What Is The Origin Of (152)?…
Fizzle out
We use this phrase to denote something that has started off promisingly but then has come to a disappointing end. It is analogous to a damp squib. The point of interest in the phrase is the word fizzle and it plays straight into one of this blog’s more regrettable areas of interest, farting.
Farting has given rise to many euphemisms but in modern usage there is no verb to describe what is often the smelliest of all farts, the one that escapes silently and the first that anyone knows about it is the presence of an acrid aroma. In my circles it is known as a SBD, silent but deadly, but it seems our forefathers had a verb to describe this phenomenon. You’ve guessed it – fizzle.
Etymologically speaking it comes from the Middle English verb fisten which meant to break wind. The suffix at the end, -le, is what the grammarians call a frequentative, emphasising frequency or repetition. How apt! Fizzle seems to have entered our language in around 1525 – I hope it crept up on us silently – and was defined as breaking wind without noise. That it was distinctive from a fart can be seen from a passage from Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s Natural History. There we find “they say if Asses eat thereof, they will fall a fizzling and farting.”
I think we should bring this word back from obsolescence and look forward to dropping into conversation at the pub the phrase, “My word, I’ve just fizzled!” And from the verb we get the nouns, fizzle, which describes the act of breaking wind silently, and a fizzler, someone who perpetrates the act. But how did this meaning fizzle out and be replaced by a much more generic and, frankly, disappointing definition?
The blame, if that is what it is, should be pointed in the direction of American colleges. Fizzling was associated with failing exams and the inability to answer the question(s) posed by a professor. In particular, it seems to have been associated with a bad, possibly inarticulate, recitation. The Yale Banger of 10th November 1846 reports, “This figure of a wounded snake is intended to represent what in technical language is termed a fizzle. The best judges have decided that to get just one third of the meaning right constitutes a perfect fizzle.” A year later, and at Yale too, we find, “My dignity is outraged at beholding those who fizzle and flunk in my presence, tower above me.”
Interestingly, around the same time the meaning of fizzle was escaping the narrow confines of farting and academic failure. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that by 1859 fizzle could be defined as making “a noise as of liquid or gas forced out of a narrow aperture, usually with special reference to the weakness and sudden diminution or cessation of such sound.” In particular, it was associated with oil drilling and what was quaintly termed as “unambitious rockets.” It is easy, then, to see the move to the modern-day figurative sense of proving a failure after a bright and promising start.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: difference between fizzle and fart, fisten, fizzling in American college slang, grammatical frequentative, meaning of fizzle, origin of fizzle out, origins of a damp squib, Philemon Holland, translation of Pliny's Natural History
