Shambles

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Erin Jones from San Diego, California.

Hi, Erin.

Hey, Erin, how are you doing?

Hi, I’m good. How are you guys?

All right, great.

Doing well. What’s going on?

Well, I was calling because I had a question about a phrase that I used recently that I never really thought about before until someone pointed out that it was kind of an odd phrase that I used.

But basically, I am going to grad school in the fall.

And before I’m going, I decided that I wanted to go on a trip for about a month to Central America.

So at the same time, my lease was up for my apartment, and I had a backpacking trip that I was doing.

So I kind of was packing up my apartment and also packing for these two trips at the same time.

And my house was just covered in boxes.

So originally I was going to plan on maybe having a dinner party that night, and I realized that half my stuff was packed away in boxes already, and I didn’t know which ingredients were in the cupboard anymore.

So basically I called my friend up and I was like, hey, you know, I know we’re supposed to have dinner tonight.

Can we maybe do it at your house instead?

So my word was I said, can we have the dinner party at your house because my house is in shambles right now.

I didn’t even think anything of it.

But then he started laughing and said, shambles, ha ha.

And I was thinking, yeah, you know, that is kind of a funny phrase.

I don’t really know where that came from, but I was calling to find out where that came from.

So your house wasn’t bloody, right?

There was no meat thrown around everywhere, no carcasses?

No, I hope not.

Okay.

She wouldn’t know.

There were boxes everywhere.

Because up until like the 1920s and 30s and even into the 40s, there were two competing meetings for shambles.

And they were, the old meeting was bloody, literally bloody, covered in blood, like a crime scene.

And in turn…

You really don’t want to come to my house tonight.

And in turn, the word shambles for that came from the stool or the booth or the stall that you might have found, say, in a marketplace.

Where the butcher worked.

He would have the carcass hanging on a hook.

He’d point to the flank that you wanted.

And he’d cut it off.

That’s roughly what it comes from.

It ultimately goes back to Latin word meaning stool or bench.

So it’s interesting.

So from Latin stool bench to a small stall that might contain a stool or a bench used by a butcher to a place of butchery to a bloody mess to a place that was just a mess without the blood.

Oh, that’s awesome.

Yeah.

It’s worse than you knew.

Yeah.

Seriously, don’t come over tonight, really.

Well, yeah, don’t leave a corpse there before you go, all right?

So in shambles, does that come to mean something different, or is that still kind of the connotation that comes with it?

It just means a mess, just a disorder.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like, did I use that correctly?

No, you’re fine.

No, you’re absolutely using it correctly.

And there are some English words that do that, where they’re really vivid and gross like that.

I mean, the word dreary goes back to dreary in Old English, which was, I mean, if you stuck a sword in somebody and pulled it out, the gore on your sword was dreary.

And a lot of the words like that tend to lose their much more vivid meaning over time.

They dilute.

Yeah, it’s called semantic bleaching, where the vividness of it kind of pales after a while.

Semantic bleaching.

Yeah, that’s the official term for it.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So what word made you cock your ear when you had a conversation with somebody?

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