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English speakers know tandem as a fancy word for a bicycle built for two. But it's also a Latin word meaning "at length." What's the story?

This is an English word whose etymology depends on a pun. Here's how it works: The first so-called tandems were carts with two horses harnessed not side-by-side (as usual) but in a line, head to tail — making the pair longer instead of wider. Some jokester apparently thought it would be funny to describe them as harnessed literally "at length" or tandem. Walter Skeat's Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language tersely describes this as "a University joke." Indeed. (Later, when two-person bicycles mirrored the same form, the term was picked up for them, too.)

One of the interesting things about this derivation is how unusual it is to see a pun in an etymology. Though in English we get our words from many places, we don't do this very often, certainly not for words that make it into wide usage. The OED reveals precious few words with punning etymologies.

In fact, I'd say this is perhaps the only one, since all the others are obscurities, one-time words, bizarre technical terms, or (in my opinion) simply jokes and not really words. For instance, must we really admit that Greeneland — "A term used to describe the world of depressed seediness reputedly typical of the setting and characters of the novels of Graham Greene" — is truly a word in English usage?

Two that come close, however, are punny (which puns on funny) and the land of Nod, meaning "sleep," punning on both a literal, geographic region mentioned in Genesis (which has nothing to do with sleep) and the metonymy of a single nod for all of sleep itself. (Coincidentally, the place-name Nod in Gen. 4:16, as Cain's place of vagabondage, is itself a Hebrew pun on a verb meaning "to wander.") These two, however, retain their puns much nearer the surface than tandem does.

The fact that this pair are the first and second runners-up for English words that are both in common use and derived from a pun merely shows how singular tandem is. Pun intended.

first published Jul 6, 2004