All the Good Things

[00:00] got one. Oh, we do under Google rules. That was the play of super excited. I told us we had to. So we signed up for it. In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you. I don't think we've done this before. But correct me if I'm wrong. What's a crapshoot? Oh, okay. So the meaning is that it's just it's, it's, this is a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,
[00:47] we're taking a stab at this thing, right? It's just not really a good, this isn't going to work out really for, is that, is that how you understand it? Yeah. Although now that, now that I'm saying it out loud, what I'm guessing it probably comes from is the dice game craps. Okay. So it's just like a, it's a roll of chance. Yeah. Luck. I, I was thinking in my mind, it was like ski shooting with crap back in the day. And I had this wonderful image in my head.
[01:17] Of people shooting like cow dong with shotguns. And I really wanted it to be that, but I'm pretty sure it's just rolling dice. Rolling dice. Okay, sure. It's a crapshoot. You never know what you're going to get. Yeah. Sort of thing. Now, can we figure out when craps started then?
[01:32] I'm going to guess that it was probably like most types of gambling and underground thing that probably existed in the lexicon before finally being written down and by Samuel Clemens or somebody, right? Riverboat gamblers and such. Don't you think? Okay. Okay. Mark Twain action. I like that. Yeah. Could certainly be later, but. Well, it feels kind of like a 20s saying like, Oh man, that's a crapshoot. I know it does. Doesn't it?
[02:02] That was my impression of somebody from the 20s. Oh man, that's a crapshoot. I don't know why that's a person from the 20s. But, and you know, you could sort of, sort of the underground gambling in Chicago sort of thing. But you're right. It's probably in the lexicon long before the, that guy said it in the 20s. Yeah. That guy with that particular accent who immortalized the term. All right. So that wasn't a very good one. This is what happens when you let me do anything
[02:37] on this show. Where are we? Let's say crapshoot history. I don't know if this site's any good or not, but it's called idiom schmidiom. So I like it a lot. All of a sudden, it's my new favorite site. It's your new favorite site. Okay. The legend has it that Roman soldiers and did the games of craps using knuckle bones of a pig as dice and their armor shields at the table. Others believe craps originated from an Arabic dice game called adal al-dar
[03:17] which means dice. And that merchants brought them over to Europe in the 12th century. Okay. And then there was an English game called hazard that became extremely popular in France in the 17th century. Because it required a little equipment street craps. It could be played in informal settings. Like in my junior high bathroom. That's where they played craps. Exactly.
[03:47] Yeah. Okay. So grammar has finally got us on lockdown here. Crapshoot is a new word. Earliest examples we can find are from the sixties, but it is not widely used until the eighties. Even today, it is still primarily an Americanism, though a few scattered examples are easily found in non US sources. The game is craps, not crap. Yet the term is often spelled crapshoot hyphenated or two words and is almost never spelled crapshoot.
[04:18] Right. The one word crapshoot helps us get around the spelling issue. That's probably a good point.
[04:25] That is a good point. So very new and probably found in the lexicon previously. So I think we more or
[04:33] less nailed that. We were a little early on when it came into the lexicon. Oh man. That's crapshoot.
[04:40] That's also your eighties guy though. So that works perfectly. No, my eighties guys are like,
[04:44] oh man, that's a crapshoot. Yeah. He doesn't have enough cocaine in his system to be in the eighties.
[04:50] That's true. Maybe that was my nineties grunge guy. Maybe, maybe. Oh man. See, that was interesting
[05:01] though. See, we did learn something. They're all good. It's the magic of the game. I didn't,
[05:08] who knew that that was from the sixties, that phrase, and who knew that crap started in
[05:14] Arabia? Yeah. With pig knuckles. Right. Or yeah. Or in Rome. Yeah, exactly. Weird.
[05:22] And been in Europe at least since the 12th century. So I got one more.
[05:29] Um, dad asked this one. So a shout out to pops Coalson. He said, uh, dead to rights,
[05:40] dead to rights. He said, first of all, I need to know if it's R I T E S or whether it's R I G H T S.
[05:48] So is it rights as in like religious or is it rights as in other things that rights can mean?
[05:53] Cause right. Give me a lot of things as in, as in correct or as in left or as in, you know,
[05:59] yeah, virtuous or whatever. So, um, so, and then what, what the heck does it mean? Why is it,
[06:09] why do we say it like that dead to rights? So what's, what's our, what's our definition of a
[06:15] dead to rights? Um, uh, I would say briefly that, uh, you have got somebody, uh,
[06:25] uh, in, uh, you are in an uninsalably good position vis-a-vis someone else. Right.
[06:34] So my, my, my brain always goes to old west and you've got the draw on them. You've got the drop.
[06:42] You've got them dead to rights. So do you think it is an old western term?
[06:47] I do. I think it has to do with something to do with bounties and gun fighters.
[06:53] And I think it's R I G H T S that's what I. Okay. Yeah.
[07:00] So, so it keeps us out of the religious part or not dead. It's not like the, uh,
[07:05] it's not like reading the, the rights of the dead or anything. This is, this is going to be, um,
[07:11] cause that was one thing I was thinking, like it could be something, uh, you know,
[07:14] at a funeral sort of, you know, and that you could see how that would get transferred to
[07:19] like a, uh, a gun battle. He's got them dead to rights. Cause he's basically going to put
[07:23] him in the grave sort of thing. Yep. I mean, the last rights, uh, certainly a big deal more
[07:28] in the Catholic church though, as opposed to the Protestant religion. For sure. For sure.
[07:33] If I thought it was, you know, an English turn of phrase, um, I would be more apt to go in that
[07:39] direction. Perhaps you're feeling pretty American on this. Yeah. I'm feeling Americanism.
[07:44] I, so the other thing I was wondering if, if it's, if it's a, again, like the basket case,
[07:49] whether this is a, um, connected to, to law, you know, cause you know, people have rights.
[07:57] Um, in the old West, they had rights. You have to do the, you have to do the bunny ears.
[08:05] Um, so that, that you would, um, you know, cause you're right. It's almost like you're, you're,
[08:10] you're, uh, you're caught dead to rights. You know, I always think of it like that way.
[08:16] Like you're caught red handed almost. Um, or I suppose, yeah, you you've been out drawn.
[08:22] I'm the enforcer. So I have people dead to rights.
[08:25] You have people dead to rights. Yeah. Yeah. But I wonder if it's like,
[08:29] could that be a, a court term? Be like, Hey, look, there there's, this person is,
[08:35] we got them. Yeah. Why would they be dead to rights? Because,
[08:41] well, because we have like a literal bounty system. Yeah. Okay. Right. And so the court
[08:47] passes a judgment. They give it to a sheriff or a marshal or somebody who's, you know, uh,
[08:53] tasked with going and collecting this fugitive. Right. He was presumably armed and dangerous.
[09:00] So murdering them is like a viable outcome. Because they're, they
[09:08] no longer, once the bounty's on their head, they don't have a right to live.
[09:11] I mean, not really. Right. We're kind of, that person has a right to defend themselves from an
[09:17] armed and dangerous fugitive. Right. Right. So in that, you know, fact pattern. Yeah. Then
[09:26] you could kill them. Okay. It's still a strange turn of phrase. It is a strange turn of phrase.
[09:34] You know, I mean, cause I, you know, I think of, uh, like there's a lot of things that you
[09:40] say that are dead, right? Like, uh, um, you use it with electricity. You use it with.
[09:47] Yeah. Oh, you, uh, you've got a dead hand in cards. You've got things are dead as a
[09:52] doornail. Like there's a lot of things that are dead, but dead to something sounds,
[09:59] I don't know any other phrases that are dead to anything, right? Yeah. It's a very,
[10:04] yeah, it's like a strangely passive construction. Right. So are we talking about Shakespeare then?
[10:08] Cause it's, it's like florid, uh, or, you know, one of our romantic poets.
[10:16] It could be, it could also, if you wanted to go further on like a gun slinging
[10:22] or even, you know, sword fighting tack, uh, you know, most people are right handed, right?
[10:28] So dead to rights. Um, you know, maybe you just, you, you have the upper hand, um,
[10:35] you know, maybe you chop off their right arm, but I don't know. Right. Okay. Okay.
[10:40] Dead to rights. Huh. Yeah. It's the, it's the construction of the phrase. I think that,
[10:47] that bothered my father as well as us. It's, it doesn't quite make any sense.
[10:53] Well, most English in the old west didn't turns out they were bad at talking and worse. Yeah. I,
[11:01] I think that I like that you think of it always when you think of it as, as, as the
[11:05] gun slinging, but I'm thinking I like swordplay. Okay. I like, uh,
[11:10] yeah, it's almost like you've knocked the sword out of his hand sort of thing.
[11:14] Got him dead to rights. There's definitely like, uh, an old west, you know,
[11:21] spaghetti westerny sort of dead to rights movie at some point. I'm going to have to remind me to IMDB
[11:27] that one. Okay. There's probably where all my associations come from. I'm taking Shakespeare.
[11:33] Got Shakespeare. And you've got the old west. I got old west. Okay. Let's look it up. All right.
[11:41] I will give you grammar. Okay. Dead to rights means having overwhelming evidence of someone's guilt,
[11:49] having irrefutable proof that someone is responsible for something. Okay. The idiom dead to rights came
[11:55] into use before the 1850s in the U S specifically has been traced to the criminal community in New
[12:01] York city. Dead to rights is an example of the use of the word dead to describe that something
[12:07] that is certain or unequivocal seen in phrases such as dead, certain dead broke, dead, sure.
[12:13] Dead serious, dead drunk. The latter half of the idiom to rights means in a proper manner
[12:19] that Amy's usually rendered with the word have as in have someone dead to rights.
[12:26] Certainly in a proper manner is sort of the, how you would in a, in a legally correct way,
[12:36] I think is what they're going for. Okay. Okay. Uh, yeah. So yeah, the, the term dead is, uh,
[12:51] goes back to the, um, used in this way, goes back to the UK in the 16th century. Really. Um,
[13:02] that's what it says. Um, we're meeting certainly, uh, this, this is, this is a word detective. Um,
[13:09] just like as in dead asleep or dead broke, um, absolutely without a doubt
[13:17] and that they trace that back to 16th century England. Okay. Gotcha. So dead or bang to rights.
[13:26] So that's very Britishy bang to rights. Yeah. So you were right. It was, it's,
[13:31] it's pretty recent. Um, it was just New York and not, uh, the West. Yeah. It seems to be,
[13:37] and you're definitely correct that it's like someone caught pretty red handed, right? Yeah.
[13:43] That seems to be the, the take. All right. Well, I'm not happy now.
[13:53] There's a lot of death and gambling on our show. Yeah. It's all the good stuff. Cheers. Cheers.