Nuptial Vowels

While writing notes to a lecture early this morning, I used the phrase “not all it’s cracked up to be.” Perhaps it was because the hour was so early or perhaps it was because I hadn’t finished my first cup of coffee, for the first time in my life, this phrase struck me as odd. I couldn’t make any literal or figurative sense of it. To “crack up” meaning to suffer an emotional or mental breakdown makes sense because it suggests both a falling apart and a falling down. To “crack up” meaning to respond with wild laughter feels right because it has to do with losing composure. But something’s being “not all it’s cracked up to be.” What does that mean?

A quick tour through the Oxford English Dictionary answered the question. As far back as 1450, “crack” came into English usage meaning “loud talk, boast, brag,” and sometimes “exaggeration”; a bit later, the meaning “to pronounce or tell briskly” was added. By the nineteenth century in America, it evolved into the idiom, “to crack up,” meaning “to praise.” Thus, “William cracked up his brother Tim’s new book.” If Tim’s new book wasn’t very good, then it “was all it was cracked up to be.”

As far as I can tell, “crack” with its all those meanings of speaking, boasting, and pronouncing briskly has fallen out of usage. Except for “crack a joke,” the almost defunct “cracking wise” (still hanging in there, though, in its variant, “wisecrack”), and of course “not all it’s cracked up to be,” all of which survive in our language like so many marsupials, “crack” meaning some sort of “talk” is pretty much extinct.

–Dennis