Question: I've heard that the term "basket case" referred originally to a person who has had all four limbs amputated and has to be carried in a basket. Is this explanation true? It seems a bit macabre and not very convincing.
Answer: In current usage "basket case" means "one that is completely incapacitated, inoperative or worn out." Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, gives as the term's original sense "a person who has all four limbs amputated." Notice there is no actual mention of a basket in either definition. That's because even the earliest references to "basket cases" alluded only indirectly, if at all, to the involvement of baskets. For example, in 1919, the Official U.S. Bulletin announced that "The Surgeon General of the Army . . . denies emphatically that there is any foundation for the stories that have been circulated in all parts of the country of the existence of `basket cases' in our hospitals. A basket case is a soldier who has lost both legs and arms and therefore cannot be carried on a stretcher."
Whether or not there ever really were "basket cases" remains open to question, though there is no disputing the fact that, as in the above example, "basket case" originally meant "a quadruple amputee." That was apparently the only sense of the term all the way through World War II. Of course, even more questionable is whether "basket cases," if they truly existed, were ever really carried in baskets. There certainly doesn't appear to be any basis for this authoritative-sounding (and yes, macabre) definition in The New Social Worker's Dictionary, published in 1941: "basket case. Med(ical). A soldier or other person who has lost both arms and both legs and must be kept in a basket." It seems most likely that someone with an overactive imagination concocted the image of a legless, armless soldier carried in a basket - we'll probably never know just who.
During the second World War, stories about soldiers who had lost all four limbs resurfaced; most of the references of that time, like the one from 1919, involved scotching rumors of "so-called `basket cases' - cases of men with both legs and both arms amputated." In 1945 Time magazine actually reported the "first U.S. `basket case' of World War II," a major who had stepped on a mine. "The explosion blew off both legs above the knee, his left arm above the elbow, and mangled his right hand so badly that it had to be removed on the ship home." (You may note that this unfortunate man was not technically a true basket case, since parts of his limbs were still intact.)
The first known use of "basket case" in its now familiar figurative sense is from Saul Bellow's novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953): ". . . if he went wrong he was a total loss, no wise justified, a dead account, a basket case, an encumbrance, zero." There are just a few instances of this use from the 1960s in our files, but it really caught on, applied to both persons and things (as, for example, in describing a country as "an economic basket case"), in the '70s, and it continues to be common today.
Question: In the recent media coverage of the so-called "Sexgate" scandal in the White House, I several times have seen the word "lothario," which I believe means basically the same thing as "womanizer." Can you tell me anything about this word?
Answer: A lothario is a man whose chief interest is seducing women. The word comes from "The Fair Penitent" (1703), a tragedy by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718). In the play, Lothario is a notorious seducer who is described as "haughty" and "gallant." He seduces Calista, an unfaithful wife who later becomes the "fair penitent" of the title. The popularity of Rowe's play was such that the character of Lothario became a stock figure in English literature, and "lothario" quickly came to be used as a generic word synonymous with "rake" or "womanizer."