The Humble Foot

For obvious reasons, the word for foot is one of the oldest in the language:

O.E. fot, from P.Gmc. *fot (cf. O.N. fotr, Du. voet, Ger. Fuß, Goth. fotus “foot”), from PIE *pod-/*ped- (cf. Avestan pad-; Skt. pat, acc. padam “foot;” Gk. pos, Attic pous, gen. podos; L. pes, gen. pedis “foot;” Lith. padas “sole,” peda “footstep”).

Like other body parts, foot has found its way into numerous idiomatic expressions. Here are just a few.

foot the bill — to pay for something, usually for something one would rather not pay for oneself: I’ll go to the convention if the company will foot the bill.

put your foot in your mouth – to say something one regrets immediately (or should!): You put your foot in your mouth with that remark about her hat.

have one foot in the grave – about to die: When you had the flu, you looked as if you had one foot in the grave.

to have itchy feet- to have a frequent desire to travel: He’s not a good marriage prospect; he has itchy feet.

to get cold feet- to feel sudden misgivings about doing something one had planned to do: It’s the morning of the wedding and the bride has cold feet.

to get off on the wrong foot–to begin an enterprise by doing something inappropriate: Susie got off on the wrong foot with her old-fashioned boss when she told him she didn’t make coffee.

to get off on the right foot – to start out doing everything right: The new fireman got off on the right foot when he saved that baby.

to put one’s best foot forward – to present oneself at one’s best: She bought a new dress and had her hair done because she wanted to put her best foot forward for the job interview.

to land on your feet to come through a difficult situation without harm: Don’t worry about Jack in this storm. He always lands on his feet.

to drag your feet to be reluctant: Stop dragging your feet and mow the grass!

to have your feet on the ground – to have a practical outlook: His decision to put off the move until he’s sure he has the job shows he has his feet on the ground.

not to put a foot wrong- to do everything according to rule and expectation:Mr. Perfect there never puts a foot wrong with the boss.

to have feet that hardly touch the ground to move quickly: On the day of the church picnic, her feet hardly touched the ground.

to put one’s feet up – to relax: Now that you’ve finished the project, you can put your feet up for awhile.

to put one’s foot down – to take a firm stand: When little Jimmy kicked the dog, his father finally put his foot down.

My foot! – expression of disbelief: Abner Potts made a perfect score on the SAT? My foot!

It’s Greeking to Me

In the play Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius question Casca about the occasion on which Caesar reluctantly refused a crown offered him by Mark Antony. Casca is portrayed as a gruff, plain-speaking sort of man.

CASSIUS. 
Did Cicero say any thing?

CASCA. 
Ay, he spoke Greek.

CASSIUS. 
To what effect?

CASCA. 
Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face 
again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

Like so many quotations from Shakespeare, “it’s Greek to me” has entered everyday speech. To say that something is “Greek to you” means that something written or spoken is incomprehensible, either because you lack the information to understand, or because the speaker or writer has failed to express the idea clearly.

A spin-off of Shakespeare’s quotation is the graphic design term greeking.



Greeking, from a typographic point of view, is the use of nonsense or dummy text, instead of the real body copy. This is done by designers to give the page an overall grey, or flat appearance, so as not to distract from the design layout. –Design: Talkboard

An example of greeking known to anyone who has ever browsed WordPress themes or looked through a computer manual is lorem ipsum. This block of nonsense Latin derives from an essay by–appropriately enough–Cicero.

Designers have good reason to use greeking. Comprehensible copy used to illustrate graphic design is distracting. A client will start reading the copy and be annoyed if it stops mid-sentence. The use of a greeking text ensures that attention remains focused on the design.

Messed-up Latin seems to be the most usual form of greeking, but other languages, including Greek, are used.

If you would like to generate your own passage of greeking, there’s a site for it. Your choices include Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Russian, Esperanto and Morse Code.

Thou lily-liver’d boy!

Maya Gharpure wants to know

What does the term lilylivered mean?

A lily-livered person is a coward, easily frightened.

The term lily-livered is one of many vivid expressions we get from Shakespeare. It may not have originated with him, but his use of the term in the much-performed Macbeth ensured it a place in the language.

In Act Five a frightened page rushes onstage to tell Macbeth that 10,000 soldiers are taking up their positions outside his castle. The boy is so terrified that the blood has drained from his face. Realizing that his fate is about to catch up with him, Macbeth attempts to conceal his own terror by lashing out at the boy with a volley of insults directed at the lack of color in his face:

Go prick thy face, and over-red thy fear,

Thou lily-liver’d boy. What soldiers, patch?
Death of thy soul! those linen cheeks of thine

Are counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?

Go prick thy face: go cut your face so as to draw some blood to give it color.

Thou lily-liver’d boy: think Easter lily, pure white. Before its functions were understood, the liver was thought to produce blood. A healthy liver would be red, not white. In the theory of “humors,” the liver governed anger and courage. By shouting angrily at the boy, Macbeth is trying to prove that his own liver is red.

those linen cheeks of thine: Macbeth is thinking of white linen.

whey-face: whey is the watery part of milk that accumulates during the making of cheese. The boy’s face is not merely white; it’s a sickly white.

The word patch may also be intended to convey something white as one meaning of patch is “a piece of sticking plaster used to cover and protect a wound or scar.”

“Human Readers” A Tautology?

When I read this comment by Richard Lee Van Der Voort, I had to laugh:

Here’s one for you. Tonight on the internet I read “human readers”. Is there any other kind? My dog is intelligent, but she cannot read.

Like Richard, I felt that to refer to “human readers” made as much sense as talking about “female women.”

After a web search I’m no longer laughing.

The expression human readers has become a retronym.

Thanks to technology, there are non-human readers out there.

A search for “human readers” brought up about 50,400 hits, most of them from the medical field:

Are human readers needed for prognostication from stress myocardial perfusion SPECT?

Sensitivity of CT Colonography for Nonpolypoid Colorectal Lesions Interpreted by Human Readers and With Computer-Aided Detection

80-year-old man with 15-mm-wide nonpolypoid tubular adenoma in sigmoid colon that was identified by human reader on blinded review but was not detected by computer-aided detection.

The internet, with its robots and spiders, is another rich source for the expression’s use:

Content Optimization Checklist for Human Readers and SEO

Discovering Equilibrium Connecting Human Readers and Internet Spiders

Good quality content is vital in a search engine optimization campaign. Not only will it help search engines to categorise your website and promote it in the rankings, it will also help to draw in human readers and will help promote your site through word of mouth.

I even found the expression on a religious site where it was used to distinguish human readers from divine (or divinely-inspired) writers of the Bible:

The evangelical claims of inerrancy and infallibility, likewise, offer no place for humans to stand, no place from which human readers could approach or understand their inhuman text.

I’m forced to concede that human readers has found a niche in the language