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One of my very best friends, Nina Hoffman, wrote a really moving piece for her newspaper, Philadelphia Weekly, about her husband’s survival of and struggles with being sexually abused as a child, and about how terrible it is that the main story in the Penn State idiocy hasn’t been about sexual abuse. “I’m heartbroken,” she says.

Lauren and I made ice cream sundaes at home a few weeks ago, and we wondered about the origins of the word. It turns out it’s one of those ones that does not have a definitive etymology. From the OED:

The name is generally explained as an alteration of Sunday , either because the dish originally included leftover ice-cream sold cheaply on Monday, or because it was at first sold only on Sunday, having, according to some accounts, been devised to circumvent Sunday legislation. The alteration of the spelling is sometimes said to be out of deference to religious people’s feelings about the word Sunday. For several accounts see H. L. Mencken, The American Language Suppl. I. (1945), pp. 376–7.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy online of Mencken’s explanations. The theory about Sunday legislation seems to come from a place that banned ice cream sodas, prompting someone to offer the treat without the banned soda.

Early yesterday morning, Boston police arrested 141 people taking part in the Occupy Boston movement after they refused to leave a park downtown. As there has been in other cities where arrests have occurred, the protesters were outraged that they would be arrested while engaging in civil disobedience.

On the one hand I can see how people who are new to mass protests and civil disobedience would be surprised the first time arrests occur. But on the other hand, it shows a lack of understanding of the history of such movements.

This has resulted in some comments that seem really out of touch with the reality of confronting both the government and corporations. This one, from today’s Globe, really highlighted that:

“I think it’s disgusting that Menino said civil disobedience won’t be tolerated,’’ said Andrew Farkas, 29, of Cambridge, who held up a sign that read “Civil disobedience made this country.’’ People here are just going to resort to more drastic actions. And it’s possible that things could turn violent.’’

(Menino is Tom Menino, Boston’s mayor.)

To threaten violence over arrests during a civil disobedience action is really stupid. Civil disobedience means breaking the law. When you engage in civil disobedience, you expect to be arrested. That’s actually the point.

Martin Luther King Jr. spent countless days in prison for engaging in civil disobedience, and he never once threatened violence. The arrests draw attention to your cause, and force a confrontation with those in power. King talks about this in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he wrote after being arrested for civil disobedience:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

If you believe in your cause, and you’re going to engage in civil disobedience, then you have to be prepared to be arrested for it. It’s a tool. And it works. Today’s Globe had two frontpage stories about Occupy Boston and the arrests. That’s the most coverage it has received since it began.

If you’re not prepared to be arrested, then you shouldn’t engage in civil disobedience. Those in power are not going to allow you to break the law just because you’re right. It took years and years for King and the rest of the civil rights movement to force change, and even now, going on 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that work is not finished. If the Occupy Wall Street movement really hopes to accomplish anything, it has to know that these arrests are not the last and are not the biggest, but only a beginning.

As anyone has heard me complain about it knows, I’ve been having problems with my wrists for about two years. It’s the result of working eight hours a day on a computer five nights a week  for the past five years. I stretch and I use ice, and I also load up on painkillers, but the pain has never really gone away.

I’m currently in physical therapy, and it seems to be helping. I’m also using a funky new keyboard that @RoseFox loaned me to try out at work. That also seems to be putting less stress on my wrists.

But one problem I’m still having is that what I want to use a computer at home it’s painful to even think about sitting down and using my wrists even more. So I’m trying out the built-in speech recognition software that comes with Windows 7. I’m writing this post using it right now. It seems fairly accurate and it’s supposed to learn as I continue using it and correcting its mistakes.

The funniest mistake that it made while I was writing this was in the first sentence. It wrote  ”I’ve been having problems with by breasts for about two years.”

I’d like to blame my lack of blogging lately on my wrists, but mostly it’s just been laziness. Now if I could just find some software to fix that.

Yesterday, one of our Metro columnists, Yvonne Abraham, wrote about the predictable reactions of the members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation to the debt ceiling deal:

But [John] Kerry, who is widely seen as a prospect for next Secretary of State, was very careful to avoid criticizing President Obama, who had some of his Massachusetts colleagues spitting chips for ceding way too much, too soon.

Case in point: professional chip-spitter Mike Capuano.

“At some point in his presidency, he is going to have to find some backbone,’’ said the Somerville Democrat, who has never come within a thousand miles of careful.

Yvonne is Australian, and someone wondered if spitting chips was some Australian idiom. I couldn’t find anything in my usual sources, the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary, so I turned to Twitter, where I follow at least one known Australian (@obsidiantears83). She and another Australian (@staticsan)confirmed that spitting chips is something they say down there, used to describe an angry outburst when someone is very upset. But when I asked what kind of chips they’d be spitting — wood chips or chips as in fish and chips — they thought about it and realized that it was one of those things they’d never thought about.

A bit of Googling turned up two answers, one likely true though incomplete, and one that seems apocryphal but is much more amusing.

The first comes from the Australian National Dictionary, which appears to be something produced with the Oxford University Press, and which explains language quirks of Australia. It gives this, under the entry for chips:

In the phrase to spit chips:

a. To feel extreme thirst.

1901  Bulletin Reciter 108 While you’re spitting chips like thunder … And the streams of sweat near blind you. 1940  Bulletin (Sydney) 27 Mar. 17/1 But, though he’s spittin’ chips hisself, he nacherally shrank From anythin’ to spoil that lovely thirst. 1946 A. marshall  Tell us about Turkey, Jo. 142 I was spitting chips. God, I was dry!

b. To manifest extreme anger.

1947 J. morrison  Sailors belong Ships 189 Old Mick Doyle’s with them. He’s spitting chips because they’re not using sea water. 1954 P. gladwin  Long Beat Home 17 It’s enough to make you spit chips when you think of Sydney—movies and vaudeville comedies and a decent musician once in two years. 1968 S. gore  Holy Smoke 14 When he comes rushing up—spittin’ chips, he’s so mad—young Dave only lets fly with one shot outa his ging, and the big bloke’s stonkered.

Unfortunately, there is no etymology, and an article on the Australian Broadcasting Company website says how it went from thirst to anger is unclear.

But the explanation I liked best, even though, as a coworker pointed out, it is the very definition of an apocryphal story, was this, from a site called Aussie Slangs:

Spit Chips: Aussie slang meaning to be very angry. Said to have originated from when a Prime Minister was watching a soccer match on TV but the Australian team lost against England. He was eating chips, like all Aussies do in front of the TV, and vomited because he was so angry. The next day, newspapers reported of the PM “spitting chips” and applauded him for his patriotism. “Spitting chips” has since entered the Aussie Slang Dictionary.

Patriotic vomiting? This is my new favorite way of showing you love your country.

We recently had a story that made a reference to spalled concrete. I’d never heard of this, so I asked around the desk, and while some people were familiar with the term — in this sense it meant crumbling —  it certainly seemed too obscure for the newspaper. So I changed it to crumbling.

Spall is an older word, according to the OED, with the first sense appearing around 1440 as a noun and meaning  ”a chip or splinter, especially of stone or ore.” Of its etymology, the OED says, “  Of doubtful origin: perhaps related to German spellen, meaning to split, but compare to the noun spale.” A spale is “a splinter or chip, a thin piece or strip, of wood,” and its etymology is “There is resemblance in form to Old Norse spal-, spǫlr, meaning a bar, rod, short piece, the Middle High German (and German dialect) spale, meaning rung of a ladder, and the German dialect spale, spal, meaning wooden spit, wedge; but real connection with these is doubtful.”

Spall’s noun sense eventually got verbed, with the OED showing a usage in 1758 defined as:  ”Mining. To break (ore) into smaller pieces,” and later, a sense first cited in 1858: “To split or chip; also, to detach as small fragments or particles.” The adjective form, meaning  ”Dressed or broken with the hammer. More widely, broken off or chipped by spalling,” is first cited in 1793.

None of these OED entries  mention crumbling as a sense, though the American Heritage Dictionary does in its definition of spall as an intransitive verb: “To chip or crumble.”

I was told a week or so ago that my blog had gone gray in Google Readers, a sign that I am inactive.

Gee, I don’t FEEL inactive.

But of course, I have been on Talk Wordy to Me. My last post, on April 29, was the day before Lauren and I started looking at houses. We found one 10 days later. We made an offer, and it was accepted so fast that when the real estate agent called us I thought we’d left something behind at his office.

And then things got crazy, and Talk Wordy got left behind. We closed at the beginning of July, and moved in the middle, and we are now finally climbing out of the mountain of boxes and approaching normalcy. So I’m back, with a bit of a redesign on the blog and new helpings of word nerdery ready to go.

As always, thanks for reading.

Here’s a word that seems to trip a lot of writers up: maelstrom. It is frequently misspelled as maelstorm. I think this is sometimes unintentional,with the brain grabbing the more familiar word storm as the fingers fly across the keyboard. But I think there is also genuine misunderstanding of the word, and it’s an understandable misunderstanding.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines maelstrom as:

• 1. A violent or turbulent situation: caught in the maelstrom of war.
• 2. A whirlpool of extraordinary size or violence.

Maelstrom is almost always used in that first sense, and the idea of likening a violent, turbulent situation to a storm makes a lot of sense. But the word’s roots are rooted to the second sense, which comes from Dutch.From the OED: “early modern Dutch maelstrom (obsolete, now maalstroom), meaning whirlpool, from malen, meaning to grind, to whirl round + stroom, meaning stream.”

From a recent New York Times obituary of L.J. Davis, a journalist and novelist: “Mr. Davis was known among friends and editors as affable and voluble, a man who arrived at every personal encounter equipped with a capacious store of unusual facts and anecdotes he was prepared to dispense at the slightest provocation.”

The sentence holds hints to the meaning of voluble, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “Marked by a ready flow of speech; fluent.” The AHD etymology: from the “Middle English, meaning moving easily, from Old French, from the Latin volūbilis, meaning revolving, fluent, from volvere, to roll.”

The AHD’s second definition for voluble touches on the older roots of the word:

• 2a. Turning easily on an axis; rotating.
• 2b. Botany. Twining or twisting: a voluble vine.

The OED also offers older meanings of voluble. Here are the ones that don’t overlap the AHD:

• 1. Liable to change; inconstant, variable, mutable. Now rare.
• 2a.  Capable of ready rotation on a centre or axis; apt to revolve or roll in this manner. Now rare.
• 2b. Of the eye: Moving readily. Obsolete.
• 2c. Capable of being rolled up.
• 3. Moving rapidly and easily, especially. with a gliding or undulating movement.

The Oxford Dictionaries Twitter feed (@OxfordWords) sends out a word of the day, and recently they had a pretty good one, dekko:

• noun. [in singular] British informal a quick look or glance: come and have a dekko at this.

The full OED says it is a slang word, originally Army slang, which makes sense, given that it comes from the “Hindi dekho, imperative of dekhnā, meaning to look.” The British colonial soldiers must have brought dekko home with them. The OED etymology compares dekko to its second entry on deck as a noun, a colloquialism it defines as “a look, peep.” It has similar roots, from the “Hindi dekha, meaning sight, dekhnā, meaning to see, look at.”