Where Words Come From

Originally published in the Santa Barbara Independent, August 26, 2004

A few weeks ago, I initiated a full-frontal assault on the argument that language mutates, when used as a rationale for slipshod speech and writing. Since then, a few gloves have been thrown down in my path challenging me to point out when I believe language does mutate for the better. While many writers pride themselves on playing or being inventive with our language, in my opinion the greatest strides come from the fringe elements of society, as I said in the same column a few weeks ago.

Take the noun “hipster,” our word for someone fashionably cool and/or bohemian, sometimes shortened to the adjective “hip.” Its origin comes from the shorthand term for the denizens of Chinese opium dens in early San Francisco. A day/night at such an establishment was spent on a soft mat where one dozed in and out of an opium high, his pipe attended to by the owner or employee of the den. When the rush started to fade, the pipe was already packed for a new hit. You didn’t even have to sit all the way up, rather prop yourself up on one elbow — thus reclining on your hip — and take a ready-made drag already waiting at lip level. This smoking posture gave rise to the expression that someone was “on the hip,” meaning at an opium den or cultivating a habit, and was eventually shortened to “hipster” and has never left our vocabulary.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Equally so are the origins of other drug terms — “midnight oil,” “cotton fever,” and “speed bumps” — not to mention those from other frowned-upon practices such as gambling and the sex trade, which have brought us such gems as “snake eyes,” “white meat,” “sandbag,” “bottle dance,” “coffee grinder,” and “giggler.” I’ll let you guess which terms goes with which trade.

Among my favorite books on wordplay and word origins is Tom Dalzell’s The Slang of Sin (Merriam-Webster, $14.95), which is my source for the above. Dalzell does a spectacular job of sourcing out word origins from the societal nooks and crannies we like to pretend don’t exist, and categorizes them according to vice — sex, drugs, gambling, etc.

Next in line is Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word (Random House, $14.95). If you think you know everything about the word many of us treat like a comma in common speech, you’re wrong. And you’ll forgive me if I don’t cite any examples here.

Finally, Max Décharné has created what is arguably the definitive lexicon of mid-century American slang with Straight from the Fridge, Dad (Broadway Books, $12.95). Appropriately, Décharné’s book is subtitled, A Dictionary of Hipster Slang, and within the author covers the most prolific slang period in America during the ’50s and ’60s, the period that gave us much of our slang terms still in common use, including “cool,” “hole in the wall,” and “cruiser,” and tracing the origins of many of these words in the decades prior.

I have others, but these reference books are my favorites, and they’re the ones I turn to most frequently in my research. Let me know yours if you have any and, better yet, if you’ve got some oddball term specific to your line of work — licit or illicit — drop me a line, and maybe I’ll start compiling my own dictionary.