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# Posted 2:33 AM by Patrick Belton

WORD PLAY: Amateur etymologists (etymophiles?) among our friends will take great pleasure in this site by England's Michael Quinion, an OEDist. You might spend some pleasant minutes there, if by chance you have been vaguely curious since kindergarten about the origin of, say Lb (and £) for "pound", the expression "big cheese" (the origins of which are incidentally Persian and Hindi, not dairy), the semantically nonsensical "I could care less" (which is found only in the States, and derives from Yiddish semantics), and my newly prized term to describe my own academic prospects, sticky wicket.

Also you might check if you're interested in Jesus H. Christ, or conversely the whole megillah (megillah, Heb., "scroll", from the reading of the book of Esther on Purim), the relationship between sycophancy and the Dantean insult "go suck a fig" (Gr. sukon, fig; see also the Sistine Chapel, wherein Michaelangelo shows his true feelings about his Julian patron), snob (from a Home Counties dialectical term for cobbler), keeping mum (with origins more onomatopoeic than Freudian), Elephant and Castle (from Infanta de Castile, translated into Cockney), and - for David and Rachel - bunny, a rural English term of endearment from the 17th century.

And Quinion also has an extraordinary wit which I'd be remiss if I didn't quote here extensively:

from the relevant entry: “I was in a deli recently when the girl behind the counter dropped something between the cabinets. There was an officer waiting on line and she said: ‘Do you think the long arm of the law can get this out for me?”

And on clams, happy and otherwise:

“Do you have any idea of the origins of the phrase happy as a clam? I’ve used it for years without knowledge of just how one would determine that a clam is happy—my acquaintance with the mollusc is strictly through consumption.”

[A] Near that stage in their lives, only the most masochistic of molluscs could be expected to experience anything but a sense of imminent dread. Even the most comfortable of clams, however, can hardly be called the life and soul of the party. All they can expect is a watery existence, likely at any moment to be rudely interrupted by a man with a spade, followed by conveyance to a very hot place.

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