When Fizzling Was Taboo

Reviving obsolete meanings of words is largely a futile business, but with the verb fizzle, it just might be worth the effort. At least it’s worth a chuckle.

My own discovery of this word’s history happened two years ago with an innocent question. A friend called me up and asked me about the etymology of the word sizzle. (Yes, my friends really do call me up with these kinds of questions.) The answer to my friend’s question is not all that interesting: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb sizzle is probably imitative (of a hissing sound). But the OED’s etymology of sizzle cross-references the verbs sizz and fizzle—and I figured as long as I was in the OED, I might as well look up fizzle.

An etymological jackpot. When I saw the earliest meaning of fizzle in English, I thought, “How did I not know this before? Why isn’t this gem in every history of English textbook?”

The verb fizzle is first cited in 1601, in Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History. It meant, in the wonderfully prim, Victorian wording of the OED (the entry was published in 1896), “to break wind without noise.” The quotation: “ … they say if Asses eat thereof, they will fall a fizling and farting.” The noun fizzle could be used to describe the action of breaking wind without noise, and a fizzler is one who partakes in said action.

How wonderful that we had a verb for that! And why in the world did we let that meaning become obsolete? (We now have the noun SBD—”silent but deadly”—but not a verb that I know of.)

By 1859, the OED has records of the verb fizzle meaning “to make a hissing sound,” with reference to oil and “unambitious rockets.”

It is 19^th-century U.S. college slang that gives us the meaning we have today, where fizzle means “to come to a weak conclusion, to fail.” It shows up first in a record of slang words at Yale University (1847) in reference to failing exams: “My dignity is outraged at beholding those who fizzle and flunk in my presence tower above me.” Slang thrives on play with the taboo, and if you’re now thinking about the slangy phrasal verb fart around (“waste time”), I was too.

Not only has the verb fizzle lost its taboo meaning, it’s not even all that slangy anymore. It remains more colloquial than formal, but according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English it shows up describing politics as well as sports in newspapers and even appears sometimes in academic prose.

I sincerely doubt that, in everyday language, fizzle is going to regain its ability to pair with fart in the memorably alliterative and slangy “fizzle and fart.” But you can now join me in using the word fizzle with secret irreverence.