• dust-up •
Pronunciation: dê-stêp • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A quarrel, a fight, a fracas.
Notes: Today's Good Word is a derived noun consisting of dust and up. Usually, such nouns from verbs with prepositions come from verbs with the same prepositions, e.g. sit-in comes from the verb (to) sit in and hold-out comes from (to) hold out. But (to) dust up has an entirely different meaning.
In Play: This word is at home in baseball: "When the umpire called, 'Strike three!', he found himself in a dust-up with the batter at home plate." But it may be used colloquially in discussions of a higher order: "The US finds itself in a dust-up with Iran over the Israeli invasion of Gaza."
Word History: The semantics of today's Good Word is similar to 'kick up/raise a dust' from an ancient slang sense of dust as "to dash, cast forcibly". So, when it arose in the late 19th century, it might have been a holdover from that sense of the word. Whatever the source, dust has cousins in German Dunst "mist, vapor" and Dutch duister "dark, obscure", all of which derive from PIE dheu-s-, dheu-m- "smoke, dark, gray". This word emerged across IE languages most often with the -m- suffix as in Sanskrit dhuman "smoke, vapor", in Latin as fumus "smoke, steam", in Greek as thumos "breath, life", in Russian as dym "smoke", and in Lithuanian as dūmai "smoke, fume". (Now a word of gratitude to Susan Maynard, a contributor since 2010, for today's mysteriously odd Good Word.)
