Question: Can you explain why we use the expression "to lose your marbles" to mean "to go crazy"?
Answer: The phrase "lose one's marbles" is just one of the countless ways we have in American English of saying "go crazy." It derives from the use of the word "marbles" to mean "elements of common sense." The phrase is apparently of modern creation. Our own earliest example of use is dated 1946, and the earliest record we know of is only from 1927. The word "marbles" itself was in use for the child's playthings for centuries before these dates, but the playing of the game of marbles in the United States hit its prime in the 1930s.
The game of marbles spawned a great deal of Depression-era slang, according to Tom Dalzell's book "Flappers 2 Rappers."
"To lose one's marbles" may be a manifestation of the colorful language of that game, playing on the idea that losing your marbles (by having them knocked out of the ring) means losing the game. The association may have been boosted by the alliteration in the words "mind" and "marbles."
We seem to be very adept at finding ways to describe having lost one's sense. Similar expressions include "going bananas," "having a screw loose," "not playing with a full deck," and "out to lunch," to name only a few.
Question: My dictionary says the word "robot" comes from Czech for "compulsory labor." Could you elaborate on this?
Answer: In 1923, a play called "R.V.R." opened in London and New York. As well as having a successful run, the play made a lasting contribution to our vocabulary by introducing the word "robot" into English. The author, Karl Capek, coined "robot" from the Czech "robota," meaning "forced labor." In "R.V.R." (which stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots" in the English translation) mechanical men originally designed to perform manual labor become so sophisticated that some advanced models develop the capacity to feel and hate and eventually destroy mankind.
"Robot" caught on quickly on both sides of the Atlantic, and within a few years it was being used to denote not only "a complex machine that looks somewhat human" but also "a person who has been dehumanized through the necessity of performing mechanical, mindless tasks in a highly industrialized society." Today, "robot" is also widely used in both scientific and nonscientific circles as a term for "any automatic apparatus or device that performs functions ordinarily ascribed to human beings or operates with what appears to be almost human intelligence."
Question: I've always thought "sleuth" an odd word. Can you tell me its origin?
Answer: A modern English sleuth is a detective, but in Middle English, the word "sleuth" meant "the track of an animal or person." The word was a borrowing from Old Norse "sloth." After the 15th century, "sleuth" was seldom used except in compounds like "sleuth-dog" and "sleuthhound." These were terms for a dog trained to follow a track. "Sleuthhound" was used specifically in Scotland for a kind of bloodhound used to hunt game or to track down fugitives from justice. We find mention of the legal importance of the sleuthhound in John Bellenden's English translation of Hector Boece's Latin "History and Chronicles of Scotland" (1536): "He that denyis entres to the sleuthound . . . sal be haldin participant with the crime and thift committit." (He that denies entrance to the sleuthhound . . . shall be considered a participant in the crime and theft committed.)
The sleuthhound, originally a Scottish animal, gained fame far beyond the bounds of its homeland; it became a symbol of the eager and thorough pursuit of an object. According to Elizabeth Gaskell in her "Life of Charlotte Bronte" (1857), "The West Riding men are sleuthhounds in pursuit of money." In the 19th-century United States, the metaphoric "sleuthhound" acquired a more specific meaning and became an epithet for a detective. This new term was soon shortened to "sleuth."