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Posted on June 1, 2014 | 1 comment

Amalienborg Slot, Copenhagen

We just flew back from Copenhagen today. Copenhagen is a great place if you like slots.

No, I’m not talking about gambling. Or maybe I am…

Slot is Danish for ‘castle’ (or ‘palace’). Copenhagen has several of them. Not all are still in use as royal residences, but some are. Denmark still has royalty and those royalties seem to get pretty good royalties from their royalty, if the number of royal endorsement seals on high-end products is any indication. I noted the royal seal on my 750 mL glass of beer that I had before boarding my flight, and the same seal on the high-end clothing store next to the bar.

The Danish royal seal on a large draft

But that’s not a gamble; that’s straightforward commerce. The gamble comes more in whose face is on the coins. (Actually, only the 10 and 20 kroner coins have a royal face; the others just have hearts around the edge and a hole in the middle.) The throne is a slot to fill; which coin gets dropped in that slot? It may be a political machine, but when the wheels turn you don’t know for sure what you’ll get when they stop – and what the coins will look like when they come out.

Denmark’s royalty was elected by the nobility until the mid-1600s. The nobles were a rather fractious lot and had last say in many things, notably finances, and after a couple of military defeats in the 1650s which led to a lot of bills to pay, King Fredrik III asserted the need for a strong, stable government, and so he instated hereditary monarchy and a law declaring the king to be sovereign beyond the law and inferior only to God. The people seemed to like that. Absolute monarchy held sway in the country for almost 200 years, until another war’s disastrous conclusion led to the establishment of a constitutional state – but retaining the hereditary royalty. So it remains a closed shop, and who you get is determined by the lottery of birth: who happened to be born when to whom. Ya pays yer royalties, ya takes yer princes and princesses.

It’s fitting to call it a closed shop. That word slot is an old Germanic word relating to just that: closing and locking. There’s another country that calls a castle a slot: the Netherlands. As it happens, you’ll also see signs on doors in the Netherlands saying gesloten. That means ‘closed’. With just a slight difference in historical sound changes you get German geschlossen ‘closed’ and Schloss ‘castle’. See the pattern? A fortress or castle is a closed, locked place – and a palace is a later development of a castle.

How does that relate to English slot? Is it from the door bolt sliding in a slot? No, actually. The English slot that is related is out of use now in most places; it refers to a bolt or bar for locking a door. To find the ‘groove’ version, we need to do a bit more sleuthing. It showed up first in English to refer to the slight depression running down the middle of the breast. But it seems to have taken that from the groove in the hoof-print of an ungulate animal, Old French esclot. That in turn appears to come from Old Norse slóð ‘track’, which is related to modern English sleuth. (A side-note: a sleuth may track an animal by its spoor; in modern Dutch, ‘railway track’, as in Track 9 in a station, is spoor. In Danish, by the way, it’s spor. But don’t think for a moment that Dutch and Danish are mutually intelligible. They’re not really that closely related.)

It is from that ‘groove’ sense that most English usages of slot come, be they the specific times allotted for plains coming into and going out of an airport (such as the plane I was on today) or (to quote the Oxford English Dictionary) “The middle of the semi-circular or horseshoe-shaped desk at which a newspaper’s sub-editors work, occupied by the chief sub-editor” – from which we get The Slot, Bill Walsh’s website for copy editors.

We could draw a parallel between the chief copy editor and a king, I suppose: the heart of the operation. But the slot in the newsroom is the beating heart, the control centre. That is not so true of royalty anymore; they are more ceremonial now. Just as well. We have seen how, in times past, when we have looked in the middle of the chest, the heart has been barred, closed – or when we look for it we find no more than a hole in the middle. Why cast lots or play slots with a country’s future?

We’re just as well off in English, where slot functions better as a word for things that often make a sound like “slot!” when in use: grooved mechanisms and openings for coins. But of course, we have a monarch too (not you, Americans; I’m talking about us members of the Commonwealth). She looks very nice on the coins.

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Posted on March 23, 2013 | 1 comment

Etymology is a great field for the amateur sleuth. Can’t you just picture a word nerd donning a deerstalker cap and piloting a big magnifier to ferret out early citations for a word? You know, there are some people who put quite a lot of time and energy into antedating words – finding citations that show that the word was in use earlier than previously thought, and perhaps giving some clue as to where it came from. One might imagine it as being like a bloodhound, sniffing the old foxed library books for the faint hints of a lexical trail.

Those of us who benefit from the lucubrations of such dedicated geeks can be more slothful. If I want to sleuth out the origin of a word, all I need do is consult a good etymological dictionary, as long as it has the info. If I want to know what words it is used with, there are corpus databases for that. And if I want to know what other words could be influencing it by resemblance… well, no one is doing formal studies on that, so the best I can do is taste, imagine, surmise.

What does sleuth mean to you? Yes, ‘detective’, certainly, as in the common collocation amateur sleuth; it is also a verb, as in sleuth it out. But what image do you get? Popular culture has some images it has determined, thanks to books and movies. But can you use the term for any detective? Is Mike Hammer a sleuth? Sam Spade? Hercule Poirot? Miss Marple? Jessica Fletcher? Sherlock Holmes? Are they all equally sleuthy, or do you tend more to have an image of, say, the Basil Rathbone version of Sherlock Holmes, with the deerstalker cap (as opposed to the Jeremy Brett version, top-hatted and more accurate to the books and also very entertaining, or the more recent Holmses such as Robert Downey Jr. or Benedict Cumberbatch)? Is a tough-guy detective not soft and subtle enough to be a sleuth slinking like soft silk through the dark alleys and drawing rooms?

If so, is this just an effect of which image is strongest- and longest-established, or does it have something to do with the sound of the word, coming and going with voiceless fricatives and, between them, the liquid /l/ and that dark, hollow high back vowel /u/? It slips and slides but sounds as though it seeks the truth like a soothsayer. Try this for comparison: in German, the word for ‘key’ is Schlüssel. Which sounds more like it would slip smoothly into a lock, key or Schlüssel? Now tell me what tones detective, private eye, and sleuth have for you.

But where does this word come from, sleuth? Ah, well, there’s an interesting trail. And it’s a trail that can’t be pursued without sloth. You see, sloth is the older form of this word. But this sloth is not related to the word sloth that we know and use today; that word comes from slow+th just as width comes from wide+th. But it happens that the modern word sloth also used to have a form sleuth, so it seems that the shift from sloth to sleuth is a more natural one than some might expect. (It’s easier if you’re an armchair sleuth.) Anyway, the sloth that our sleuth comes from is from an Old Norse word for ‘track’ or ‘trail’. That is what a sleuth (sloth) first was: the trail of an animal… or person.

And if you are tracking a person or animal, you may find it useful to have a bloodhound. What, since the 1400s (though less so today), is another name for a bloodhound? Sleuth-hound. It was not until the mid-1800s that persons who tracked other persons came to be called sleuth-hounds. But it took a mere couple of decades for that to be shortened to sleuth. The term was used for fictional detectives at least 15 years before the appearance of Sherlock Holmes (the Oxford English Dictionary has an 1872 citation naming a story called Sleuth, the Detective).

Was sleuth applied to Sherlock Holmes by his author? In “The Red-Headed League,” we see this: “his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive.” That appears to be the one and only use of the term in Arthur Conan Doyle’s works (at least that I can find from sniffing around in the Project Gutenberg library), and that’s a sleuth-hound. But that’s not so surprising if you know that the use of the word sleuth for a detective first came about in America. And its use as a verb meaning ‘ply the trade of a detective’ appeared at the beginning of the 1900s.

So there it is: the fruits of amateur armchair sleuthing… a small amount of digging but mostly just looking things up. But the tasting is still up to you.

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