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So there I was a while back reading this story in the Baltimore Sun about the efforts to unite Cyprus when I came come across this sentence:

``For the international community, the outcome is a political and diplomatic dog's break fast.''

Say what? The Word Detective had to admit he had never heard that phrase before.

So off I go to my shelf of books, to the Internet, to in-person interviews with talented wordsmiths to find out what a dog's breakfast is. And I did.

A dog's breakfast is a mess or a muddle. The reference I checked said it derives from the ``unpleasant habit of dogs, rising early before the local townsfolk, of eating the mess of food dropped or vomited onto the pavement the previous night."

Wow. Isn't the English lan guage colorful.

It's stuff like this that makes The Word Detective's job so interesting.

Heads and hands

Another big case The Word Detective took in recent weeks was the origin and correct spelling of doily, a case that began with a surprisingly heated debate

You all know what a doily is, don't you?

It is a cloth ``napkin,'' for want of a better word, usually white, that I always find on the arms of chairs and on the back of the chair where your pomadeladen head rests.

Like many strange words, the Doily was named after the linen draper who invented it in Lon don (although he might have spelled his name Doiley, Doylet or Doyly).

It appeared in print in an article in the Jan. 24, 1712 edi tion of The Spectator.

I'm melting, I'm melting... During a tour of the White House, of all places, The Word Detective heard the origin of the phrase ``mind your own bee's wax.''

Our guide was showing us a cordoned-off room with a fire place, and the fireplace had a screen panel in front of it to deflect the heat of a roaring fire.

Why? Because women's make-up of the time had a base of bee's wax, and a lady who ventured too close to the fire risked seeing her ``face'' melt away.

And so meddlers are admonished to not only mind their own business, but to mind their own bee's wax as well.

A few miscellaneous cases

When the British first settled Australia they encountered a strange animal that jumped all about thanks to its enormous hind legs.

They asked the Aborigines what they called the animal. The Aborigines said something like, ``I have no idea what you're asking me'' because they did not understand English.

The Aborigine phrase for ``huh, what did you say?'' was something that sounded like ``kangaroo.''

And the name stuck.

Did you know that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein both have 13 letters in their names? If that's not a connection, I don't know what is.

Speaking of Iraq, The Word Detective heard a report on NPR the other morning about private contractors who were hauling empty trucks all over Iraq for who knows what reason.

The drivers of these empty trucks had a name for what they were hauling: sailboat fuel.

I like that.

See you next week.

ORESTE P. D'ARCONTE is published of The Sun Chronicle. Reach him at darconte@thesunchronicle.com or at 508.236.0394.