A little ‘gout’ in the frying pan

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published 12:00 p.m., November 3, 2009

As the days go by, I continue to accumulate more English language that strikes me as unusual enough that I have to find out where it came from. We all use phrases which are so commonplace and accepted that only very rarely do we question where they came from, or what they originally meant.

In one of the last columns, I came across the phrase: “It will do in a pinch.” At that time, my research indicated that it came from back in the days of the gold rush in California, and later in the Dakotas, when no one had any money to pay for drinks

It should be noted that no one had any money anywhere. We were still on the edge of a barter system in this country, and the federal government was just beginning to figure out what to do about a common currency for a nation so new that no one had quite come to realize its existence.

Booze back then was paid for by gold dust. Each drink cost a pinch of gold dust, and that pinch was not the drinker’s pinch, either. It was the bartender’s pinch, lest the bar be short changed by what became later known as a “penny pincher.”

No one pinched pennies; that phrase stayed alive even after gold dust was long gone and could no longer be pinched.

However, recently, I came across another reference to “do in a pinch.” It came in some reading about the Civil war, and the muskets that were in use back then as firearms. After powder and lead was packed down the barrel, the flash pan was administered a “pinch” of black powder, which was ignited by the falling flint, hence the name “flint lock.”

A whole bunch of phrases came from that musket, phrases such as “flash in the pan,” which referred originally to a gun that flashed but didn’t go off, and refers now to someone who shows a lot of promise, but cannot follow through on that promise.

Another was “half-cocked,” which meant that in the general excitement of firing the rifle, the hammer remained in the half-cocked position, which it had to be in so one could place the powder on the flash pan. Yet another was “keep your powder dry,” because the stuff wouldn’t go off if it was wet.

“Do in a pinch” may well have originated with the old musket crowd, because a pinch of black powder was all it took to fire those old guns, so although I originally believed “do in a pinch” to be a sure-fire shoo-in for the gold dust origination, maybe not. (Oops, there’s one: “Sure fire.” Probably another musket derivation.) Here’s another one: shoo-in. Sorry. I don’t know where “shoo-in” came from. Maybe it’s “shoe-in.)

“A pinch in time saves nine” is a phrase I haven’t been able to find much about. I am going to speculate that “nine” refers to the nine lives of a cat, or to the firer of the musket who had better get that powder properly and timely applied, or his nine lives are going to be gone. I doubt it refers to buying nine shots of booze.

While we’re talking about powder, I have found out where the drug term “crank” came from. “Crank” refers of course to methamphetamine, a powder which was originally manufactured in California, and distributed throughout the nation by the original Hell’s Angels motorcycle gangs. By the tons.

How did they do that? How did they get all that stuff smuggled out of the state for many years? They concealed it in the crankcases of their Harleys, hence the nickname “crank.” It’s bad stuff, so one could say that a little of that stuff will do in a pinch, too, maybe.

A long time ago we had a French student stay with us. It gave me a chance to brush up on my college French, and to find some more word history, maybe. So one day we’re sitting in the local bar, which also served a great hamburger. The bar’s name was the Dugout. Guillome and I were sitting there when he pointed up at that sign and asked me why someone would name their bar after human feces. He didn’t see “dugout,” he saw “du gout,” which means “of the, well, crap,” for want of censorship of the real word.

It tickled both of us. Just the other day, I was scraping some goo off a greasy frying pan, when I realized that I likely had just stumbled onto the ancestry of yet another word, namely, goo.

“Gout,” in France, is pronounced “goo.”

Now I know.

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