Question: How old are the words "hoodlum" and "hood"? Do they have anything to do with bank robbers wearing hoods during holdups?
Answer: The word "hoodlum" originated in San Francisco around 1870. (It did not get shortened to "hood" until about 1930.) By about 1877, people were taking notice of "hoodlum" in other areas of the country, but by that time no one could remember exactly how it had come to be. Newspaper articles were frequently written about the word, putting forth many colorful stories to account for it, but none of these have ever been proved true.
One story goes that the ruffians themselves would cry "huddle 'im!" when they encountered a potential victim on the waterfront. They would then huddle around him to beat him and steal his valuables.
Another story says that a San Francisco reporter spelled a local gang leader's name backwards because he feared the consequences of exposing the true name. "Muldoon" became "Noodlum," but a typesetter misread the reporter's handwriting, and "Noodlum" became "Hoodlum." Soon "hoodlum" became a synonym for a petty criminal. There are several variations on this story, including one in which "Noodlum" became "Hoodlum" because of an association with the Irish name "Hooligan."
Another theory is that "hoodlum" comes from a German dialect word, "hodalum," which means about the same thing as the English word. There were many German-Americans living in the San Francisco area at the time, so this may be a more plausible explanation than most of the others.
Question: The culinary term "shortening" has me puzzled. I believe its roots lie in the word "short," but how does shortness relate to the delightful process of making pastry flaky?
Answer: The word "shortening," which refers to any edible fat used to make baked goods tender or flaky, originated as a form of the verb "shorten." "Shorten" generally means "to make short" but in terms of baking means "to make tender or flaky by adding fat." The verb does, in fact, come from "short" but not in its widely known sense of "not tall or long." "Short" is less commonly used to describe anything that is flaky, crumbly or brittle - from pastry dough and salmon meat to fired metal and dried-out timber. It is this "easily crumbled or broken" sense of "short" that is at the heart of the word "shortening."
Unfortunately, "short" in this sense is something of an enigma. It first appears in an old cookbook recipe from the first half of the 15th century, but there is no earlier evidence to clearly show how this "brittle or crumbly" sense may have developed in a word that since the 9th century always referred in some way to length (or lack of it).
The recipe, which is for an old French pastry called a "raston," lists several ingredients and then instructs the cook to "putte al thes to-gederys & bete hem to-gederys with thin hond tyl it be schort & thikke y-now" (that is, to "put all these ingredients together and beat them together with your hand until the mixture is short and thick enough"). Oddly, here "schort" is used of the pastry before it is even put in the oven, unlike the later use of the word to describe the texture of the finished product. Nevertheless, we can be confident that "schort" means "crumbly" given the mixture's very dry ingredients (flour, eggs and yeast) and the fact that the recipe later asks the baker to remove the top crust of the pastry and "pyke al the cromys withynne" or "pick out all the crumbs that are inside."
There are also several nonculinary uses of "short" that suggest a dry crumbliness or brittle quality. One such example comes from a book on horsemanship published in 1607 whose author warns that improper shoeing of horses can "burne and drie vp their hoofes, making them short and brittle." Another appears in a farmers' guide dating back to 1766, which discusses the advantage of soil that "does not stick obstinately, but is short, tolerably light, breaking into small clods." There is also a modern advertisement for masonry cement that admits that its product will "get too short to work if too much sand is added."
The Oxford English Dictionary attempts to draw a connection between the "not long" and "crumbly" senses of "short": it suggests that the many different uses of "short" to describe things easily crumbled may have evolved from the general notion that such substances possess "little length of fiber." But what length of fiber has to do with brick mortar and French pastry isn't quite clear. Realistically, until we find clear written evidence supporting a sense of "short" that bridges the transition between "not long" and "crumbly," a full explanation of the origin of "shortening" will be just beyond our reach.
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.