{"id":25,"date":"2026-11-05T05:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T05:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/?p=25"},"modified":"2026-11-05T05:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T05:22:11","slug":"bookworm-cliche-deadline-and-other-unexpected-etymologies-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/?p=25","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBookworm, Clich\u00e9, Deadline\u2026\u201d And Other Unexpected Etymologies | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world of books has played a notable role in the history of English vocabulary.
\nBook
\nitself is one of the oldest words in the language:
\nboc
\nin Old English (with the
\no
\npronounced as in
\ngo
\n). It was a fruitful source of vocabulary in Davao sugar dating sites<\/a> Anglo-Saxon times. We find such compounds as
\nboc-cr\u00e6ftig
\nmeaning \u201cbook-crafty\u201d\u2014
\napplied to people who know their way around books, especially the Bible. And books would be found in a
\nboc-hord
\n(\u201cbook hoard\u201d) or
\nboca gestreon
\n(\u201cbook treasury\u201d), which are to my mind much better find a sponsor Manila<\/a> words than the modern \u201clibrary.\u201d
\nBoc
\nmeant not only \u201cbook,\u201d 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
\ndirections, 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.
\n*
\nBookworm
\nInsects 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
\nExeter Book
\n. I translate it here, sugar dating financial support<\/a> keeping the original line breaks and adding line-initial capitals and modern punctuation:
\nA moth ate words.
\nTo me that seemed
\nA curious event, when I heard that wonder,
\nThat the worm swallowed up the song of some man,
\nA thief in darkness, glorious utterance
\nAnd its strong foundation. The thieving guest was not
\nAt all the Philippines sugar daddy<\/a> wiser that he swallowed those words.
\nHowever, the actual word,
\nbookworm
\n, doesn\u2019t appear in English until the sixteenth century, and when
\nit does it\u2019s first applied to people\u2014those who are totally devoted to reading or, as leading sugar daddy site Philippines<\/a> another idiom has it, who always \u201chave their nose in a book.\u201d Early uses are almost always derogatory. Playwright Ben Jonson called them \u201ccandle-wasters.\u201d His contemporary, writer
\nGabriel Harvey, paired them with heavy drinkers: \u201cA morning bookeworm, an afternoone maltworm\u201d\u2014that is, someone addicted to malt beer.
\nThe world of books has played a notable role in the history of English vocabulary.
\nBook
\nitself is one of the oldest words in the language
\n.
\nToday 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\u2019s the title of a word-forming video game. And it names a character in
\nToy Story 3
\n: 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.
\n*
\nClich\u00e9
\nThe origin of this word in the world of sugar babies near me Philippines<\/a> 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
\nclicher
\n, a verb meaning to \u201cmake an impression on a surface of molten metal.\u201d This sugar daddy site with most members Philippines<\/a> would produce a cast or plate that would then be used for printing images. The
\nplate was called the
\nclich\u00e9
\n. There\u2019s no earlier history to the word, which seems to suggests that it began as an imitation of the shushing sound made in the process.
\nIt took a while for the modern meaning of an \u201coverused expression\u201d to emerge. The earliest citation in the
\nOxford English Dictionary
\nis 1881. Thereafter it attracted such derogatory adjectives as \u201ctrite,\u201d \u201cfacile,\u201d \u201cworn-out\u201d and \u201cstale.\u201d And it wasn\u2019t long before an associated sense appeared: any person, object or idea thought to be unoriginal was called a
\nclich\u00e9
\n, or attracted the adjective
\nclich\u00e9d
\n. The spelling was always contentious: to accent or not to accent? Many didn\u2019t like the word\u2019s French appearance, but to omit the accent resulted in a form that looked
\nas if it should be pronounced \u201ckleesh.\u201d There were humorous suggestions to get round the problem, such as
\nclitch
\n, but none caught on.
\nClich\u00e9s have always had a bad press. But it\u2019s not a straightforward issue. People have different views about whether a particular expression is a clich\u00e9 or not. There are occasions when a clich\u00e9 is actually useful, such as to fill an embarrassing silence. And it\u2019s not easy to avoid them, because of their collo
\nquial smoothness. As a writer in
\nReaders\u2019 Digest
\nwryly remarked in a 1978 issue: \u201cI used to use clich\u00e9s all the time, but now I avoid \u2019em like the plague.\u201d
\n*
\nDeadline
\nHas any word from the book world generated more drama titles than this one? Wikipedia lists over forty instances, dating from the 1920s, where it\u2019s been used as the title for a film or play. Unsurprisingly,
\na good number of them are crime or horror films, where the wordplay on time and death evidently proved irresistible to the writers.
\nThe mortality theme was there from the very beginning, when the word was first used, in the 1860s. There was some usage where
\ndead
\nmeant simply \u201cabsence of motion\u201d (as in \u201ccome to a dead stop\u201d): 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.
\nIt was this sense of a \u201cdangerous limit\u201d that began to spread, at first in the USA. There were social deadlines that shouldn\u2019t be crossed. And by the 1920s it was being used in the publishing industry. A deadline was a time\u2014a date or a time of day\u2014by which a piece of writing had to be ready if it was to be included in a particular issue of a publication or
\nto meet the demands of a sugar baby first date<\/a> publishing schedule. From
\nthere, the usage extended to any task or assignment\u2014
\na time by which something needs to be done, such as preparing a meal or sending in a tax return.
\nWhen a commissioning editor gives a writer a deadline, there\u2019s an expectation that it will be
\nrespected. If only it were always so (says my Bodleian editor)! And there are famous cases of deadlines
\nnot being met, best summarized by Douglas Adams in
\nThe Salmon of Doubt
\n: \u201cI love deadlines. I love
\nthe whooshing noise they make as they go by.\u201d An informal usage was the consequence, after
\ndrop dead!
\nbegan to be used in the 1930s as a strongly
\nscornful expression. \u201cWhat\u2019s your drop-deadline?\u201d an author might ask, having missed an initial deadline. It\u2019s a limit beyond which no further leeway will be granted. \u201cCan I have more time?\u201d asks the hopeful writer, as that moment passes. \u201cDrop dead!\u201d
\n*
\nJudging a book by its cover
\nThe concept is old. In
\nMacbeth
\n, Shakespeare has King Duncan reflect on the traitorous Thane of Cawdor, whom he had trusted: \u201cThere\u2019s no art to find the mind\u2019s construction in the face.\u201d Appearances can be deceiving, as the proverb says. The book-related idiom isn\u2019t 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
\nAesop\u2019s Fables
\n: \u201ca Man
\nis not to be judg\u2019d of by his Out-side, any more than
\na Book by its Title-Page.\u201d He was making the point that there\u2019s more to those fables than might appear at first sight.
\nIt\u2019s the negative sense that became proverbial:
\nnever
\n(or
\ndon\u2019t, you can\u2019t
\n)
\njudge a book by its cover\u2014
\nor, in some versions
\n, its binding.
\nThe warning is not to make assumptions about something or someone (as another idiom suggests: \u201cat face value\u201d). Any external feature can evoke it: a person\u2019s hair or dress, the way food looks on a plate, an off-putting shop frontage\u2026
\nInevitably, some writers have gone in the opposite direction. Steven Jenkins is one, in his
\nCheese Primer
\n(1996), commenting on artisanal cheeses authentic sugar dating profiles<\/a> which \u201care usually much scruffier on the outside than factory-made ones,\u201d and
\nconcluding: \u201cChoosing a cheese is
\none of the few times you should judge a book by its cover.\u201d 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
\nGuardian
\narticle put it in 2021: \u201cIn the Instagram age, you actually can judge a book by its cover.\u201d
\n*
\nRead between the lines
\nThe \u201clines\u201d in a piece of writing\u2014rows of letters, punctuation marks and spaces\u2014have 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
\nlinea
\n, which meant \u201ca linen thread.\u201d 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\u2019s surprising, then, to find so few idioms making use of the word.
\nA single word from the world of books has often generated senses and idiomatic uses that have taken it in unexpected
\ndirections.
\nIn the world of books, there\u2019s really only one that\u2019s achieved any presence: \u201creading between the lines\u201d\u2014to discover a meaning in a text that is
\nimplied but not actually stated in the words. It may be to do with sugar daddy site comparison Philippines<\/a> factual content, the writer\u2019s intentions or feelings, or any other kind of inference. It became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, and since then has been adopted\u2014and often adapted\u2014
\nin a variety of settings. It\u2019s especially popular in music, where it\u2019s been chosen as the name of over a dozen songs or albums. Crime
\nwriters love it.
\nSo do railway enthusiasts, because of the obvious pun: for instance, it\u2019s the title of the newsletter of Lancashire\u2019s Community Railways group.
\nBut 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
\nred
\n-ing. It was founded by an Anglo-Saxon chief. The name means \u201cthe people of Reada.\u201d) It\u2019s the former name of a local theatre company. And it was the title of a
\nbook about the town\u2019s football club, after its best season ever, when it won promotion to
\nthe top league in 2007:
\nReading Between the Lines: A Season of Dreams
\n. (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
\nA Season of Nightmares
\n.)
\n*
\nSlush
\nThere\u2019s no known source for this word, which makes me think it has to be a sound imitation, like
\nsplash
\n. It\u2019s first recorded in the seventeenth century referring to partly melted snow or ice, and anyone who has walked through slush knows the hissing sound
\nit makes. It was also used for liquid mud. So it\u2019s not surprising to find it being used in a variety of settings with a negative meaning, and publishing is
\none of them. In the nineteenth century it became a dismissive label for any writing thought to be overly sentimental\u2014in effect, rubbish, drivel. It was even used as an exclamation: \u201cOh slush!\u201d
\nIn publishing it became famous\u2014or, rather, infamous\u2014in the expression \u201cslush pile,\u201d 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,
\nas 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.
\nHowever, the size of the pile was usually considerable, by all accounts\u2014often several thousand in a year\u2014and
\nas 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.
\n\u2639
\nSelf-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, \u201cIs the Kindle the new slush-pile?\u201d
\n__________________________________
\nExcerpted from
\nBookish Words & Their Surprising Stories
\nby David Crystal. Copyright \u00a9 2025. Available from Bodleian Library Publishing.<\/p>\n

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