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Authors: William Safire
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rats.”
The above-mentioned quarterback Grbac (a Croatian name pronounced “GER-bots,” which he pronounces “GER-back”) and his team lost in the playoffs to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 27-10. That loss was described by the Washington Times somewhat unkindly as a rout, a noun better applied that week to the 45-17 loss by the Green Bay Packers to the St. Louis Rams. Worse, the Ravens, last year’s Super Bowl champions, were derided by the headline writer as having been defeathered, a metaphoric fate to which Ravens fans would mutter “nevermore.”
However, if one team dominates (having come to play, in announcers’ jargon, against a team that is flat, a reference to carbonated water with the fizz gone), it will be said to have romped, an intransitive verb that has for three centuries meant “won easily.”
Gone are the mid-century days when the ring announcer in heavy-weight fights would offer a dignified version of “may the better man win.” Harry Balogh, after introducing the champion Joe Louis and the opponent often called “the bum of the month,” would say, “And may the superior pugilist emerge victorious.” No such ironic niceties anymore: today, the victor on the field of play will have creamed, buried, mopped the floor with, shellacked, annihilated, humbled or otherwise embarrassed the losing side.
The verb to cream in this destructive sense was first cited in a 1929 Princeton Alumni Weekly —“Say, if he opens his mouth, I’ll cream him”—and then described as “an essential part of any toughie’s vocabulary.” Its metaphoric origin is either in “to pour cream over, thus humiliating” or in “to remove the cream from, thus leaving a thin milk” (today regarded as desirably low-fat, which is why the locution is on the decline).
The New York Times chose whipped over creamed in recounting the recent Green Bay defeat ( whip-cream is not yet in use, but give it time), while other headline writers liked drub, probably from the Arabic darb, “to beat.”
But the most extreme—and to some, most mysterious—expression of such merry mayhem is to clean their clocks . “This phrase is being used by TV newscasters,” writes Stuart Zuckerman of New York, “to describe everything from a one-sided victory in sports to the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. What’s the origin?”
Clock-cleaning is indeed rampant. “If we try to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules,” said General Brent Scowcroft during the recent anti Taliban campaign, “we’re going to get our clock cleaned .” Mark Mednick, coach of California’s Irvine High girls’ volleyball team, told the Orange County Register that in the battle with Torrance High, “in the third game, they cleaned our clock, but then Hillary Thomson had some clutch digs.”
Break the phrase apart for close study. To clean gained a sense of “to clean out” in 1812, applied to victims of thieves or gamblers. In a few years, a slang meaning of clean became “to drub, defeat, wipe out.”
Now take up clock in its verb form, as in “clock him one.” When I expressed puzzlement about this years ago, British readers pointed out that as a clock had a face, to clock someone was to hit him in the face or elsewhere on the head. That led to the slang term fix one’s clock: an O. Henry story in 1904 had the line “I reckon we’ll fix your clock for a while.”
In Latin, clocca means “bell.” (A cloche hat is bell-shaped.) The clock registered time by striking a bell, and that act of noisily striking or hitting was also expressed in the verb to clock . In baseball, “he really clocked it” refers to the hard-hit ball; in football, “he really clocked him” is said over the sprawled-out form of the well-tackled runner.
Thus was developed to clean (defeat, thrash, trounce) one’s clock (face, head, person). Earliest citation so far: In 1959, the novelist Sam Cochrell wrote this dialogue: “Don’t give me that guff. You’re not a corporal
The above-mentioned quarterback Grbac (a Croatian name pronounced “GER-bots,” which he pronounces “GER-back”) and his team lost in the playoffs to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 27-10. That loss was described by the Washington Times somewhat unkindly as a rout, a noun better applied that week to the 45-17 loss by the Green Bay Packers to the St. Louis Rams. Worse, the Ravens, last year’s Super Bowl champions, were derided by the headline writer as having been defeathered, a metaphoric fate to which Ravens fans would mutter “nevermore.”
However, if one team dominates (having come to play, in announcers’ jargon, against a team that is flat, a reference to carbonated water with the fizz gone), it will be said to have romped, an intransitive verb that has for three centuries meant “won easily.”
Gone are the mid-century days when the ring announcer in heavy-weight fights would offer a dignified version of “may the better man win.” Harry Balogh, after introducing the champion Joe Louis and the opponent often called “the bum of the month,” would say, “And may the superior pugilist emerge victorious.” No such ironic niceties anymore: today, the victor on the field of play will have creamed, buried, mopped the floor with, shellacked, annihilated, humbled or otherwise embarrassed the losing side.
The verb to cream in this destructive sense was first cited in a 1929 Princeton Alumni Weekly —“Say, if he opens his mouth, I’ll cream him”—and then described as “an essential part of any toughie’s vocabulary.” Its metaphoric origin is either in “to pour cream over, thus humiliating” or in “to remove the cream from, thus leaving a thin milk” (today regarded as desirably low-fat, which is why the locution is on the decline).
The New York Times chose whipped over creamed in recounting the recent Green Bay defeat ( whip-cream is not yet in use, but give it time), while other headline writers liked drub, probably from the Arabic darb, “to beat.”
But the most extreme—and to some, most mysterious—expression of such merry mayhem is to clean their clocks . “This phrase is being used by TV newscasters,” writes Stuart Zuckerman of New York, “to describe everything from a one-sided victory in sports to the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. What’s the origin?”
Clock-cleaning is indeed rampant. “If we try to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules,” said General Brent Scowcroft during the recent anti Taliban campaign, “we’re going to get our clock cleaned .” Mark Mednick, coach of California’s Irvine High girls’ volleyball team, told the Orange County Register that in the battle with Torrance High, “in the third game, they cleaned our clock, but then Hillary Thomson had some clutch digs.”
Break the phrase apart for close study. To clean gained a sense of “to clean out” in 1812, applied to victims of thieves or gamblers. In a few years, a slang meaning of clean became “to drub, defeat, wipe out.”
Now take up clock in its verb form, as in “clock him one.” When I expressed puzzlement about this years ago, British readers pointed out that as a clock had a face, to clock someone was to hit him in the face or elsewhere on the head. That led to the slang term fix one’s clock: an O. Henry story in 1904 had the line “I reckon we’ll fix your clock for a while.”
In Latin, clocca means “bell.” (A cloche hat is bell-shaped.) The clock registered time by striking a bell, and that act of noisily striking or hitting was also expressed in the verb to clock . In baseball, “he really clocked it” refers to the hard-hit ball; in football, “he really clocked him” is said over the sprawled-out form of the well-tackled runner.
Thus was developed to clean (defeat, thrash, trounce) one’s clock (face, head, person). Earliest citation so far: In 1959, the novelist Sam Cochrell wrote this dialogue: “Don’t give me that guff. You’re not a corporal
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