When a letter to the editor called a political talking head a ‘dingbat’ I searched for the origin of the word. In Australian, American and New Zealand slang a ‘dingbat’ is someone who is wildly irrational or eccentric. We’ve used the word this way since the late-1800s. According to the Oxford however ‘dingbat’ has a longer history and many meanings. The sense of a stupid or crazy person appears in Australia and America around the 1870s or 1880s, laying the foundation for Archie Bunker’s affectionate nickname for his wife Edith in the TV show All In the Family. It incorporates two components: ‘ding’ meaning a hit or punch and ‘bat’ meaning either the action of striking or the object with which you strike. So, perhaps ‘dingbat’ meaning a halfwit comes from the notion a person has had too many blows to the head. It reminds me of a joke P. G. Wodehouse repeated in many stories. When someone behaved in a foolish way, a character was sure to remark, ‘Must have been dropped on his head as a baby.’ I suggest ‘dingbat’ is a similarly jocular expression.

When we look at the expression ‘slush fund’ we immediately think of politicians – why? The Merriam-Webster explains that a ‘slush fund’ is ‘a fund for bribing public officials or carrying on corruptive propaganda on behalf of special interests’. But it began life with a totally different meaning. In the early-1800s, it was born on sailing ships. In the Royal Navy, the food for those on the lower deck was dreadful. The only meat was pork or beef, stored in heavily salted vats for long voyages. The ship’s cook turned this tough old meat into a meal by boiling it in a large tub or pot in his galley. A thick layer of fat floated to the top of the pot, was scooped off and put into a tub where it solidified. It was called ‘slush’ and the tub it was stored in was called the ‘slush tub’. When they reached port, the contents of the ‘slush tub’ were sold to ship’s chandlers to be make into tallow candles. The money raised was put into a fund to buy small luxuries for the crew. This was the ‘slush fund’. Over time, it came to refer to any ‘extra’ money on hand. In America, by the 1870s, it was used in political circles for any unofficial money used to pay off officials as ‘illicit commission, bribery, corruption and graft’. Hence, our use of ‘slush fund’. Ah, well, such is the way of the world—from the good to the corrupt! (Or am I sounding cynical?)