J Good buy, Mr Chips
OHN Capendale has asked me to mediate in an argument about a shop sign advertising “lay buys”. He thinks it should be “laybys”. He is correct. There might be laymen, layabouts and layoffs, but as far as I know there is no such thing as a “lay buy”.
Mind you … if you paid in instalments for a dozen eggs I suppose that might be a lay buy … as might a transaction conducted in a brothel … but let’s not overexercise our imaginations.
A lay-by is an indentation on the side of a road where one should (really) park while talking on the phone. It is also a negotiation involving delayed payments, invented by the Australians in the 1930s. Upon paying a deposit, your object of desire is laid by on a shelf or in a cage and kept for you until you return with the full outlay. Unlike hire purchase, with a lay-by you don’t get to take your wallaby home and pay for it later.
The English took to the same system in the 1960s and gave it the equally silly name “layaway”, which sounds like eleven chickens playing cricket at another team’s ground. A real coop.
Buy, by and bye can be confusing. “Buy” involves a purchase, except when it doesn’t. You can make a good buy or a bad buy, but no money changes hands when you buy time. A buy-out involves buying in. Let the buyer beware, if you buy that.
“By” is even more perplexing. The first meaning of “by” is “near to” — as in “stand by me”. But, perversely, bystanders tend not to get too close to whatever it is they’re standing by. Then there’s a bypass, which goes around something instead of nearer to it. And byways, by the way, are never anywhere near to where you’d like to be going. Nor are highways, but let’s not get sidetracked.
“By and large” was originally a nautical term meaning to sail first one way and then the other, but we use it in the sense of “pretty much” or “mostly”. A byword is not, as its name suggests, an incidental by-product of conversation, or a whispered word in the ear. It is the very essence of meaning, and is usually proclaimed by someone with a byline. Let bygones be bygones, I say.
“Bye” is less frustrating. It is short for “goodbye”, which comes from “God be with you” (in Old English it was spelt goodbwye ). If English were a logical language, “hello” should have come from “to hell you go”, but logic has no place in language. “Hello” is a relatively modern word, first used in 1883. It has no meaning except as a shout to attract attention. In the 1400s it was “holla”. Along the way it grew variant spellings, such as hallo, hullo and hello.
The Americans used to say hello while the Brits said hullo, which doesn’t sound right, but here’s HW Fowler, quoted by the Online Etymology Dictionary: “Hello, formerly an Americanism, is now nearly as common as hullo in Britain, and the Englishman cannot be expected to give up the right to say hello if he likes it better than his native hullo.”
There could be a song in that: You say hello, I say hullo. As opposed to the advertising jingle exhorting customers to buy fillings for their pies: Buy! Buy blackbirds!
“Bye”, by the by, is also an alternative spelling for a free run given in cricket. Which seems entirely consonant with “God be with you”, especially when it is a leg bye given to a batsman who accidentally hit the ball for a six with his spleen. Goodbye till next week. LS