“Bookworm, Cliché, Deadline…” And Other Unexpected Etymologies

The world of books has played a notable role in the history of English vocabulary. Book itself is one of the oldest words in the language: boc in Old English (with the o pronounced as in go). It was a fruitful source of vocabulary in Anglo-Saxon times. We find such compounds as boc-cræftig meaning “book-crafty”—applied to people who know their way around books, especially the Bible. And books would be found in a boc-hord (“book hoard”) or boca gestreon (“book treasury”), which are to my mind much better words than the modern “library.”

Boc meant not only “book,” as we would know it today, but any kind of written text, such as registers, catalogues, legal documents and charters. And that is the cue that has guided me in selecting the words explored in the following passabes. A single word from the world of books has often generated senses and idiomatic uses that have taken it in unexpected directions, thereby increasing the lexical richness of English. With the arrival of printing, the new terminology created more opportunities for lexical growth, as did the publishing industry; and the emergence of the internet has produced still more.

Bookworm

Insects that damage books have been around a long time. One of them provided the solution to an Old English verse riddle, written in the tenth-century Exeter Book. I translate it here, keeping the original line breaks and adding line-initial capitals and modern punctuation:

A moth ate words.
To me that seemed
A curious event, when I heard that wonder,
That the worm swallowed up the song of some man,
A thief in darkness, glorious utterance
And its strong foundation. The thieving guest was not
At all the wiser that he swallowed those words.

However, the actual word, bookworm, doesn’t appear in English until the sixteenth century, and when it does it’s first applied to people—those who are totally devoted to reading or, as another idiom has it, who always “have their nose in a book.” Early uses are almost always derogatory. Playwright Ben Jonson called them “candle-wasters.” His contemporary, writer Gabriel Harvey, paired them with heavy drinkers: “A morning bookeworm, an afternoone maltworm”—that is, someone addicted to malt beer.

The world of books has played a notable role in the history of English vocabulary. Book itself is one of the oldest words in the language.

Today the word has positive associations. To call someone a bookworm usually just means that they enjoy reading a lot. Evidence of its rehabilitation, if it were needed, is to be found in modern pastimes. It’s the title of a word-forming video game. And it names a character in Toy Story 3: an intelligent worm with a built-in flashlight, who has access to a library of instruction books for fixing toys, including the hero, Buzz Lightyear. Difficult to think of a greater accolade for a book-related word.

Cliché

The origin of this word in the world of printing has long been forgotten, along with the technology that gave rise to it. It arrived in English in the early nineteenth century from French clicher, a verb meaning to “make an impression on a surface of molten metal.” This would produce a cast or plate that would then be used for printing images. The plate was called the cliché. There’s no earlier history to the word, which seems to suggests that it began as an imitation of the shushing sound made in the process.

It took a while for the modern meaning of an “overused expression” to emerge. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1881. Thereafter it attracted such derogatory adjectives as “trite,” “facile,” “worn-out” and “stale.” And it wasn’t long before an associated sense appeared: any person, object or idea thought to be unoriginal was called a cliché, or attracted the adjective clichéd. The spelling was always contentious: to accent or not to accent? Many didn’t like the word’s French appearance, but to omit the accent resulted in a form that looked as if it should be pronounced “kleesh.” There were humorous suggestions to get round the problem, such as clitch, but none caught on.

Clichés have always had a bad press. But it’s not a straightforward issue. People have different views about whether a particular expression is a cliché or not. There are occasions when a cliché is actually useful, such as to fill an embarrassing silence. And it’s not easy to avoid them, because of their colloquial smoothness. As a writer in Readers’ Digest wryly remarked in a 1978 issue: “I used to use clichés all the time, but now I avoid ’em like the plague.”

Deadline

Has any word from the book world generated more drama titles than this one? Wikipedia lists over forty instances, dating from the 1920s, where it’s been used as the title for a film or play. Unsurprisingly, a good number of them are crime or horror films, where the wordplay on time and death evidently proved irresistible to the writers.

The mortality theme was there from the very beginning, when the word was first used, in the 1860s. There was some usage where dead meant simply “absence of motion” (as in “come to a dead stop”): a static fishing line was called a deadline, for instance. But there was also a military usage: a boundary line around a prison which prisoners were not allowed to cross. If they did, they were liable to be shot. It was first used in the American Civil War, at the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp Andersonville.

It was this sense of a “dangerous limit” that began to spread, at first in the USA. There were social deadlines that shouldn’t be crossed. And by the 1920s it was being used in the publishing industry. A deadline was a time—a date or a time of day—by which a piece of writing had to be ready if it was to be included in a particular issue of a publication or to meet the demands of a publishing schedule. From there, the usage extended to any task or assignment—a time by which something needs to be done, such as preparing a meal or sending in a tax return.

When a commissioning editor gives a writer a deadline, there’s an expectation that it will be respected. If only it were always so (says my Bodleian editor)! And there are famous cases of deadlines not being met, best summarized by Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” An informal usage was the consequence, after drop dead! began to be used in the 1930s as a strongly scornful expression. “What’s your drop-deadline?” an author might ask, having missed an initial deadline. It’s a limit beyond which no further leeway will be granted. “Can I have more time?” asks the hopeful writer, as that moment passes. “Drop dead!”

Judging a book by its cover

The concept is old. In Macbeth, Shakespeare has King Duncan reflect on the traitorous Thane of Cawdor, whom he had trusted: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Appearances can be deceiving, as the proverb says. The book-related idiom isn’t recorded until the mid- nineteenth century, though it was anticipated in 1704 by Irish poet Edmund Arwaker, who wrote in a preface to his translation of Aesop’s Fables: “a Man is not to be judg’d of by his Out-side, any more than a Book by its Title-Page.” He was making the point that there’s more to those fables than might appear at first sight.

It’s the negative sense that became proverbial: never (or don’t, you can’t) judge a book by its cover—or, in some versions, its binding. The warning is not to make assumptions about something or someone (as another idiom suggests: “at face value”). Any external feature can evoke it: a person’s hair or dress, the way food looks on a plate, an off-putting shop frontage…

Inevitably, some writers have gone in the opposite direction. Steven Jenkins is one, in his Cheese Primer (1996), commenting on artisanal cheeses which “are usually much scruffier on the outside than factory-made ones,” and concluding: “Choosing a cheese is one of the few times you should judge a book by its cover.” Publishers, too, are suspicious of the negative tradition, knowing the value of a striking cover design. And the impact of a book cover is felt to be especially important on social media sites that offer book publicity. As a Guardian article put it in 2021: “In the Instagram age, you actually can judge a book by its cover.”

Read between the lines

The “lines” in a piece of writing—rows of letters, punctuation marks and spaces—have been so-named since Anglo-Saxon times. The word is an application of the general notions of a string of things, a cord, a linear mark, and several other senses all ultimately derived from Latin linea, which meant “a linen thread.” It was hugely fruitful, adopted in virtually all areas of knowledge, as the parenthetical examples suggest in such domains as music (lines of a stave), mathematics (geometrical lines), travel (railway lines), commerce (product lines), biology (lineage), communications (phone lines) and programming (lines of code). It’s surprising, then, to find so few idioms making use of the word.

A single word from the world of books has often generated senses and idiomatic uses that have taken it in unexpected directions.

In the world of books, there’s really only one that’s achieved any presence: “reading between the lines”—to discover a meaning in a text that is implied but not actually stated in the words. It may be to do with factual content, the writer’s intentions or feelings, or any other kind of inference. It became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, and since then has been adopted—and often adapted—in a variety of settings. It’s especially popular in music, where it’s been chosen as the name of over a dozen songs or albums. Crime writers love it. So do railway enthusiasts, because of the obvious pun: for instance, it’s the title of the newsletter of Lancashire’s Community Railways group.

But the best puns (or worst, depending on your point of view) are those based on the existence of the town in Berkshire, Reading. (For those outside the UK who may not know, this is pronounced red-ing. It was founded by an Anglo-Saxon chief. The name means “the people of Reada.”) It’s the former name of a local theatre company. And it was the title of a book about the town’s football club, after its best season ever, when it won promotion to the top league in 2007: Reading Between the Lines: A Season of Dreams. (As a former professor of linguistics at Reading University, and a fan, I have to add that, as I write, the pun no longer works, after two relegations and another just avoided. Or, if it does, the subtitle would have to be A Season of Nightmares.)

Slush

There’s no known source for this word, which makes me think it has to be a sound imitation, like splash. It’s first recorded in the seventeenth century referring to partly melted snow or ice, and anyone who has walked through slush knows the hissing sound it makes. It was also used for liquid mud. So it’s not surprising to find it being used in a variety of settings with a negative meaning, and publishing is one of them. In the nineteenth century it became a dismissive label for any writing thought to be overly sentimental—in effect, rubbish, drivel. It was even used as an exclamation: “Oh slush!”

In publishing it became famous—or, rather, infamous—in the expression “slush pile,” which makes its appearance in the early twentieth century. It referred to all the unsolicited manuscripts sent to a publishing house by aspiring authors, such as book proposals, drafts of whole books, and magazine articles. Not everyone in publishing liked the term, as it suggested everything in the pile was going to be equally rubbish, which was patently not the case, for some success stories came out of it. And it showed little respect for the enthusiasm and commitment that the putative authors were displaying.

However, the size of the pile was usually considerable, by all accounts—often several thousand in a year—and as the quality of submissions was often very low the term has stayed in use in the publishing world, and achieved a certain amount of use outside it, referring to any informal collection of magazines, newspapers or other literature. I know one academic who calls the pile of not-yet-read journals in his office his slush pile. I have one myself. ☹

Self-publishing online, along with submission management software, has changed the situation to some extent, though it may just be that the center of gravity of the slush pile has shifted. As one online writer put it, “Is the Kindle the new slush-pile?”

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