There were days when anybody could write a letter to Notes
and Queries, a biweekly magazine published in London, and see it in print a
few days later. One correspondent, whose playful but sterile imagination
suggested to him the pseudonym BUSHEY HEATH, wrote the following in Volume 12
of the Third Series, 1867, p. 262: “In country retirement, etymology seems to
furnish a more natural literary pleasure than it can do in the busy town.
All kinds of roots are springing up here, and why should not the roots of
language be cultivated among the rest? For my part, I take so much delight
in the pursuit, that I am afraid my dreamy fancies often shoot far beyond the
stone-crop of your learned streets, and only flourish in exotic
abortions.” Mr. BH was right in one respect: the vocabulary of historical
linguistics is shot through and through, as he might have said, by the
botanical metaphor. Words contain roots (and at one time scholars taught
that a stage of bare roots had existed), a synonym for root is stem,
language families have branches, the Indo-European protolanguage was likened to
a tree (German Stammbaum), and so forth.
On the other hand, BH may have been plagiarizing
Dickens. David Copperfield appeared in 1850, and by 1867 the
reading public had learned it almost by heart. David, when he became a
pupil in Dr. Strong’s exemplary school, was told “that the Doctor’s cogitating
manner was attributable to his being always engaged in looking for Greek roots;
which (the narrator continues) in my innocence and ignorance, I supposed to be
a botanical furore on the Doctor’s part, especially as he always looked at the
ground when he walked about, until I understood that they were roots of words,
with a view to a new Dictionary which he had in contemplation. Adams, our head-boy, who had a turn for mathematics, had made a calculation, I was informed,
of the time this Dictionary would take in completing, on the Doctor’s plan, and
at the Doctor’s rate of going. He considered that it might be done in one
thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the Doctor’s last, or
sixty-second, birthday.” My heart goes out to Dr. Strong, for I know that
Adams was right.
In the middle of the 19th century, learning Latin
and Greek was part of a gentleman’s upbringing, but etymology as a branch
of scholarship was still young even in Germany. Yet people always wanted
to know where words came from. How they satisfied their curiosity is a
question that should leave no student of the history of ideas
indifferent. In England, the public used etymological dictionaries
written in the 17th century (and treated them seriously) or looked
up words in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Until the 1860’s, no more
up-to-date sources could be found, and Skeat’s groundbreaking etymological
dictionary appeared only in 1882. Nowadays libraries are inundated with
popular books on word origins. Presses churn off this literature at a
speed at which the voracious and indiscriminate market is able to absorb
it. According to my bibliography, the first such book was published in
the English speaking world in 1818. It was Antiquitates
Curiosae: The Etymology Of many Remarkable Old Sayings, Proverbs,
and Singular Customs Explained by Joseph Taylor. London: Printed for
T. and J. Allman. (I do not know why “many” was not capitalized: perhaps
a misprint.) Not everything in it is wrong.
It took the popular genre a long time to reach its present
day peak, and, as might be expected, the quality of product reaching our
shelves is uneven — it takes all sorts to make a well-stocked library.
Although most of these books published before the modern boom have been justly
forgotten, some of them are well-written and instructive. It is a
pleasure to look through Wandering among Words, Rambles among Words, Word
Gossip, Notes of a Bookworm, Leaves from a Word-Hunter’s Note-Book, and
Some Curios from a Word-Collector’s Cabinet, to mention a few worthy of
note. They reflect the state of the art as it was understood at
the time, and the explanations in them should be taken with a grain of salt,
but this is self-evident.
To write a book, especially if it consists of odds and ends
(disjointed word histories), is easy. The hardest part is to think of a
good title. Word must be in it, if at all possible, and authors
vie with one another in offering The Fortunes of Words: Letters to a
Lady, Common Words with Curious Derivations, Strange Stories of
Words, Weird and Wonderful Words, and even The Private Lives of
English Words. In this ocean of titles, two have made a strong
impression on me. One is The Heart of Words–not too
memorable as titles go, but a strong religious feeling permeates it, which
makes the use of heart appropriate. It also has a curious dedication:
“To her without whom the last word on page 70 would be meaningless to the
author.” Naturally, I looked up the word; it is man. The
other is Cruelty to Words. Its author is Earnest Weekley, known,
among other things, for his etymological dictionary of English, published in
1921. The book is on the misuse of English, of course.
Then there are Spoon and Sparrow (an old 19th-century
book) and Dog Days and Dandelions (a recent one). They
invite us into a secret chamber but say nothing about what we will find
there. Dandelions? Sparrows? Or are they like Cabbages and
Kings, in which a lot happens, but neither to vegetables nor to
monarchs? Who cares? It is summer, one needs beach reading, and “in
country retirement, etymology seems to furnish a more natural literary pleasure
than it can do in the busy town.” The main thing is to avoid “exotic abortions.”
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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