While working on my forthcoming database of English etymology, I have looked through countless old journals and magazines. I have especially enjoyed reading the reviews of etymological dictionaries published in their pages. Some were shockingly abrasive, even virulent; others delightfully chatty and unabashedly superficial. Malice is indestructible, so that the first type has survived into the present, but the second is gone, and the aim of this post is to bewail its demise.
In the middle of the 19th century, one of the best-known British etymologists was Hensleigh Wedgwood. He managed to unearth look-alikes of English words in various languages, and even his opponents recognized his detective abilities. However, Wedgwood attempted to trace most words to primordial cries, which often led him to ridiculous conclusions. For example, Engl. huge goes back to an Old French adjective whose origin is unknown. Obscure French words may turn out to be borrowings from Old Germanic languages, and some uninspiring guesswork to this effect exists also with regard to huge. Wedgwood derived huge from the interjection ugh!, allegedly related to the root ug- “shudder.” This type of etymologizing found few friends at a time when German linguists had succeeded in setting down the basic principles of comparing words. Wedgwood was aware of those principles but tended to ignore them. In 1859-1865 he brought out his major work A Dictionary of English Etymology. It ran into two more editions (1872 and 1888). George P. Marsh, an expert in the history of English who published a detailed discussion of etymologies in Webster’s dictionary, must have viewed Wedgwood’s work as a serious achievement. Marsh negotiated for the rights to publish an American edition of it; only the first volume (the letters A-D) appeared, for reasons I have not been able to ascertain.
Reviewing any dictionary is not easy, for how many people have the time and energy to analyze the entire volume? The same holds for thick etymological dictionaries. As a result, reviewers seldom go beyond informing the readers of the format of the work or expressing their satisfaction with the fact that a long-awaited book has come out (and lavishing praise on the author), or pointing to its fatal deficiencies, or listing a dozen words that they would have explained differently. Serious philologists wrote devastating reviews of Wedgwood’s dictionary. Those who knew no better admired his perspicacity. Today, Wedgwood’s dictionary is forgotten, which is a pity, because even confused people are hardly always wrong and because some of Wedgwood’s suggestions are astute. It is in general to be regretted that the humanities tend to adopt the all or none approach; if a work or trend has been shelved, it is assumed that it is not worthy of interest.
The most enjoyable reviews (from a purely hedonistic point of view) are of course the chatty ones, such as this review of Wedgwood published in the American journal The Living Age (76, 1863, 542-543):
“Few books are so readable as a good dictionary. A folio “Johnson” has always been a favorite resource on a wet day; and all men acquainted with literature are aware how much entertainment may be found in the quaint pages of Bailey, and in Dr. Richardson’s exhaustive volumes. Exhaustive—no; the epithet is ill-chosen. The sources of language are inexhaustible; its fountains possess perennial flow. Mr. Wedgwood’s book shows clearly that, with all the achievements of his predecessors, he has found much to do. Well has he done it; and upon a foggy December day we should desire no better amusement than that which his volumes afford.”
Hensleigh Wedgwood, a man for all seasons. I can’t resist the pleasure of reproducing the same anonymous reviewer’s comment on the word gazette. The first “gazette” was first published in Venice in 1536. Two hypotheses of the origin of this Italian word exist: either from gazetta ‘magpie’, diminutive of gazza (and then a title like Tatler [sic], Town Talk, and the like) or from gazzetta, the name of a small coin, “so called because this coin was paid either for the newspaper (the usual explanation) or for the privilege of reading it; cf. Picayune, as the name of a newspaper in New Orleans, named from picayune, a small coin” (The Century Dictionary). Wedgwood was a supporter of the magpie hypothesis, and the Living Age reviewer says:
“We presume that the souls of editors pass into magpies; and that when, riding or driving along some pleasant country road, we hear the cacophonous screams of those mischievous birds, they are vainly attempting to tell us the latest news.”
What an age! To be able to write such reviews and not to arouse the editors’ wrath!
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Anatoly Liberman is the author of
A Good Dictionary
Few books are so readable as a good dictionary. —Author unknown, from a review of Hensleigh Wedgwood’s A Dictionary of English Etymology in The Living Age (No.76 (1863) 542-543), quoted at OUP Blog.
George P. March: that should be Marsh.
I was particularly interested by something arguably even better than an etymological dictionary: namely, a book of corrections to one. Wedgwood published such a book on Skeat’s dictionary, a rare copy of which I have at home, and which I wrote about here, concerning the words ‘monkey’ and ‘puzzle’.