Shiver Me Timbers - 20 April 2015

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": Careful what you criticize! Not long ago, some words that sound perfectly normal today were considered gauche and grating on the ear. If the complainers had had their way, we couldn't say the word "pessimism" or use "contact" as a verb! Also, we'll settle another debate once and for all: is it "a historic" or "an historic"? Plus, what are you doing for Inside-Out Day? Also, bed lunch, sweven, hinky, johnny gowns, the real meaning of shiver me timbers, and more.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />We get lots of calls and emails that take a pessimistic look at the way language changes-- which reminded us that the word pessimism itself, just 100 or so years ago, was derided by the curmudgeons of old. People thought the word pessimism was a lazy, inaccurate replacement for "despondency." <br /><br />If you're looking for yet another reason to buy an infant a present, there's always Inside Out Day, which some people celebrate as the day when a baby has been out of the womb as long as they were in it.<br /><br />Singultus, which comes from a Latin word for "sobbing" or "dying breath," is a fancy way of describing a not-so-fancy affliction: the hiccups. <br /><br />Did pirates ever actually say shiver me timbers? And why would they be shivering in the Caribbean, anyway? Actually, this saying has nothing to do with being cold, and pirates probably didn't say it. The phrase goes back to the 1700's and was popularized in books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Shiver, in this sense, means "to split in two." Shiver me timbers, in the imagined pirate lingo, refers to a storm or siege splitting the wooden beams of a ship.<br /><br />A bed lunch is one way to refer to a late night meal, right before bedtime. <br /><br />Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz about the ties that bind various sets of three words. For example, what do essay, excess, and decay have in common?<br /><br />The a historian vs. an historian debate has a pretty straightforward answer: a historian is the cor