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What geography and history teachers will claim distinguishes modern life most from that of yestercentury is the availability of transport. I'm sure everyone was told repeatedly in primary school that the commonfolk of our ancestors spent their lives in the same town or village they were born. But today, most families have cars, air travel is cheap, and it's considered quite normal to have visited every continent save Antarctica.

Such, I consider, is the information revolution. In maybe a generation or two, when nobody alive remembers, the schoolchildren will be told how hard it was to find information and communicate; that we had large buildings called libraries, and that finding anything out required handling thousands of small pieces of card. A few months back I was watching ‘WarGames’ with a friend. When the protagonist goes to his local library to find information on a particular topic, my friend exclaimed, “Oh! He's using the library like Google!” In the same way, I find that I use Cambridgeshire Libraries' subscription to OED on my behalf more often than I physically visit the library.

So it is that, as there is now no reason to be a stay-at-home, there is no excuse for wanting to know something but not doing so. The internet is convenient; books are cheap. This is the world we live in.

In work's kitchen, there is a container of Splenda, a sweetener. I noticed this morning it had written on its side, “Whet your whistle.” This puzzled me, as I have always thought the expression was the less alliterative, “wet your whistle.” Though, the only time I could ever recall hearing this expression was in the Ahlbergs' entrancing ‘The Jolly Postman’, which kept me enthralled as a child. But though I remembered the striking choice of words, I couldn't make it scan (‘The Jolly Postman’ is poetic) or remember the context. Google came to the rescue, finding me this blog, which had the answer, along with the accompanying illustration.

So the Giant read the postcard
With Baby on his knee.
And the Postman wet his whistle
With a thimbleful of tea.

But back to the expression itself. A quick search of OED Online tells me that whet one's whistle is actually a 17th Century eggcorn of wet one's whistle, which is a 14th Century phrase. (All the OED links require a subscription.)

A more popular use for “whet” is in the phrase, “whet one's appetite.” That phrase uses “whet” in two ways: first, because it refers to sharpening one's appetite, giving it a point; second, because the verb “whet” often connotes preparation for an attack, in this case, preparation for a meal. In the case of wetting one's whistle, the original use is for drinking to clear the throat in preparation for speaking, as one spits in a whistle to make it more strident before blowing. One can also wet one's beak, mouth, or beard, all straightforward references to the drinking action.

While looking that up, I chanced upon a nearby entry on wet blanket. I always thought the phrase was a reference to bed-wetting, that a wet blanket is a childish sop. It turns out that the original use described a blanket soaked in water for use in putting out fires, so the figurative use suggests someone who dampens enthusiasm or spirits.