Question: If the "ic" in "icicle" stands for "ice," what is an "icle"? What language is it from?
Answer: While it might seem that "icle" ought to derive from something meaning "dagger" or "stick" (the way "berg" in "iceberg" is a Scandinavian word meaning "moun-tain"), that is not the case at all. To unravel the mystery of "icle" we have to go back nearly 1,300 years, to a time when the Old English word for "ice" was "is" and the word for "icicle" was "gicel." For some reason, in a manuscript of around the year 1000, the Latin word for icicle, "stiria," was translated as "ises gicel," which, with apparent redundancy, meant literally "icicle of ice." In Middle English "ises gicel" became a single word, spelled "ysekele," "isykele," or "isechele." Thus, the "icicle" that we know today means precisely what "ises gicel" meant a thousand years ago - "icicle of ice."
The story contains subplots as well. Old English "gicel" actually led a double life, leading not only to "icicle" but also to the separate word "ikyl" or "ikel" in Middle English, ultimately becoming "ickle" in Modern English. As late as the middle of the 20th century, "ickle" was still being used to mean "icicle" in Derbyshire and Yorkshire in northern England.
Furthermore, in some localities "ises gicel" had become not "ysekele" but the compound "ise-yokel" by the 14th century. This changed to "ice-schokle" or "iceshogle," which was eventually reduced to "shockle" or "shoggle." Thus, in Scottish dialect, "gicel" lives on in "shockle" and "shoggle" as the word for "icicle," as well as the word for "hunk of ice."
Question: Is there a technical medical term for the condition performers call "stage fright"?
Answer: "Stage fright" has a lot of other names - nervous performers call it everything from "butterflies" to "jitters" to "nervous stomach." One of our sources lists "performance anxiety" as a synonym of "stage fright," but that term doesn't appear in any of the medical dictionaries we checked. "Situation anxiety" does appear in the medical references, but it describes a feeling of apprehension that comes with the start of an undertaking, a meaning that only comes close to (but isn't the same as) "stage fright." There are a couple of clinical phobia terms for related but not identical conditions too. "Lalophobia" is used for a condition in which a person is literally afraid to speak, and "phono-phobia" can mean the fear of speaking aloud. Neither of these terms is a synonym of "stage fright," though. As far as we know, medical science hasn't prescribed a definitive term that labels the syndrome more clearly than plain old "stage fright."
Question: Why do we say something is "down the tubes" if it goes wrong or is ruined?
Answer: "Down the tubes" used to be an expression among sailors on submarines that meant "down in the torpedo room." It was also used to refer to swallowing, a sense similar to that of another idiomatic expression, "down the hatch." There is obviously a big gap between those meanings and the modern "go down the tubes," which means "to come to nothing" or "to go to ruin," and it's hard to say if there is a direct connection between the old and new senses. The actual origin of the current meaning is uncertain.
One theory about the origin of the current sense suggests that it derives from a cross between the expression "go down the drain" and the surfer's term "tube" (which describes the hollow space under the crest of a breaking wave). This could have given the expression "go down the tube" (the singular form "tube" does appear in early examples of the modern sense of "down the tubes"). The idea would be that, if one is going "down the tube" in surfing, one is in a most precarious position and might "wipe out." "Tube" was first recorded in the surfer's sense in 1964; the date of our first example of "down the tubes" in its modern sense is 1968. So the theory that "down the tubes" takes its modern meaning from surfing is plausible - but it is still only a theory.
This column was prepared by the editors of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Send questions to: Merriam-Webster's Wordwatch, P.O. Box 281, 47 Federal Street, Springfield, MA 01102.