sides to the story. According to Frances’s friends, her husband on their first night together “laboured a quarter of an hour to know her,” then said, “Frankie, it will not be,” and bade her good night. According to his friends, as soon as the couple were alone, Frances “reviled him … terming him cow, coward and beast … which things so cooled his courage that he was far from knowing, or endeavoring to know her.”
That marriage annulled, she was dead set on capturing Carr. Overbury hadn’t minded Carr’s dalliance with Frances—in fact he had ghostwritten Carr’s love letters to her—but he didn’t want Carr to marry this “base woman,” and so he wrote “The Wife” and presented Carr with a copy. Overbury had never had a wife himself, nor been linked to any woman, but his poem undertakes to describe the subcutaneous virtues a proper wife would have. In the course of forty-six stanzas it takes some unexpected turns. The skin-deep image is all very well; more striking is the dismissal of a woman’s shapely body as nothing “but well-digested food.” There is gender-bending:
At first, both sexes were in man combinde,
Man a she-man did in his body breed;
Adam was Eve’s, Eve mother of mankinde,
Eve from live-flesh, man did from dust proceed.
One, thus made two, mariage doth re-unite,
And makes them both but one hermaphrodite.
Or rather let me love, then be in love,
So let me chuse, as wife and friend to find,
Let me forget her sex, when I approve:
Beasts likenesse lies in shape, but ours in mind:
Our soules no sexes have, their love is cleane,
No sex, both in the better part are men.
Carr and Frances were creeped out by “The Wife,” and so was the king. James liked the cut of Carr’s jib himself, but he had found a new young man, George Villiers, who, judging from his portrait, was more beautiful, if you don’t mind really skinny legs and a blank expression, than Frances and Carr put together. Frances and Carr had the king’s blessing. Overbury lost favor and found himself in the Tower.
He appealed to his friend Carr, who he assumed would be able to bring James back around. The response, through nefarious intermediaries, was judiciously poisoned jellies and tarts. Overbury grew sicker and sicker, thanks not only to the steady flow of tainted treats but also t
o the attentions of fashionable physicians. One of these, Dr. Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, was the author of a book recommending, for internal application, “a syrup made with the flesh of tortoises, snails, the lungs of animals, frogs and crawfish, all boiled in scabrous and coltsfoot water, adding at the last sugar candy” and, for external application, a dressing called “balsam of bats,” which contained “three of the greater sort of serpents or snakes cut into pieces, their skins being first stripped off; twelve bats; two very fat sucking puppies; one pound of earthworms washed in white wine; common oil; malago sack; sage, marjoram and bay leaves,” to be boiled and then supplemented with two pounds of hog’s lard, “the marrow of a stag, an ox’s legs, liquid amber, butter and nutmegs.”
Overbury hung on for months. Finally he lost faith in Carr and succumbed. In his day he had been described, by James’s wife, the long-suffering Queen Anne, as “a pretty young fellow,” but in death his skin was covered with pustules and grievous ulcers. Frances and Carr had a gala wedding. John Donne, hoping for an income from Carr (who never delivered, so Donne had to take holy vows for a living), wrote a poem for the occasion, including these lines:
For every part to dance and revel goes,
They tread the air, and fall not where they rose
which may have come back to disturb Frances and Carr a couple of years later when they were sentenced to hang.
Rumors had gone around. Public sentiment had been aroused. And Carr had developed an ill-advisedly outspoken case of jealousy toward Villiers, whom James never ceased to dote on, even after a friend of Carr’s who had an epicene son “took great pains in tricking and pranking him up,” improving the youth’s complexion by “washing his face every day with posset curd,” and parading him before the king.
Frances and Carr were imprisoned, tried, and convicted. Eventually the king pardoned them—too pretty for the rope—but the trial and incarceration had been an ordeal, and sources close to the couple said that although they lived under the same castle roof, their love had not survived. There they were, stuck with each beautiful other, each proof to the other that beauty can in fact run deep-trouble deep.
belch
OED traces this robust word back to Old English bealcian, which meant the same thing; compares it to Dutch balken, to bray, shout; and leaves its etymology at that. Chambers breaks down and admits that belch is “almost certainly imitative in origin,” which is surely so. But an audible eructation of gas from the stomach doesn’t make the sound belch. Eructation is closer, or urp, or burp if one prefers, but even though I have known some highly creative eructators, I have never heard anyone put a b sound into a belch. Nor, for that matter, a ch. Not onomatopoeic, then, but sonicky. Belch looks like it ought to sound like a belch. Maybe because we so often labor to squelch a belch.
See blurt.
bigth
Neither WIII nor OED recognizes bigth, even as an obsolete word, but it used to be used. According to Alice Morse Earle in Customs and Fashions in Old New England, early apothecaries “did not measure the drugs with precision … . The asbestos stomachs and colossal minds of our forefathers were much above such petty minuteness; nor did they administer the doses with exactness. ‘The bigth of a walnut,’ … ‘as bigg as a haslenut, ’ … ‘the bigth of a Turkeys Egg.’”
Why did bigth die out? Breadth, depth, length, width, and even strength have the advantage of being more specific and measurable; but bigness is in OED and still has some currency. The problem with bigth is that it’s ugly to look at, confusable with bight, and a pain to pronounce. Shifting from a hard g to th is a jolt. Big thing, or big thighs, gives the tongue time to make the transition. Length ends in gth, but the n softens the g so it flows into the th.
blab, blabber
OED:
Words of similar form appear in other Teut. langs.: cf. ON. blabbra … Da. blabbre to babble, gabble, Sw. dial. blaffra to prattle, G. blappern, … plappern to blab, babble, prate. But the evidence is not sufficient to show whether any of these were actually connected with the English word, or whether they agree only in being natural expressions of the action involved, which seems to be essentially that of producing a confused repetition or combination of labial (b) and lingual (l, r) sounds.
That is to say, words about loose lips and a flapping tongue, formed by loose lips and a flapping tongue.
bless
This word is peculiarly English, with no kin in other languages. OED traces bless back to Old English blóedsian, whose “etymological meaning was … ‘to mark (or affect in some way) with blood (or sacrifice); to consecrate.’” For instance, to splash sacrificial blood on doorways to keep out the Destroying Angel.
When the Bible was translated from Hebrew into Latin, scholars needed a word for the Hebrew brk, which meant, according to OED, “primarily ‘to bend,’ hence ‘to bend the knee, worship, praise, bless God.’” They came up with benedicere, literally to speak well of. By the time the Bible was translated from Latin into English, blóedsian had softened, in form, to bless, which was chosen as the equivalent of benedicere. That selection, OED suggests, is how bless gained unbloody connotations—sort of like the way people hoped your aunt Peaches would be influenced by being chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant.
But wait a minute. Where did that soft ss ending come from? If blóedsian had held on to more of itself, Elvis in “All Shook Up” would have sung something like “Blodze my soul, what’s wrong with me?” The s sound in bless didn’t come from benedicere, because the Latin c had a k sound. (Cicero, the great Roman orator, to whom we owe “While there’s life, there’s hope,” would turn over in his sarcophagus if he heard us praise an eloquent speaker as ciceronian, pronounced sissy-ronian. In Cicero’s place and time he was kicker-o.)
In OED we find bloedsade circa 950, bletsode circa 1000, bletcaed in 1154, and Blettcedd circa 1200. A softer-sounding verb was needed for gentler rituals. When blessed turns up at last in 1377, it is with regard to the breaking and blessing of bread.
“At a very early date,” says OED, “the popular etymological consciousness …”
Love that notion, “the popular etymological consciousness.” I didn’t even know we had such a thing going on, but I like to think about us all floating in a rootsy ken, without quite realizing it. Maybe popular etymological subconscious would be more accurate, but who am I to quibble with OED?
“ … the popular etymological consciousness began to associate” the verb bless with the originally unrelated noun bliss, whose roots, neither bloody nor sacramental, are akin to those of blithe. In haphazard Middle English, bliss was often spelled bless and vice versa (or either of them, blyss). “Hence,” says OED, “the gradual tendency to withdraw bliss from earthly ‘blitheness’ to the beatitude of the blessed in heaven, or that which is likened to it.”
In Old English, bliss was already lispingly close to itself: bliths. As early as the year 971, it was already blisse. OED suggests that bliss and bless influenced each other as to meaning. I’m thinking form, too. I’m thinking bliss got sanctified by sharing its s’s with bless.
See -ed.
blob
Appears first in the fifteenth century as a verb meaning to make a bubble and in the sixteenth as a noun meaning bubble, in either case, by common acknowledgment, sonicky: “expressing the action of the lips in producing a bubble,” according to OED, which says the same about bleb, a small blister or bubble. “In relation to blob, bleb expresses a smaller swelling; cf. top, tip, etc.,” adds OED—eh and ih are shorter sounds than ah. That’s why we say tip-top and hip-hop: top-tip would be top-heavy, hop-hip a stumble. Compare topspin, which orally enacts its meaning twice: pushing forward to p then cutting back to sizzle a bit at s, then forward again to p and back again to nail it with an n. That psp juncture, in particular, packs lots of representative action. The only words I can think of where that sequence appears are made-up inversions, lipspread, upsprung—no, wait, there’s rumpsprung, in which the neighboring m and r s
pread the pressure out.
See bubble.
bloggerheads, at
The situation of people calling each other names, anonymously, on the Internet.
blurt
OED’s first definition of this word is not current except in dialect, but you have to like the smack of it: “To emit the breath eruptively from the mouth; to snort in sleep.” Presumably OED lists that definition first—although its first citation in print dates from 1611—because it is more closely linked to the body than the current, more abstract definition, “To utter abruptly … , to burst out with,” which is supported by an earlier (1573) citation in print. If a word has ever had a bodily meaning, that is presumably the one that it started with.
So what’s the etymology? OED says “app[arently] a modern onomatopoeia, expressive of a discharge of breath or fluid from the mouth after an effort to retain it; with the bl- element, cf. blow, blast, blash, etc.; with the rest cf. spurt, spirt, squirt, etc.: see also BLIRT.”
When we do see blirt, which means to burst into tears, the OED gives us more on the nature of -urt and -irt words: “expressing the forcible emission of liquid.” I would say the ur or ir part is what does that (as also in burst, gurgle, burble, splurge, purge, hurl—the uh sound without the r gives us gush, flush, upchuck), and the t evokes termination. I know that when I blurt something out, I often bring it to an abrupt halt and hope I can pass it off as a snort.
Alphabetter Juice Page 4