Doing a Double Take on Double-Talk

Rob Kyff

Word pairs are the bread and butter of English. We love, for instance, to say that price gougers are charging us an "arm and a leg," even though losing just one of these appendages would be bad enough. During a downpour, it rains not only "cats" but also "dogs," and describing a tingling sensation summons both "pins" and "needles." 

But sometimes our use of these phrases seems to be, well, "touch and go." Consider the widespread mis-rendering "a-carrot-and-a-stick approach" as "a carrot-on-a-stick approach," a mistake that entirely destroys the allusion to motivating a stubborn donkey with both reward andpunishment. 

In some cases, people have simply forgotten what these doublets originally described. In previous columns, I've traced "touch-and-go" to sailing ships that scraped their keels on reefs or sandbars but sailed on without much loss of speed, and "cut and run" to cutting loose the ship's anchor (or cutting the ropes that unfurl the sails) to make a quick getaway. 

Even the origin of "cut-and-dry" isn't cut and dried. Some say this phrase originally referred to processing timber or firewood, while others swear it began with meat, fish or tobacco. Who knows? 

And what of the "rack" in "rack and ruin," the "cranny" in "nook and cranny" and the "beck" in "beck and call"? 

"Rack" is a variation of "wrack," an old word for wreckage or destruction in general. The original meaning of "rack" was something driven by the sea, so "rack" came to refer to anything washed up on shore, from dried seaweed to a wrecked ship. The phrase "rack and ruin" appeared in written English as early as the 1500s. 

Though we rarely use "cranny" without the accompanying "nook," a "cranny" is a small break or slit or an obscure corner. It comes from the Middle French "cren, cran," meaning a notch, as in "crenellation." Though both "nook" and "cranny" are relatively old words, they didn't team up in print until the 1830s. 

The "beck" in "beck and call" is an old term for a wordless gesture of command, such as a hand or forefinger motioning you to come here or go there. "Beck" is a clipped form of "beckon" and is related to the German word for "signal," which also gives us "beacon." The phrase "beck and call," meaning being subject to both physical and verbal instructions, first appeared in print during the 1870s. 

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