I never thought about the word until I encountered it in the autobiography of Mark Twain. He reported on the term not from his Mississippi River days, but from his experiences in the ocean around Hawaii.

He wrote that the scuttlebutt on a ship was the cask of fresh water that had a hole in it so sailors could drink from its contents. It tended to attract the seamen in thirsty groups, and while they surrounded it they chatted. From that practice its definition evolved to mean gossip. That’s right: the original talk-around-the-water-cooler scene.

Today I consulted the dictionary. I read that the term originated in 1805. A butt is a cask, from the late Latin buttis. A scuttle is a hole made in it, from the Middle English scutel which descended from Latin scutella (drinking bowl).

When we say butt we refer to the protuberances formed by the gluteal muscles, or the target of a joke, or the stub of a cigarette. But the one is actually short for buttocks, the next is related to how a goat or other horned animal knocks with its head (from ME butten and Old French bouter, to hit), and it looks like the last is the cigarette’s ass.

Buttock is from the Old English buttuc, for “strip of land, end.” Obviously we most often use the “end” meaning, but the strip of land brings up fundament: earth, bottom. Your fundament is what you sit on. I’m tickled when slogan-type words are poorly chosen. Whenever I hear the political call for Solidarity I think of constipation. Now isn’t it delicious, what the definition of fundament suggests about Fundamentalists?