If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all . . . or so goes the old saying. Today we have something nice to say about a term sometimes associated with meanness: dumbbell.

Children know dumbbell as a playground taunt applied to someone considered dull or stupid. Weight trainers know dumbbell as one of a pair of short bars with weights at each end. But even smart children and body builders probably wouldn't know that the term also has a musical application: the original dumbbell named an apparatus similar to that used to ring a church bell; this dumbbell went on to establish itself as a handy aid for folks interested in learning bell-ringing.

It took more than two hundred years for dumbbell to develop its slang sense "stupid person." How did that come to pass? We'd like to consider ourselves too smart to pin the development on the strong silent type, so instead we'll point out the "dumb" in dumbbell originally referred to the lack of noise made by the instrument and eventually was associated with a secondary sense of "dumb," namely, that referring to something meaningless or stupid.

Does all this talk ring a bell about the dumdum bullet? It shouldn't. This dumdum, a hollow-pointed missile that expands more than usual upon hitting an object, was named for the Asian-Indian town where it was first manufactured, and bears no etymological kinship with the phonetically similar "dumb."