zem-zem

[George Thompson]

Presumably from an Arabic word associated with oases.  Or Berber, I
suppose.  If it's in the OED, it's under a spelling I failed to guess at.

            "The Broadway Zem-Zem."  Reader, have you ever noticed the
"watering trough" at which the omnibus horses always stop, on their way up
and down town, to "take a drink."  To us, this half-way equestrian
coffee-house is a point of no little interest -- a resting-place between up
and down town -- a sort of metropolitan zem-zem in the desert of brick and
mortar, at which the omnibus horse, that patient and greatly-abused camel
of civilization, stops periodically to "wood and water."  ***

            *Fifteen Minutes around New York*, by G. G. Foster, New York:
DeWitt & Davenport, c1854, p. 34.  ("Wright's American Fiction", vol. 2,
reel F-9, no. 936)



I notice also the figurative use of the expression "to wood and water",
which would literally apply to a railroad steam engine stopping at a
water-tank and also refilling its wood box.


GAT
-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org