I get by with a little help from my fiends — word fiends, that is.

In a recent column about the phrase "having an ax to grind," I axed the popular notion that Ben Franklin coined it.

An email from Sylvia Garstka explains how Franklin erroneously came to be associated with the phrase. Franklin's "Autobiography," she writes, recounts the story of a man who tries to hone the entire face of an ax as smooth as its brightly polished edge.

But when he discovers how fatiguing it is to turn the grindstone long enough to polish the entire ax, he decides he likes the ax best as it is.

Franklin's point is that people often accept their faults when they realize how hard it is to overcome them. This has nothing to do with "having an ax to grind," but it's easy to see how Franklin ended up getting into the "ax."

I recently attributed the term "kibosh" to "caip bais," Gaelic for "cap of death." Joseph Fitzgerald of East Hartford, Conn., writes, not to kibosh, but to kibitz.

"It appears to come," he explains, "from the practice of terminating Irish dissidents during the Penal Laws. One operation, called the 'pitch-cap,' consisted of dipping a headgear in syrupy pitch or tar, placing it on the head and setting it on fire." (Talk about a hothead!)

"This was the cap of death," Joseph explains. "In the Irish language, it was called 'caip bais,' pronounced 'kype bawsh.'"

My recent reference to the original meaning of "refund" (to pour back a liquid) prompted Art Wright of Storrs, Conn., to note the watery motif in the financial terms "liquidity" and "frozen assets."

Suddenly, my brain flooded with other aqueous assets: cash flow, investment pool, prime the pump, float a loan, revenue stream, flood the market, trickle-down economics, bail out, soak the rich, drowning in red ink. It's no wonder we call money "currency," bank at Wells Fargo, and are audited by "Price Waterhouse"!

A while back, I suggested that the term "Dutch treat" (a meal or other entertainment for which each person pays his or her own way) was disparaging to the Dutch.

Not so fast, emailed Karl and Johanna Van Valkenburgh, a couple who presumably go Dutch on all outings. They explained that, because the Dutch women of New Amsterdam enjoyed high legal, social and financial status, they insisted on paying their own way when dating.

So "Dutch treat" originally denoted a woman's independence, not her date's stinginess, a point I've tried, quite unsuccessfully, to explain to several girlfriends along the way.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to [email protected] or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

Photo credit: Jason Abdilla at Unsplash