Month: September 2025

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

Are you getting antsy?

Q: A recent BuzzFeed headline suggested that Travis Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift sooner than he intended because she was “antsy.” Now I’m antsy about learning the history of “antsy.”

A: In the Aug. 27, 2025, article on BuzzFeed, Ed Kelce, the father of the football player, is quoted as saying his son “was going to put it off” for a couple of weeks, but the singer “was getting maybe a little antsy” to be engaged.

As for the history of “antsy,” a possible early version (spelled “ancey”) appeared in the first half of the 19th century, but it’s uncertain that the two terms are related, even though both apparently have the same meaning—restlessly impatient or agitated.

The Dictionary of American Regional English begins its “antsy” entry with this early example: “Minard’s talking and Peake’s scribbling were enough to drive anyone ancey” (Papers of Bishop Jackson Kemper, 1838).

However, the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, says it’s “unclear” whether “ancey” and “antsy,” though used “apparently with the same sense,” should be “interpreted as showing the same word.”

The OED suggests that the story of “antsy” actually began nearly a century later with the appearance of the expression “to have ants in one’s pants and variants.”

The dictionary defines the expression as “to fidget constantly; to be restlessly impatient or eager,” noting that in early use the fidgeting involved sexual feelings, as in the first Oxford citation:

“Some of the boys around town sure got ants in their pants over her” (from Torch Song: A Play in Prologue and Three Acts, by Kenyon Nicholson).

Here’s a later OED example where someone is turned on by music: “This guy gets so worked up when he hears swing that he can’t sit still but jumps around as if he had ants in his pants” (Pic magazine, March 9, 1938).

As for “antsy” (spelled the usual way), it apparently appeared for the first time in the phrase “antsy-pantsy,” which was derived from the longer expression. The earliest example we’ve found is from The Long Death, a 1937 murder mystery by George Dyer:

“I dope it out that the gunman in the front got through writing, and began to get antsy-pantsy to go on with the kidnapping where he’d left off.” (He had been writing a “snatch note” demanding “20 grand.”)

The oldest example we’ve seen for “antsy” used by itself is in Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “The psychologist could look at his Van Gogh and get antsy all by himself” (from One Cried Murder, a 1945 mystery novel by Jean Leslie).

And this is the latest citation in the OED: “The hours of telly exposure made me oddly antsy and anxious” (from Time Out New York, Jan. 1, 2009).

Finally, the combinations of “ants” and “pants” reminds us of an antsy mnemonic used to remember the difference between stalactites and stalagmites: “When the mites go up the tites go down.”

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The short and the long

Q: I think you can say, “The new bits last longer than the old bits,” but you can’t say, “The new bits last shorter than the old bits.” Why is that?

A: The words “short” and “long” are sometimes antonyms and sometimes not, often depending on whether they’re adjectives or adverbs.

As adjectives, they’re usually antonyms, so one could describe a drill bit as “short,” “shorter,” or “shortest” as well as “long,” “longer,” or “longest.”

But as adverbs, “short” and “long” generally aren’t opposites. For example, “short” can mean soon (“I’ll be there shortly”), abruptly or quickly (“He stopped short”), and unprepared (“He was caught short”).

And the adverb “long” can refer to a specific period (“He worked all summer long”), a significant distance (“Do you have to travel long to get there?”), and beyond a certain time (“I can’t stay longer”).

So it’s not unusual that only one of the adverbs works with the verb “last,” as in your example—something can “last longer” but it can’t “last shorter.”

In fact, the adjectives “short” and “long” aren’t always opposites either. “Short,” for example, can mean insufficiently supplied (“She was short of cash”), abrupt or curt (“He was short with her and she was even shorter in replying”), and quick or efficient (“They made short work of it”).

And “long” can mean speculative (“It was a long guess”), a specific length (“The rug was six feet long”), at great odds (“She took a long chance when she married me”), and a specific duration (“The speech was two hours long”).

But in the financial sense, the two adverbs can still be antonyms: when you “sell short” you think an asset’s price will fall in value over time, and when you “sell long” you think it will rise in value.

And of course “short” and “long” have various other senses as nouns and verbs, such as  “shorts” (short pants or underpants), an electrical “short” (short circuit), to “short” out,  and to “long” (feel a strong desire) for someone or something.

As for their etymologies, “short” and “long” both appeared in Old English as adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs. The first citations in the Oxford English Dictionary are for the adjectives (sceortne and langne), words inherited from prehistoric Germanic.

The OED’s first “short” citation, which uses the term in the distance sense, is from the Old English Boethius, a late ninth- or early tenth-century translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“Forþy hi habbað swa sceortne ymbhwyrft” (“Therefor they [some stars] have so short a circuit”). The passage refers to the ancient belief that the stars and other celestial bodies traveled around a stationary earth.

The first “long” example is from Daniel, an anonymous poem based loosely on the biblical Book of Daniel. This passage refers to the journey of the ancient Israelites into exile in Babylonia after the army of King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in the sixth century BC:

“Gelæddon eac on langne sið Israela cyn, on eastwegas to Babilonia” (“They [Nebuchadnezzar’s troops] led the people of Israel on a long journey over the eastward roads to Babylonia”).

We should mention here that the title of our post, “the short and the long,” is an early version of the more common expression “the long and the short.”

When “the short and (the) long” first appeared in the 15th century, the OED says, it referred to “all that can or need be said; the summation, total, substance, or essence of the subject under discussion; the upshot.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from “The Merchant and His Son,” an anonymous poem written sometime before 1500: “Y wolde have the [thee] a man of lawe, thys ys the schorte and longe.” From Remains of Early Popular Poetry of England (1864), edited by William Carew Hazlitt.

And here’s a better known example from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, probably written in the late 16th century: “He loves your wife; there’s the short and the long.” (Nym, a servant of Falstaff, is speaking here to the husband of Mistress Page.)

The OED says the reverse expression, “the long and (the) short of (it, etc.),” had a similar meaning when it appeared in the 17th century: “But to the purpose here’s the long and short ont” (from Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes From No Place, 1622, by John Taylor).

Finally, here’s the dictionary’s latest example of the usage: “The long and the short of it will be that for weeks on end everybody will be offended with everybody else to the point that no one will be speaking to anyone.” From His Current Woman (2002), Bill Johnston’s translation of Inne Rozkosze (“Other Pleasures”), a novel by the Polish writer Jerzy Pilch.

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Why ‘learn by heart,’ not ‘by brain’?

Q: Why do we refer to memorizing as “learning by heart”? Wouldn’t “learning by brain” make more sense?

A: The expression “learn by heart” reflects an ancient belief that the heart, not the brain, is the human body’s organ of sensation and cognition.

That sense of “heart,” now sometimes called the cardiocentric hypothesis, was common in early Germanic languages, including Old English, and much earlier Egyptian, Chinese, and Greek.

More to the point, the ancient Egyptians believed that the heart recorded one’s good and bad deeds, and that the gods weighed one’s heart after death to determine whether the soul would enter the afterlife or be destroyed.

In Middle Egyptian, spoken from roughly 2000 to 1350 BC, the heart hieroglyph, transliterated as ib, looks like a jar with two handles, perhaps representing arteries and veins.

It usually meant the mind, but ib was also used in reference to the heart as an anatomical organ.

As the Egyptologist James P. Allen explains, the heart “was not only the center of physical activity but also the seat of thought and emotion” (Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 3d ed., 2014).

In texts with ib, he writes, “the translation ‘mind’ usually makes better sense than the literal ‘heart.’ ”

To refer to the anatomical organ, he says, Egyptians usually combined ib with hat, the hieroglyph for the forepart of a lion, forming the compound glyph haty, representing the organ at the front of the chest. Various phonetic symbols could be added.

However, Allen adds that ib and haty were sometimes interchangeable. Here’s an example of ib and hat in the compound term haty, with two phonetic symbols:

In ancient Chinese, the pictograph 心 (xin) originally referred solely to the anatomical organ, but by the late fourth century BC it meant the mind as well, and is often translated by sinologists as “heart-mind.”

This is an early example of the mind sense of xin from the Mencius, an anthology of conversations and anecdotes attributed to the Confucian philosopher Mencius (circa 371-289 BC):

“心之官則思，思則得之，不思則不得也” (Xīn zhī guān zé sī, sī zé dé zhī, bù sī zé bùdé, “To the mind belongs the office of thinking. By thinking, it gets the right view of things; by neglecting to think, it fails to do this”). Translated by the 19th-century Scottish linguist and sinologist James Legge.

Around the same time, the Greek philosopher Aristotle described the heart (καρδίᾳ, kardia) as the organ of sensation. In this passage, he uses the genitive καρδίας:

“καὶ ἡ μὲν αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως ἐν τῷ μέσῳ τοῦ σώματος τῆς καρδίας οὔσης” (“the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart”). From A. L. Peck’s 1968 bilingual version of Aristotle’s treatise Περὶ τῶν Ζῴων Μερών (Perì tôn Zōíōn Merôn, On the Parts of Animals).

When the word “heart” first appeared in Old English (spelled heorte, hearte, etc.), it referred to both the organ that pumps blood and the organ of mental activity—or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the bodily organ considered or imagined as the seat of feeling, understanding, and thought.”

The OED notes: “semantic developments that are widespread among other early Germanic languages include: courage; the heart as seat of life, of feeling, of thought, or of the will; centre; inner part; most important part.”

The dictionary adds that this sense of “heart” in early Germanic languages may have been influenced by the perception of the heart in classical and post-classical Latin as the “seat of thought, intelligence, will, emotion, or character.”

The earliest OED citation for the mental sense of “heart” is from a ninth-century Old English gloss, or translation, written between the lines of the eighth-century Latin in the Vespasian Psalter:

“ne forleort hie efter lustum heortan heara” (“[God] did not forsake them to the lusts of their hearts”). Psalm 80:13.

The negative particle ne in the interlinear Old English gloss changes the meaning of the original Latin: “Dimisi eos secundum desideria cordis eorum” (“I [God] let them go in accordance with the desires of their hearts”).

A scribe had inserted the Old English above the Latin in the manuscript. The gloss of the Vespasian Psalter is considered the oldest surviving portion of the Bible in English.

The earliest OED citation for “heart” in its anatomical sense is from Bald’s Leechbook, an Anglo-Saxon medical text written around the mid-ninth century: “Se maga biþ neah þære heortan & þære gelodr” (“The stomach is near the heart and the liver”).

As for the phrase “by heart” in an expression like “learn by heart,” the usage first appeared in the Middle English of the 14th century.

The OED defines “by heart” as “from memory; so as to be able to repeat or write out correctly and without assistance what has been learnt; by rote (often without proper understanding or reflection).”

The dictionary says the phrase frequently appears “with get, have, know, learn,” but in the earliest Oxford citation it’s used with “rehearse” in the archaic sense of to recite from memory:

“He was so myȝty of mynde þat he rehersed two þowsand names arewe by herte” (“He was so mighty of mind that he recited two thousand names in a row by heart”). From Polychronicon,  John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1387, of an earlier 14th-century work by Ranulf Higden.

In contemporary standard dictionaries, the primary meaning of the noun “heart” is the organ that pumps blood, but the word has many modern senses derived from the ancient belief that the heart was the seat of perception and cognition.

The primary definition in Merriam-Webster online is “a hollow muscular organ of vertebrate animals that by its rhythmic contraction acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of the blood.”

However, the M-W entry includes many other modern senses of words and phrases that recall the ancient belief. Here are some of them, along with the dictionary’s examples:

Personality (“a cold heart”), compassion (“a leader with heart”), love (“won her heart”), courage (“never lost heart”), innermost character (“knew it in his heart”), in essence (“a romantic at heart”), with deep concern (“took the criticism to heart”), and, of course, by rote or from memory (“knows the poem by heart”).

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A tidy history of ‘spick and span’

Q: In the phrase “spick and span,” the word “spick” seems to be bound to “span.” It doesn’t stand on its own. Is there a concept for words that are bound to a phrase and meaningless alone?

A: We wrote a post in 2010 (recently updated) about words that are predictably paired with another. For example, “ulterior” is often paired with “motive.” Similar pairs are “bitter + end,” “heated + argument,” “slippery + slope,” and many more.

Sometimes the predictable pairs are joined by a conjunction, as with “flotsam and jetsam,” “rhyme or reason,” “rack and ruin,” “sackcloth and ashes,” “odds and ends,” and so on.

Sir Ernest Gowers, who edited the second edition of Fowlers Modern English Usage (1965), has a term for this latter category—“Siamese twins.” These are words, he says, that “convey a single meaning” when linked by “and” or “or.”

Some twins, Gowers writes, can make sense when separated (like “leaps and bounds”). But some can’t, often because the separate words have become obsolete or dialectal in their original meanings, so they’ve disappeared from common usage. Among the “indivisible” twins, he mentions our old friend “spick and span.”

So the answer to your question is yes: There is a concept for words that are bound in a phrase but meaningless alone. And “spick and span” is a good example. The original meanings of the words have died out but they survive in the phrase. Here’s the story.

The expression “spick and span” (often hyphenated or spelled “spic-and-span”) dates from the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the tale began centuries before that, most likely with early Scandinavian words for a nail (spik) and a chip of wood (spánn).

In Old Norse, as the OED says, spánnýr meant brand new. It combined the noun spánn (chip of wood) with nýr (new), so literally it meant new as a fresh chip or shaving of wood.

In the late 13th or early 14th century, the Old Norse spánnýr entered English as “span-new,” meaning “quite or perfectly new,” the OED says. It especially referred to new clothes, as in the dictionary’s earliest citation:

“Þe cok bigan of him to rewe, and bouthe him cloþes, al spannewe” (“The cook began to pity him, and bought him clothes, all span-new”). From an anonymous Middle English romance, The Lay of Havelok the Dane, dated from the 1280s to circa 1300.

The noun “spick” came into the expression a few centuries later in the 1500s, Oxford says, when the earlier “span-new” underwent an “emphatic extension” and became “spick and span new.”

In the OED definition, “spick and span new” has a slightly different set of meanings from “span-new.” The notion of cleanliness slips in, and “spick and span new” refers to something “absolutely or perfectly new; brand-new; perfectly fresh or unworn.”

This is the dictionary’s earliest example: “They were all in goodly gilt armours, and braue purple cassocks apon them, spicke, and spanne newe.” From Thomas North’s 1579 translation of a French version of Plutarch’s Lives, written in second-century Greek.

As for the etymology of “spick,” Oxford says it was a noun, a variant of “spike,” which had been around since the mid-1300s when it meant a sharp piece of metal or wood used for fastening. Thus early on it could mean a nail or an especially large nail (the modern sense of “spike”).

Etymologists suggest that “spick” came into Middle English from either the Swedish and Norwegian spik (nail) or from other Germanic sources. But ultimately it came from a prehistoric root that’s been reconstructed as spei– (sharp point), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 

Interestingly, “spick and span new,” as Oxford notes, is similar in form and meaning to the Flemish and Dutch compound spiksplinternieuw (“spick-splinter-new”). And John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that the “spick” element in the English expression was added in imitation of the Dutch. The image is roughly “new as a newly forged nail or a fresh splinter of wood.”

Over time, it appears that the “new” element was taken for granted, and by the early 17th century the shortened expression “spick and span” was being used, though the definition did not change. Like “spick and span new,” it first meant “absolutely or perfectly new; brand-new; perfectly fresh or unworn.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from the playwright Thomas Tomkis’s comedy Albumazar, first performed in 1614 and published in 1615: “Of a starke Clowne I shall appeare speck and span Gentleman.”

And here’s a later OED example, which we’ve expanded for context, from The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Nov. 15, 1665):

“it was horrible foule weather; and my Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spicke and span white shoes, she dropped one of her galoshes in the dirt, where it stuck, and she forced to go home without one, at which she was horribly vexed.”

Finally, the idea of newness became weaker in the expression, and “spick and span” in the sense we use it today appeared in the mid-19th century. The definition, the OED says, became “particularly neat, trim, or smart; suggestive of something quite new or unaffected by wear.” Here we’ve expanded the dictionary’s earliest example:

“and in front you behold young Benvenuto, spick and span in his very best clothes and silk stockings, looking—as Benvenuto never did in his life.” From comments about a portrait of Benvenuto Cellini in “A Pictorial Rhapsody,” William Makepeace Thackeray’s review of an exhibition at the Royal Academy (Fraser’s Magazine, July 1840).

A late 19th-century example shows just how much notions of neatness and tidiness had replaced newness in the expression. The OED citation is from the Irish novelist Charlotte Ridell’s Daisies and Buttercups (1882): “this spick and span old house.”

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Liwans, porticos, and palaces

Q: I am reading Ben-Hur (1880) by Lew Wallace and I have come across a word, “lewen,” that I cannot find in any dictionary. It appears to be an architectural feature in this example: “The arches of the lewens rested on clustered columns.”

A: The word “lewen” in Ben-Hur is Lew Wallace’s rendering of ليوان, an Arab word of Persian origin, typically spelled “liwan” in English and pronounced lee-WAHN. In your example, it’s a vaulted hall open on one side, such as a portico in a palace.

“In classical Persian and Arabic texts the term usually refers to a palace building or some formal part of a palace, such as a platform, balcony or portico,” according to The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture (2009), edited by Jonathan M. Bloom and Sheila S. Blair.

But among modern archeologists and art historians, Grove says, the term is used solely for a “vaulted hall with walls on three sides and completely open on the fourth”—a portico, in other words.

The encyclopedia adds that the basic form of the liwan “can be traced back to Mesopotamia and Iran during the time of the Parthians and Sassanian,” two ancient pre-Islamic Persian empires.

In Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the open side of the liwan usually faces a courtyard. And that’s the way it’s used in your example and many others in the novel.

For readers unfamiliar with the book, it features the stories of Jesus and Judah Ben-Hur, a fictional Jewish prince who is enslaved by the Romans and becomes a Christian.

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