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Jewish World Review March 10, 2005 / 29 Adar I 57645

Editors of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, Tenth Edition

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Consumer Reports


Source of the nickname ‘the Big Easy’ for New Orleans; ‘happy as a clam’; grotesque or gruesome?


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Dear Editor:
What is the source of the nickname ``the Big Easy'' for New Orleans?
— J.J., Londonderry, Vt.

Dear J.J.:

New Orleans, like many other distinctive cities, has a good handful of nicknames, but none is as well known as ``the Big Easy.'' According to our research, it first showed up in 1970 as the title of a novel about New Orleans by James Conoway. The 1970 book was made into a popular movie in 1986, and from that point the term became much more widely used.

Conoway is often credited with inventing the famous name himself, although one of our citations from a 1988 article in Harper's Magazine suggests otherwise: ``Liebling was conjuring up the city before 1960 (...) It was a poor, peculiar, happy place, (...) Only local black people and a handful of hipsters knew to call it the Big Easy.'' As it stands, however, we have no written evidence of ``the Big Easy'' prior to Conoway's 1970 novel.

Dear Editor:

Where did we get the saying ``happy as a clam''? How can you tell if a clam is happy?

— J.M., Newport, R.I.

Dear J.M.:

The saying ``happy as a clam'' is a shortened version of a longer phrase, ``happy as a clam at high tide.'' (A variation of this longer phrase is ``happy as a clam in high water.'')

The extended saying is based on the fact that clams, living on or buried in the ocean floor, are much less likely to be reached by digging hands at high tide than at low tide. At high tide (or high water), a clam would be considered to be ``happy'' because it is out of harm's way.

A number of sources trace the origin of the extended phrase to the 19th century. With casual use it eventually got shortened to the more common saying we know today, even though the logic of the original expression is lost in the short version.

Dear Editor:

I hear people use ``grotesque'' when they really, to my mind, mean ``gruesome.'' Are these words really interchangeable? For example, should one call a devastating outbreak of some killer disease ``a grotesque nightmare'' or ``a gruesome nightmare''?

— P.D., Caldwell, Idaho

Dear P.D.:

In one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes asks Dr. Watson, ``How do you define the word 'grotesque'?'' Watson suggests, ``Strange — remarkable,'' but Holmes doesn't entirely agree. ``There is surely something more than that; some underlying suggestion of the tragic and terrible,'' he says.

Watson is defining ``grotesque'' in its purest historical form. ``Grotesque'' comes from ``grotta,'' the Italian word for ``cave.'' During the Italian Renaissance, ``pitture grottesche'' were what the Italians called the exotic paintings found in caverns unearthed in the excavation of Rome. Later on, a style of decorative art that incorporated fantastic combinations of human and animal forms interwoven with strange fruits and flowers, reminiscent of the Roman ``cavern pictures,'' was called simply ``grottesca'' in Italian. The Italian word soon worked its way into English. Our noun ``grotesque'' still refers to a style of decorative art that distorts the natural — or, in a broader sense, to anything that we might describe by the adjective ``grotesque.'' The adjective first appeared in English at the beginning of the 17th century.

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So the question then becomes, what are the limits of the grotesque? Synonyms for the adjective are ``bizarre,'' ``fantastic,'' ``weird,'' ``outlandish,'' and ``fanciful.'' ``Grotesque'' emphasizes distortion of the natural usually to the point either of ridiculous ugliness or ludicrous caricature. Sometimes the word suggests an absurdly irrational combination of things that are incompatible, as in ``in this war-torn state it is grotesque to use peacetime standards for measuring freedom of speech.''

The other ``g'' words — ``gruesome,'' ``grisly,'' ``gross,'' and ``ghastly'' — really aren't close synonyms of ``grotesque,'' but it's apparent that the boundaries blur at times. Thus, you might read of ``the grotesque inhumanity of his attacker.'' How acceptable you find such usage may depend on whether you consider things that are horrific and revolting — or, in Sherlock Holmes's phrase, ``tragic and terrible'' — to be strange or unnatural.


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Up

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02/17/05: Military ‘cadet’ and a golf ‘caddie’?; ‘madder plant’
02/09/05: ‘Red tape’; ‘glamour’ and ‘grammar’?
02/03/05: ‘Cesarean section’; ‘blue bag’ 01/27/05: ‘Nightmares’; Macadam discovered macadamia nus?; difference between ‘extemporaneous’ and ‘impromptu’
01/19/05: 'Stool pigeon'; 'last hurrah'; train depots
01/12/05: 'Aught' and 'ought'; 'he doesn't know sickum'
12/30/04: Stranded'; 'over;'; circulars are square
12/16/04: 'Derrick'; 'scales falling from their eyes'; 'anthem'
12/09/04: Sailors using 'port' and 'starboard' for 'left' and 'right'; plural of compound words
11/30/04: 'Fly off the handle'; why the words 'left' and 'right' became associated with the political connotations of 'liberal' and 'conservative'; 'review' and 'revue'
11/17/04: 'Ball the jack'; Nazis
11/11/04: 'Catachresis'; 'kick the bucket' and dying; ballots
11/03/04: 'Divers' meaning 'different'?; 'The audience brought the house down'
10/25/04: 'Notorious' as a compliment?; 'and' as first word in sentence; 'yeoman' and 'yewman'
10/20/04: 'Shaggy-dog story'; 'tawdry'; 'Shawnee'
10/12/04: 'Busted'; differences between 'iterate' and 'reiterate'; 'the rain has quite abated'
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09/22/04: ' Redux'; 'elan'; 'swan-neck'
09/08/04: 'Adam's apple'; 'You sure lucked out'; 'the lion's share'
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08/24/04: Guacamole = avocados?; 'bona fides' needs plural verb?; 'exact same' redundant?
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08/12/04: 'Vexillologist'; 'fifth column'; 'Homer sometimes nods'
08/05/04: 'Spitting image'; 'eclectic'; 'spendthrift'
07/28/04: 'Trousers'; 'argosy'
07/19/04: 'Sourdough wit'; 'headshrinkers'; 'seventh heaven'
07/08/04: 'The proof is in the pudding'; 'Pyrrhic victory'
07/01/04: Origin of 'vitamin'; 'binnacle list'
06/25/04: 'Abnegate' and 'abdicate'; 'feet of clay'; 'difugalty'
06/17/04: 'Whinge'; 'whole cloth'
06/10/04: 'The devil to pay'; 'crack', as in 'a crack marksman'; 'the dog that didn't bark'
06/03/04: 'Surrounded on three sides'; sleuths
05/18/04: 'Of the first water'; horses and horseradish; more
05/06/04: 'Historic' v. 'historical'; 'prestigious' = 'trickery'?; 'can of corn' as sports phrase
04/27/04: Derivation of 'bozo'; 'elt'; 'spill the beans'
04/21/04: Meaning of "budget'' in the word "fussbudget''; "bleeding hearts''; "skycap''
04/01/04: "Thin red line''; "doak"; "level playing field"
03/22/04: "King Canute"; "vodka"; "Cheese it. The cops!''
03/16/04: "Carrot and stick''; "hue and cry''; Where did the term "flea market'' originate?
03/09/04: Going "haywire"; "close, but no cigar"; "mahatma"
03/01/04: "Roundheel'' and "well-heeled''; "milquetoast"; "sick as a dog''
02/26/04: "Charley horse"; "`Foolproof''; "cracker-barrel''
02/17/04: "Dunce''; titles "Mr.'' and "Mrs.''; "under the weather''
02/10/04: "Turnpike''; "dead reckoning''
02/02/04: "Mutt"; "lobby" in its political sense; "procrustean bed"
01/27/04: "Decimate"; "duende"; a dessert "junket"?
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01/09/04: Confused about the word "hearsay"; "Burgle"; "waiting in line" or "waiting on line"?
12/31/03: The past tense of "plead''; Is "old adage'' redundant?; Where did "lounge lizard'' come from?
12/15/03: "Ostracize" and "oyster''?; Where does the "mentor'' come from?; "jeopard''
12/02/03: "Karats'' and "carats'' — meaning of and difference between; why apostrophe in "'cello''?; "hell-bent for leather''
11/18/03: "Hoosegow,''; why the little finger is called the "`pinkie''; difference between "lady'' and "dame''
11/13/03: 'Take it on the lam'; 'decorum'; 'you look like the wreck of the Hesperus'
11/03/03: Origin of "hypnosis"/"hypnotism"; "all right" or "alright"; emote
10/28/03: "Blue plate special"; how to use "hoi polloi''; "Peck's Bad Boy''
10/20/03: Who was the person the artist who first used "silhouette" as an art form?; why are they called migraine headaches?; origin of "keep one's shirt on"
10/13/03: "Grey'' in "greyhound'' has nothing to do with the color?; "at loggerheads''
09/29/03: Where does the word "karaoke" comes from?; people or persons?; "synecdoche"
09/23/03: Using "eke'' correctly; fedora; why do we call an especially flattering biography a "hagiography''?
09/10/03: Why do we call a zero score in tennis "love''?; "biannual'' or "semiannual''?; Is there any difference between "further'' and "farther''?; dilemma of using "dilemma''
09/02/03: "Out loud'' rather than "aloud''; "pushing the envelope''; "without rhyme or reason''
08/25/03: "Cheesy''; "hold a candle''
08/11/03: "Halcyon days''; Why isn't "sacrilegious'' spelled "sacreligious''?; "red light'' and "green light'' as expression — which came first, the inaction or the signals?
08/04/03: "Votive'' candles; "cosmeticizing"; "potluck''
07/28/03: Why ‘debt’ has a ‘b’ in it; "south moon under''; why "Rx'' is used for prescriptions
07/21/03: "Romance" & "Rome"?; punching & clocks; "conversate"
07/14/03: "Lukewarm''; Where did we get the word "wig'' for a fake head of hair?
07/09/03: Why doesn't "Arkansas'' rhyme with "Kansas''? ; "Catawampus"; "Jimmie Higgins work"
06/30/03: "Foozle"; author who wrote an entire novel without using a certain letter of the alphabet?; "kith and kin"
06/23/03: "On the fritz"; "knuckle down''
06/17/03: How did "lazy Susan'' come to be used for the rotating tray?; woolgathering'' as synonym for "idle daydreaming''; "in harm's way''
06/09/03: "Clotheshorse"; a god named "Ammonia"?
05/29/03: With kid gloves; "receipt'' = "recipe''?; from soup to nuts

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