You know how sometimes you're writing a word over and over and all of a sudden it just looks weird? Like you can't even figure out why it's spelled that way? That sensation is called wordnesia.
I think there must be something similar for idioms or phrases, the kinds of things you've said all your life until you look at them closely. (Or worse, when you try to explain them to someone who's never heard it before!)
One that hit me recently was "odds and ends." I knew what it meant: a random collection of things. But I couldn't figure out why those two words were paired up together.
Virginia Woolf's Odds & Ends Diary
I'd seen the phrase in print most recently when I was reading Remarkable Diaries, which is one of those huge coffee table books put out by DK. Each page has a brief description of a person and their diary (or sketchbook, journal, letters), photos of actual pages with handwriting or typescript, and other related images and facts.
I came across the entry for Virginia Woolf, an author I spent time reading in college. She had this to say:
"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing .. that comes into my mind. I should like to it resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends, without looking them through." (The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, April 20, 1919)
The Fabric Connection
I can understand "odds and evens" as referring to odd and even numbers. But how are "odd" and "ends" related? The website Idioms Online states that the phrase "probably evolved from a term in the mid-1500s 'odd ends', referring to short leftovers from bolts of cloth." The Merriam-Webster Dictionary mentions that its first known use was 1761, while the Collins Dictionary lists the origin as 1740-50. While researching, I found a random post by an individual from 2008 that claims that the phrase also means "in disarray" which does seem to fit with how Virginia Woolf used it, but I couldn't find that meaning listed in an online dictionary.
As an aside, just for fun I used the Time Traveler website by Merriam-Webster, which lists new words by year. I looked up 1761, the year of "odds and ends" and found these other new words: bewildering, earsplitting, sixth sense, tea tray ... and many others!
More Odds and Ends
In researching this topic, I came across a few odds and ends about, well, "odds and ends." Here's a sample of how the phrase (and the variant "odds n ends") has been used:
- Title of a 1969 song by Dionne Warwick
- A Buffalo-based close-out retailer
- Name of a vegetable soup recipe
- A tattoo parlor in Rockford, Illinois
- A film from 1959
- A fabric store in Pasadena, California
This isn't even close to a comprehensive list. There are many businesses (and at least one city) that have a page on their website titled "Odds and Ends" where they list information that they couldn't shoehorn into another category.
In researching this idiom, I also learned a new-to-me Britishism that's related: "odds and sods." The site Idiom Origins dates it to 1945, which would explain why it wasn't used by British author Virginia Woolf.
My Earring Design
With this phrase rattling around in my head, how could I not create something? My Odds and Ends earrings use up a few "odds and ends" in my jewelry making stash. I store short bits of leftover chain, random jump rings and head pins, single beads, odd sized rivets, or ear wires without mates in little containers. When I had the idea of making odds and ends earrings, this is where I went to find some of the pieces I used.
The earrings are just different enough to give them that "odds and ends" feeling, but not so different that they don't appear to be from the same pair. These would be a fun accessory for an English or ESL teacher, a way to wear the very concept of idioms you're trying to explain to students!