Word Histories: Etymologies Derived From the Files of the Dictionary of American Regional English

grapevine

In an interview in USA Today last fall Karen Mayo-Chandler, a former girlfriend of the actor Jack Nicholson’s, discussed various aspects of his personal life: “One thing [Jack] did tell me—he’s not opposed to marriage. I heard on the grapevine he had asked Anjelica [Huston] to marry him. . . . She seems like a very nice lady. . . but I was led to believe their relationship was very much a friendship thing by the time I was seeing him.” The telegraph line constructed in 1859 between Placerville, California, and Virginia City, Nevada, was supposedly called the grapevine telegraph, possibly owing to the similarity between its strung wires and the continuous, circuitous vines that connect bunches of grapes. A metaphorical sense of grapevine telegraph (an informal network for conveying information or rumor) arose very quickly and was widely used during the Civil War. Before the 1860s were out, the phrase had been abbreviated to grapevine, though the original grapevine telegraph also survived (“Dispatches report that the ‘grapevine telegraph’ told every American soldier the news within twenty-four hours”—The Christian Century, 1943). In Australia grapevine telegraph finds an analogue in bush telegraph (“Soldiers have a bush telegraph system of their own. The wildest furphies [rumors] travel over it, but sometimes it carries the truth”— The Australian Soldier, John A. Hetherington, 1944).

buddy

In her announcement last October that she would soon be leaving NBC’s Today show, Jane Pauley tried to lay to rest rumors that her co-host, Bryant Gumbel, had been involved in backstage maneuvering to force her out. “He’s not a heartless wretch,” Pauley said in an emotional statement. “He called me ‘my buddy,' and we are buddies.”Buddy (partner, fellow) is a mid-nineteenth-century Americanism whose roots lie in the English dialect word butty (fellow workman, companion, friend, “mate”). The evolution of butty into buddy was probably hastened by the existence of the baby-talk word buddy, meaning “brother” (“‘Look, sister, see; the sky’s got the measles!’ ‘No, buddy,' said she, correcting him, ‘it’s only freckled’”— Harper’s Magazine, 1858). Butty is derived from booty, meaning “plunder” or “loot,” which in turn made possible the expression booty fellow, referring to a confederate in swindling (“One man lost an hundred pound land at shooting, [because] some that shot with him on his side were booty fellows against him”—AManifest Detection of the Most Vyle and Detestable Use of Dice-Play, Gilbert Walker, 1532). Booty (“Fortune . . . drops Booties in my mouth”—A Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare, 1611) is a borrowing through French of the Middle High German bute or buite (exchange, barter). A related term, boot (advantage, profit), survives today only in the phrase to boot (to the good, in addition).

willy-nilly

After the assassination of a presidential candidate and a senior police official in Bogotá, Colombia, last August, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh raised the possibility that American troops would be sent to Latin America. He warned, however, that he did not favor a “willy-nilly U.S. military commitment”— that is, a commitment that was unplanned, ad hoc, or somehow driven by events beyond our control. The term willy-nilly comes from the contraction of “will I, nill I” or “will he [she, you], nill he [she, you],” and originally meant with or without the will of the person concerned (“He was sure, willynilly, to be drenched with a deluge of decoctions”— Salmagundi, Washington Irving, 1824). Willy-nilly in this sense has an almost direct correlative in the Latin term nolens volens. Over time willy-nilly, perhaps influenced by shilly-shally (shall I, shall I), acquired the meaning “vacillating” (“The willy-nilly disposition of the female in matters of love is as apparent in the butterfly as in the man”—Inquiries Into HumanFaculty and Its Development, Francis Galton, 1883). Attorney General Thornburgh’s usage reflects willy-nilly’s willynilly journey away from vacillation and somewhat back toward the original “helplessly, inevitably” and “whether desired or not.” Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney used the word in the same sense last December when he decried what he characterized as “willynilly” cuts in defense spending proposed by some lawmakers. He also labeled “hogwash"— the term refers to the swill given to swine—the charge that his own proposed cuts were not based on any clear military strategy.