Today’s new word isn’t really new to me. But I was talking the other day to fellow word enthusiast Tim Stewart about the phrase “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” and we decided that there’s a term in there that might be new to a lot of people: to spindle.
The exhortation not to fold, spindle, or mutilate comes from the days when people used mainframe computers and punch cards. Here’s a basic punch card with the phrase printed across the bottom:
Punch cards act as input data for a computer; the patterns of the holes that are punched in the card represent numeric values.
There was a period when documents were printed directly on punch cards. You might get your utility bill on a punch card, or your class schedule. Even checks might be printed on punch cards:
The phrase “Do not fold …” (or one like it) was often printed on cards that might be handled by non-computer people. If someone took their punch card check and folded it or tore it or punched a couple of extra holes in it, the card couldn’t be read properly.
Ok, what about spindle? A spindle is a metal spike on which you impale pieces of paper, like this:
Spindling is used sometimes to keep short-lifetime papers together, things like a business’s receipts for the day. That being the case, the people who sent out bills printed on punch cards didn’t want you to open an envelope, take out the punch card, and stick it on the “pay next week” spindle, thereby adding holes to the card. So “do not spindle.”
While reading about this, I also learned that the expression to spike a story in journalism, meaning to stop or kill the story, originally referred to spindling it on the editor’s desk rather than moving it forward in the publishing process.
Origins! I was poking around in Garner’s Modern English Usage recently and my eye fell on the entry for solecism. Garner defines this as “An ungrammatical combination of words, noncompliance with the rules of syntax, or a deviation from standard usage.” More succinctly, an error.
Garner included a word history that I found surprising and delightful. Solecism is a toponym, who knew, referring to the Greek city of Soloi; in ancient Greek, soloikos was “of or pertaining to Soloi.”
The snooty Athenians were of the opinion that the way that the folks in Soloi spoke—their soloikos Greek—was a “corrupted” version of beautiful Attic Greek. Even in Greek, the word soloikismus came to mean speaking incorrectly or sounding like a rube. This word passed into Latin, then into French, and finally into English.
It just goes to show that there have probably never been people anywhere who didn’t think that our language is beautiful and correct, and the way those people speak is barbarous and, of course, wrong.
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