Month: February 2026

Being an academic includes, believe it or not, a measure of humility. So when I covered this term here before,  I wrote “my money, as well as Wikipedia’s, is on Barney Google, a nearly forgotten cartoon character. ”

I may have lost that bet. There’s some evidence that Barney’s popularity led to a shift in an existing term.

While doing some research on sites to visit in Northumbria, in service of a long-term plan to walk the Hadrian’s Wall Path, I came across the legend of The Lambton Worm, a crawling horror dispatched by local nobleman, Sir John Lambton. As a lad he went fishing and caught the creature, when it too was a youngster. He disposed of the strange “fish” by tossing it in a well, and trouble followed. You may recall the legend if you saw Ken Russell’s B-movie adaptation of Bram Stoker’s reportedly awful novel, The Lair of the White Worm.

I hope to visit the scene of these adventures, south of Newcastle, when I begin my rambles across the north of England. As for my evidence that I was wrong earlier about googly eyes? Doubts began when I found a folk-song composed in 1867 by Clarence M. Leumane, and I’ll quote part of it here, after Sir John unwisely tosses the baby worm down a well:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,
An’ grewed an aaful size;
He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,
An greet big goggly eyes.

The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that our “googly eyes” comes from the older “goggly eyes” of the song, and, further back, to the 1530s and Middle English.

Sorry Barney Google, our term is far older than you. Perhaps Barney’s pop-eyed look helped morph “goggly-eyes” to “googly-eyes”?

Send words, stick-on googly eyes, monster legends, and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Images: Picpik.com and Wikipedia.

Here’s a word of common parlance with an interesting etymology. We think of shuffling cards or perhaps walking slowly along, dragging our feet. Both meanings exist alongside each other and pose no problems for native speakers of English. My gut instinct told me that the sliding motion of cards when shuffling them (unlike cutting a deck of cards) gives us a hint of the origin.

The Online Etymology Dictionary provides both the “Middle English shovelen “to move with dragging feet,”  and well as a possible “Low German schuffeln ‘to walk clumsily, deal dishonestly.’ ” That latter meaning gives us a possible link to the noun “shuffle,” which can be a trick or deceit.

At last, I know what was on the minds of the geniuses at Warner Brothers who created my favorite deep-fried Southern trickster and foil for Bugs Bunny, Colonel Shuffle. He’s a thin-skinned Southern aristocrat in a few cartoons, including the memorable “Mississippi Hare,” with Bugs getting the best of Shuffle at every turn, leading to one of the finest lines in cartoon history when Shuffle is shoved over the side of a riverboat, “Why did you dunk my poor old hide in Ol’ Man River?” Shuffle appeared elsewhere, usually as the butt of jokes rather than playing them, try as he might.

Shuffle is descended from not only Mark Twain’s King and Duke but a long series of picaresque characters that came before the Civil War. When Shuffle declares that he is “the rip-roarin’-est, gold-diggin’-est, sharp-shootin’-est, poker-playin’-est riverboat gambler on the Mississippi!,” he uses boasts we associate with Davy Crockett, Sut Lovingood, Simon Suggs, and other real and fictional “ring-tailed roarers” of Southern-frontier history and tall tales. All of them were expert at playing tricks and pulling cons on gullible strangers.

Good thing they never shuffled their cards around Bugs Bunny, Doc.

Send words, card tricks, and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Col. Shuffle’s card-game shuffle–5 aces!