Question: What is the origin of the phrase "to spruce up," meaning "to clean up or improve the appearance of"? Does it have something to do with the planting of spruce trees to improve a property?
Answer: Good guess, but the connection between "spruce up" and "spruce tree" is actually less direct. Let us explain.
The word "Spruce," an alteration of "Pruce," was once used in English as a name for the country of Prussia. A number of goods imported from Prussia were therefore known by names that began with the word "spruce" - spruce canvas, spruce iron, spruce leather, etc. The spruce tree, which was tall and straight and thus especially desirable for use as the mast of a ship, was one of the most valued of these Prussian products. The word "Prussia" eventually supplanted "Spruce" as the name for the country, but by that time "spruce" had become well established as the name of a tree.
The verb "spruce" is presumably derived from the use of "spruce" as an adjective meaning "neat or smart in appearance," but the origins of this adjective are harder to pin down. Chances are quite good that it also evolved from the earlier "Spruce" (Prussia), but the exact nature of the connection is not known with certainty. Our best guess is that the "neat and trim" sense of "spruce" developed as an extended use from "spruce leather" - a leather imported from Prussia with which particularly fine jerkins (close-fitting jackets) were made. An early example of the adjective can be found in the writing of Thomas Dekker, who in 1609 used the phrase "the neatest and sprucest leather."
Question: Some years back there was a family of common gallinules living in my back yard, before the pond that abutted it was turned into a parking lot. Recently, on a visit with a birding relative in south Texas, I heard her call what looked to me like the same kind of bird a "moorhen." Is that a local name? I am led to believe that is the case because my bird guide gives only "common gallinule" and my dictionary defines "moorhen" as "gallinule."
Answer: If both your bird guide and your dictionary have a copyright date before 1983 they would not reflect the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) 1983 adoption of "common moorhen" as the new name for the common gallinule. "Moor-hen" isn't, however, really a new name. Its adoption by the AOU was in the interest of uniformity. The species known as common gallinule (Gallinula chloropus) has been called a "moorhen" in Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and "moorhen" is the established name there. The AOU decided to append "common" to the American name in order to distinguish the species from the genus group Gallinula to which it belongs and to which the general name "moorhen" was assigned.
Our common moorhen was originally thought to be a subspecies of the European bird and was first known as the Florida gallinule. Around 1950, it was reclassified as simply a regional variant of the European species, rather than a subspecies, and given the new name "common gallinule." Another very closely related bird, the purple gallinule, belongs to a different genus and thus isn't a moorhen, though by definition it is considered a gallinule. To add to the confusion, there are two purple gallinules, an American one and a European one, with different but very similar genus names.
You would expect such an odd little bird (whose name in Latin, "gallinula," means "little hen") to have more than one common name, and indeed it does. One or the other of the gallinules has been variously called "water hen," "marsh hen," "swamp hen," "sultana" and "blue Peter." But it you were to hear someone use one of these names now, he or she might just as likely be referring to the American coot, which belongs to the same family as the gallinules.