I could have spent a hundred years bemoaning English spelling, but since no one is paying attention, this would have been a wasted life. Not every language can boast of useless letters; fortunately, English is one of them. However, it is in good company, especially if viewed from a historical perspective. Such was Russian, which once overflowed with redundant letters. To a small extent, such is Modern German with its ß (Swiss German does very well without it). In the Germanic and Romance languages, x, where it has not been abolished, is a needless luxury (sex would be as appealing in the form seks, and ax ~ axe would cut as nicely if it were spelled aks). Another luxury (luksury), or rather a great nuisance, is the letter y.

In old manuscripts, i occupied very little space (the dot did not help), and its smallness, inherited from the Greek iota, became proverbial. The English continuation of the word iota, via Latin, is jot, noun (not a jot), and possibly jot, verb (to jot something down means “to write something briefly”; compare jottings). When the personal pronoun (Old Engl. ic) lost its consonant and was reduced to a single vowel, it had two options: to attach itself to the adjoining word (I said and said I would then have become isaid and saidi respectively) or make itself more visible. Little words appended to the beginning of longer ones are called proclitics. Those glued to the end are known as enclitics. Medieval Frisian and Dutch are full of “clitical” forms (which makes texts in those languages sometimes hard to decipher), but English scribes chose another way: they capitalized the midget, and that is the reason for the modern spelling of I. Foreigners often wonder why the English aggrandized themselves by capitalizing the first person pronoun. The opposite is true. They were afraid of disappearing in texts and elevated the status of the letter of the alphabet, not of their personality.

For the same purposes of visibility, at the end of words scribes replaced i with y; hence any, busy, and their likes (in “pet forms,” y sometimes varies with ie: Johnny ~ Johnnie). Every new rule produces complications. Once you decide that y is a substitute for i in word final position, you have to learn how this position can be recognized. It looks like a trivial task, but appearances should not be trusted. Dry ends in y, which is fine (that is, we take the traditional spelling for granted). Nor do the comparative and the superlative drier, driest raise objections: the dangerous letter (i) is now in the middle. But we spell dryly with two y’s! To understand the rationale for this spelling, one has to distinguish inflectional suffixes (such as -er) from word-forming ones (such as -ly: dryly is a word different from dry, while drier is a form of dry). There is the noun dries “drought,” which coexists with its homophone drys “prohibitionists” or “dry places” (plurals). Drys looks unfamiliar and ugly, but it is correct. If someone decided to add the suffix -ism to bully, the result would be bullyism, not bulliism. Likewise, bullyrag is not bullirag. Dries “drought” is wrong.

Wyverns have no wives. Why don’t they?

A few words have y in the middle for all kinds of arcane reasons. Such are dye, rye, and lye. The Old English for rye was ryge (pronounced approximately rüye). Its spelling does not seem to have changed much since the days of King Alfred. Dye is a different case. In many languages, non-identical spellings are used to differentiate homophones in writing. In English, dye has the letter y to distinguish it from die. Seeing that dye and die can hardly be confused, this measure is a waste. But you never know. Perhaps the owner of some failing hair salon decides to ruin the reputation of the competitor and to this end disfigure the wall of the more successful establishment with the graffiti “Never say dye!” To this ruffian the redundant letter will come in handy. (No doubt, I was not the first to perpetrate this feeble pun. People devoid of the sense of humor always use the verb perpetrate in this context and call all puns feeble.) The same principle that explains the difference between die and dye has been used in flier ~ flyer. I discovered the existence of the program called frequent flyer (and I still remember when it started) from a flier distributed to the passengers. I assume that lye is spelled with a y to prevent its confusion with lie. If so, we witness another exercise in futility because lie (“tell falsehoods”) and lie (as opposed to sit and stand) are still spelled alike. Shakespeare puns, and puns very cleverly (that is, not feebly), on the two verbs in a bitter sonnet addressed to the Dark Lady.

Then there is goodbye, with its incongruous ye. And while I am dealing with by, I may mention that by- or byelaws have nothing to do with the preposition or adverb by (this is a well-known fact, but it may be new to someone). Bylaw, in one of its meanings, goes back to the concept of a local law (from the Old Scandinavian word for “place of residence”). It is the same by as in Crosby (cross + by), Whitby (“white settlement”), and so forth. Dickens chose to spell the name of his character Dombey, but it is still Dom-by. Even Frisbee traces to Frisby, originally “a Frisian town.”

Most learned words with y in the middle are of Greek origin. Regrettably, English has never shaken off its classical heritage in spelling. Cycle, cypress, cyst, dynasty, etymology, lyre, myopia, nymph, syllable, style, and many others — not necessarily bookish nouns, adjectives, and verbs — bear witness to this pedantry (a list of my-words is especially sizable: myth, mystery, etc.). There is still some controversy surrounding the coining of the name nylon, but in any case, the word is not Greek. Why do we spell distemper but dyslexia? An etymological reason for that exists: two prefixes are indeed involved here, but modern English-speakers hardly sense the difference between them. Dystopia is the opposite of utopia, and displace is the opposite of place. The necessity to learn the written image of every new word beginning with dis- in pronunciation will turn the sweetest individual into a disgruntled customer or cause dyspepsia. Are you sure it is disharmony but dysfunction? Look them up or search for them. However, the process of writing need not become a game of constant riddle solving. If I were king, with due apologies to the Wylds, Wyldes, Smyths and Smythes, I would abolish the letters x and y, except in their family names, and let lynx and Styx become homographs of links and sticks! Who will be stymied by my desire to make life easier? (Stymie is a late word of unknown origin.) My plan has little practical value, for the chance of my achieving the status of an absolute monarch, an enlightened despot, a benign (benevolent?) dictator, let alone king is remote. However, the die is not cast.

Those who enjoy reading dictionaries will discover gyves, lychgate, lykewake, wych-elm (along with wych-hazel), and many other nice-looking words. They will wonder why tryst, which is probably related to trust, is not trist. They will get entangled among tireless tyros (or tiros: a Latin word for “novice, recruit” of unknown origin: military slang, something like rookie?), British tyres, and American tires (from attire?). It remains to say that y is the first letter of numerous words, yes and (New) York among them. It allows dogs to yap and yuppies to flourish.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Ouroboros by Lucas Jennis. An etching of a wyvern eating its own tail. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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There is a very specific language of Gothic and horror literature that has its roots buried deep in the history of English: doom has been around since Old English; dread carries over from Middle English; eerie, that sense of vague superstitious uneasiness, enters Middle English through Scottish. The adjectives are harsh and guttural: moons are always gibbous, the trees eldritch. Rather famously, Sigmund Freud begins his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ by exploring for several pages the etymology of the German term unheimlich (literally the ‘unhomely’, but cleverly translated using the ancient Scots word ‘uncanny’). Freud rests his entire argument about this elusive, uneasy emotion which is often said to be typical of Gothic fiction on the strange instability of this word. Heimlich and unheimlich are not always opposites, but can come to mean the same thing. What is the most alien, weird, and foreign – the uncanny – produces its effect precisely because it erupts in the most domestic, familiar, and ‘canny’ spaces of the home.

A name to be remembered

It is no surprise that the Gothic, a literature that emerged from the heart of northern Protestant Europe in the eighteenth century, uses an insistently harsh and ancient Northern tongue for its disordered and fantastical imaginings of murky deeds in the Dark Ages centuries before Enlightenment. The Gothic avoids the erudition of suspicious southern Latin sophisticates for a harsher Anglo-Saxon tongue. And if we still associate the modern Gothic with this language of the north it is largely down to the influence of one writer: H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). In the 1920s and 30s Lovecraft wrote pulp horror fictions about men undone by nasty tentacled gods in the backwoods of New England or at the ends of Earth amongst the savage races of Pacific islands or the keening penguins of the Antarctic. Horrible things slithered and slimed, invading human bodies and threatening all human values. He published in amateur journals with tiny print runs and then in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. He published only one novella in book form during his life, yet his influence on modern horror has been huge. There is no Stephen King without Lovecraft, no Ridley Scott Alien series, no body-horror, no X Files, no Guillermo del Toro films. Thousands of writers continue to use Lovecraft’s cosmogony of alien gods. He has influenced contemporary philosophy, Goth and Black Metal music, Japanese manga, and there are even religions that worship Lovecraft’s fictional god ‘Cthulhu’.

‘Weird literature’ and Lovecraft’s style

Lovecraft was responsible for fixing down a particular form of ‘weird literature’, a mode of writing slithering somewhere queasily between Gothic and science fiction. ‘Weird’, of course, is another ancient Northern word, found in Saxon, Old German, and Old English. In 2003, young genre writers like China Miéville were associated with a movement christened ‘The New Weird’, further attesting to Lovecraft’s continuing influence into the new century.

The most striking thing about Lovecraft’s prose is his extraordinary, mannered style. His stories are often static mood pieces, building their effect through dense descriptive passages that achieve an almost hypnotic rhythm. He over-eggs every description with tottering towers of adjectives, breaking every decorous rule of ‘good writing’. Adjectives move in packs, flanked by italics and exclamation marks that tell rather than show. He always exhaustively describes what is repeatedly said to be indescribable. He wrote passages like this, from his most famous tale, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-like imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membranous wings … It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway… The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.

The risk of such a style is that it always teeters on collapse, tipping over to become funny rather than frightening. There are many readers who find Lovecraft inept and comical, and this style is certainly very easy to parody. Rather disarmingly, though, Lovecraft tended to agree, berating his own style and failures in letters to friends. He abandoned writing for a long time after the initial rejection of At the Mountains of Madness, feeling there was no point in continuing. But there is a kind of logic to his stylistic awkwardness – it’s as if he needs to make language clatter and break open in order to get at the weird effect. The weird, I always think, is a pulp sublime that slithers out of the carcase of Lovecraft’s broken sentences.

Lovecraft on language and race

Lovecraft was rigorous in imagining his aliens – why would the English language be able to express absolute otherness? His god ‘Cthulhu’ is named with the barest approximation of the horrible sound his debased and savage followers utter. There is even a ritual chant that Lovecraft’s narrator transcribes: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn (which means, obviously, ‘In the house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’). Yet even this alien language perhaps distantly echoes the hard consonantal sounds and alliterative rhythms of Old English.

There is a darker reason for Lovecraft’s heavy investment in the old languages of the Gothic. Lovecraft was a deeply reactionary man, the last representative of two decaying New England families, deeply afraid of the whirlwind of change in modern America. He lived two years in New York in the 1920s, the huge influx of immigrants terrifying him and feeding his fantasies of invasion and dethronement. He feared that those of Nordic origin (the descendants of the first American white settlers, the Puritans of the Mayflower escaping Popish decadence in Europe) were being threatened by an influx of the Asiatic and other lesser races. He approvingly quoted from the very popular racist books of Madison Grant, who published works with titles like The Passing of the Great Race. It was after Lovecraft escaped from New York in 1926 and returned to Providence in Rhode Island that he wrote his greatest horror masterpieces. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is explicitly about the degenerate world of Brooklyn’s port district (then the largest port in the world), but soon these fantasies of racial in-breeding were transfigured into a register of cosmic threat.

For Lovecraft, the Gothic was deeply tied to questions of inheritance, race and language. He spoke explicitly of the Gothic as a literature of the Nordic tribes, best written by those heralding from the Goths and the Teutons. ‘Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense,’ he wrote in his essay ‘The Supernatural Horror in Literature’. He spoke of his favourite Gothic authors Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen as possessing ‘a purely Teutonick quality’ in which ‘you ought to find plain evidences of Nordick superiority; and derive therefrom a proper appreciation of your natural as distinguisht from your adopted race-stock.’ Language is never neutral, and in Lovecraft’s extraordinary fiction it is always a question of race and identity, produced in an era of great anxiety about the alleged ‘race suicide’ of the Western world in the aftermath of the Great War.

Always tread carefully: Cthulhu waits dreaming.

This article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. An expert on science fiction and Gothic literature, he is the author of The Invention of Telepathy, Science Fiction, The Trauma Question, and The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. He is the editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories published by OUP in May 2013.

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It may not be too widely known how hard it is to discover the origin of even “easy” words. Most people realize that the beginning of language is lost and that, although we can sometimes reconstruct an earlier stage of a word, we usually stop when it comes to explaining why a given combination of sounds is endowed with the meaning known to us. Moo poses no problems (sound imitation); neither does diesel (a proper name). Outside those two spheres, everything is “riddled with riddles.” Today I want to tell a story of how the “easy” origin of the adverb aloof was discovered. The sought-after etymology looks almost self-explanatory, but such is the first impression.

At present, aloof is used only in its figurative sense (we stay aloof, remain aloof, and so forth; hence aloofness), but it arose as a nautical term. This fact remained hidden for a long time. Stephen Skinner, the author of the second etymological dictionary of English (1671; the first was published by John Minsheu in 1617) thought that aloof meant “all off.” It was a relatively new word at his time: the OED has no examples of aloof predating 1535. Skinner’s solution appeared tempting to those who did not care too much about phonetic niceties. In aloof, the vowel is long, while in off it is and has always been short. Obviously, in 1671 no one would have been bothered by such a detail. Being aloof does more or less mean being “all off,” and that equation satisfied people for two centuries. I found it even in an 1870 book, where it was given without discussion as fact. The great Samuel Johnson copied most of his etymologies from Skinner, and the popularity of his dictionary (1755) guaranteed the longevity of the all off derivation.

However, the search for the true descent of aloof did not stop there. It occurred to some people that aloof was perhaps an alteration of a-loft. In 1864 Webster’s original etymologies underwent a drastic revision by C. A. F. Mahn, a German philologist, who, as one of our correspondents assured me, had never made it to America (I had suspected the truth but could find almost nothing on him) and worked, to use the modern cliché, “from home.” His contribution was important, and many absurd suggestions Noah Webster had launched disappeared from the dictionary. But, of course, who could single-handedly rewrite the etymologies of a whole language, especially considering that comparative linguistics was just then coming into its own and that not a single reliable dictionary of English word origins had yet been written! At least Mahn, though a Romance scholar, was a native German and therefore had sufficient familiarity with the achievements of the young science. But in the entry aloof even he vacillated between all off and aloft. Aloft has the already familiar fatal flaw: its root vowel is short. Also, we would like to know what happened to final t.

I have no way of finding out who nowadays reads The North British Review (abbreviated below as NBR). In the nineteenth century, “Reviews” of this type flooded both England and the United States. Many of them became deservedly famous. Sometimes they contained only long critiques of various books, but sometimes they also published essays, poetry, and fiction. One of the contributors to NBR was George Webbe Dasent, a brilliant translator of Icelandic sagas and Norwegian folktales. He knew both languages very well (he also felt comfortable in their grammar, as his manual testifies) and believed that being proficient in a language made him qualified for solving etymological puzzles. In this he was mistaken. Most “Reviews” published everything anonymously, but some contributors later brought out their collected works in book form, and that is how it is occasionally possible to ascertain their authorship. Dasent’s two volume set Jest and Earnest (1873) is excellent reading. His review of Latham’s revision of Johnson’s dictionary (and it is this review that I excerpted for my database) is there. I am used to the vituperative style of the epoch gone by, but Dasent was not only sarcastic, trenchant, and arrogant: he was unbearable. He never doubted that he possessed a key to the ultimate truth. Etymologists’ specialization may have a negative influence on their preferences. The number of deluded people who descry Hebrew, Arabic, or Slavic roots everywhere is not negligible. Someone who has an intimate knowledge of Irish tends to trace hundreds of words to Celtic. Familiarity with Icelandic makes one oversensitive to Scandinavian. This is what happened to Dasent, in whose opinion, aloof was a borrowing of Icel. á hlaupi, literally, “on the run” (the verb hlaupa is akin to Engl. leap). Now, in the earliest examples, as they appear in the OED, aloof signifies an order to the steersman to go to windward, so that “on the run” does not look too good a match for it.

Windward ho!

Dasent wanted to cut rather than disentangle the knot, but etymology, to quote an old lexicographer, is a work of difficulty and delicacy. The puzzle was solved by Skeat in the first edition of his dictionary (1882). Many of the solutions he offered in that work proved wrong, and Skeat, aware of his deficiencies, kept revising them, but this etymology has remained intact. Already in 1857 aloof was explained as the word for keeping one’s luff in the act of sailing to the wind, the luff being a contrivance for altering a ship’s course. Very many nautical terms reached English from Dutch. (A respectable English sailing term almost has to look Dutch. That is why schooner, which is not from Dutch, has the letter h after sc.) The same holds for aloof. Its etymon is Dutch te loef. English substituted on for te, and on loof became aloof, just as aboard, despite the many vicissitudes through which this word went, developed from on board.

Does the denouement look like an anticlimax? I don’t think so. To be sure, the etymology of aloof is almost in plain view, but it took people more than two hundred years to see the picture in its true light. Aloof may have come not from Dutch but from Danish, because the phrase had international currency (for example, it was also used by French sailors), but the Dutch source is more likely. Some dictionaries keep saying that aloof is a word of unknown origin. This verdict should be dismissed as unjustifiably harsh. No doubt, it is better to be safe than sorry. Yet, in this case there is nothing to be sorry about. Could aloof experience the influence of aloft (a suggestion made by many)? Such possibilities can never be excluded. Similar words of this type are sometimes called paronyms. The closer any given two words sound, the greater the possibility they will interact. As far as I can judge, aloft and aloof have little in common. From an etymological point of view, loft, a borrowing of Scandinavian lopt, means “air,” as German Luft still does.

The episode related above (a typical just so story, but with a much greater degree of verisimilitude than the story of the elephant’s trunk) shows that panning for etymological gold, even when the gold does not lie too deep, is hard but that some efforts pay off. And this is all there is to my tale, as Chesterton might have said and perhaps even said somewhere.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Sailing ship by Ivan Aivazovsky. Public domain via Wikipaintings.

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Some time ago I read Sidney P. Moss’s 1984 book Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America. Those who remember Martin Cuzzlewit and the last chapter of American Notes must have a good idea of the “quarrel.” However, this post is, naturally, not on the book or on Dickens’s nice statement: “I have to go to America—on my way to the Devil” (this statement is used as an epigraph to Moss’s work). In Chapter 10, titled “The Reading Tour,” Moss recounts the impressions of the listeners who had the good luck to hear Dickens in 1867-1868, during his second and last trip to the United States. He was a splendid actor (it is not for nothing that he enjoyed describing theaters and circuses), and newspapers followed his tour at every step.

Two places aroused my curiosity. The Boston Daily Journal (3 December 1867) described Dickens’s appearance, his suit of faultless black, a profusion of gold chains festooned across his vest, and so forth. The description ended so: “A cashy, good-natured, shrewd English face it is, one that would be associated with the out-door life of a smart man of business, not particularly troubled with the sentiments, and most unmindful of good cheer, brusque, not beautiful, wide-awake and honest” (p. 271). The florid style of the description does not appeal to me, but this is beyond the point. I stumbled at the phrase cashy face. Judging by the general tenor of the article and the situation (a performance by a worldwide celebrity), the word could not be too conversational, and indeed, cashy did not turn up in slang dictionaries with the sense that might fit the context. It is also absent from Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles and A Dictionary of American Regional English. I finally hunted it down in John Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, from which it made its way into Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. Wright rearranged the senses, but the information remained intact.

Cashy, recorded in the form cashie, means “delicate, not able to endure fatigue; soft, flabby, not of good quality (said about vegetables); luxuriant, succulent (said about plants).” Most senses seem to carry negative overtones. Obviously, Dickens’s face was “delicate.” But why should the reporter have used a word that in his days had restricted currency even in Scotland? Cashy could not be an over-subtle allusion to Dickens’s fondness for the word. We may be certain that it does not occur in Dickens, for otherwise James Murray would have included it in the OED, but he did not. I assume that in 1867 the readers of the Boston Daily Journal were expected to understand what was written in their newspaper. It would be interesting to know whether our correspondents from Boston and Scotland still know this adjective.

Charles Dickens: A cashy face and rising inflection.

From an etymological point of view cashy looks like cash-y (expensive? involving great care?). All the modern senses of this adjective go back to cash. A cashy job is one performed “under the table,” usually by individuals who are not qualified or by persons avoiding taxes. A finished (“cashed”) box of marijuana is called cashy, and the simplest sense of cashy is “wealthy.” But it is most doubtful that the adjective meaning “delicate, flabby, succulent, luxuriant” can be traced to cash. Nor does it seem likely that cashy is an Anglicized form of French caché “secret, hidden.” Once again I would like to appeal to our readers. Someone may know something about the derivation of this troublesome adjective.

The New York Tribune (14 December) was equally laudatory. However, it criticized Dickens’s “partiality for rising inflection and some Cockneyisms of pronunciation” (p. 282 of Moss’s book). Since the “Cockneyisms of pronunciation” were not cited (did Dickens say toime instead of time?), we will let them be. It is the rising inflection that merits a moment’s attention. Rather long ago, I discussed the rising intonation in American English but would like to return to it in connection with Dickens’s speech habits. I remember my embarrassment when I came to Minnesota and could not interpret statements, all of which sounded like questions to my ear. “Where is that building?” “It is two blocks away from here…” (with a strong rise). The dean informed us (among many other things): “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year…” (again with a strong rise). Someone told me that this intonation is peculiarly Midwestern: people are shy here and raise their voice to leave room for retreat (“That building is two blocks away from here, but, if you miss it, don’t blame me…”; “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year; yet, it may come earlier, who knows? I am really not sure”). The explanation struck me as fanciful and unconvincing. Later, much to my satisfaction, I discovered that the timidity of the allegedly self-effacing Midwesterners is a myth. They are people like everybody else. Some are timid, while others are not.

Then, I think about ten years ago or so, everybody suddenly began to speak about young women in California using exactly this rise. It was discussed in the media, and journalists ascribed the phenomenon to the emancipatory trend among the female segment of the population, as though a rise were a challenge (“This is what I say. Will you dare to disagree?”). I was amused by a theory opposite to the one I had heard in my semi-native Minnesota. It should be noted that the history of intonation does not exist. English vowels and consonants have been described by schoolmasters and other interested people since the seventeenth century, and old spelling tells its own story, but we have no record of intonation predating the late eighteen-hundreds. Remarks like people in this area “sing” abound, but such remarks are not informative. They only tell us that the outsider did not “sing” in the same way. Also, those observations usually refer to tone languages and dialects rather than intonation. Some conclusions about pauses in the uninhibited speech of the past can be drawn from the division of an old text into words, lines, and paragraphs, and poetry provides us with clues about sentence stress. Other than that, the “singing” of our ancestors is lost.

It is hard to account for some rules. In principle, one expects a rise in a question. But in English only questions beginning with a verb have a rise (“Is he your friend? Do you know him well? Have you ever lived together?”), while so-called special questions end like statements in a dip (“When was he born? Where does he live? Who is he?”). This also holds for the second part of disjunctive questions (“Do they call him Bob [a rise] or Rob [a fall]?”). One and the same intonation can have different functions. I have read several descriptions of Cockney, but I don’t remember whether anyone mentioned a rising intonation as a special feature of that dialect. What will Londoners say? There is no certainty that the correspondent of the New York Tribune was a trustworthy judge of Cockney speech. But seemingly, Dickens did raise his voice the way they do in Minnesota and California (only in Minnesota this intonation is not “gender-specific”). The three identical patterns need not have a common origin, and it would be interesting to hear the opinion of people from the Midwest, California, London, and elsewhere.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Charles Dickens – Scenes in his life. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Thief again.
One comment on thief referred to an apparently admissible Lithuanian cognate. It seems that if we were dealing with an Indo-European word of respectable antiquity, more than a single Baltic verb for “cower” or “seize” would have survived in this group. I also mentioned the possibility of borrowing, and another correspondent wondered from whom the Goths could learn such a word. Since thief has been attested in all the Old Germanic languages, it belongs to the Common Germanic stock and must have been coined or borrowed before the fourth century, when Wulfila translated the Bible into Gothic. Here it is important to take into account the historical situation. Germanic speakers living several millennia before Wulfila were nomads. Presumably, they would not have been above stealing cattle and horses (with the latter process requiring good, trusted friends) or robbing people. Yet myths reflect this situation sparingly. In Greece (stepping for a moment outside Germania), Hermes became famous because, while a child prodigy of one day old, he stole fifty head of cattle from his half-brother Apollo (their father was Zeus). In Scandinavia, Odin stole the mead of poetry from a giant, and, according to an obscure allusion, Loki stole a precious necklace. Stealing usually presupposed wresting a treasure of cosmic importance from a mighty adversary. We don’t know the age of those tales; the northern myths are hardly very old. Nor have the laws of the nomadic Teutons come down to us. Tacitus’s admiration for the unspoiled barbarians should be taken with a grain of salt, the more so as we have no idea who his informants were. The Old English, Old Frisian, and other similar laws that deal with thieves were recorded centuries after Tacitus. House breaking could not be a common crime among nomads, and keys (very primitive keys) were mainly used for locking doors against stray oxen and such.

I assume that the “Proto-Germans” (Teutons; unfortunately, English has no word like German Germanen) needed special verbs for galloping away on somebody else’s horse, for abducting a bride, and for waylaying people. They might have a verb meaning “to steal” but probably not a noun for “thief in general,” though their more cultured neighbors surely made them familiar with such an important concept. Many ancient languages of that epoch are lost, and the Teutons’ neighbors, apart from the Romans, were often also nomads. It seems odd that thief is all but impenetrable from an etymological point of view. I am usually not in a hurry to suggest a substrate origin for an obscure word, but thief might penetrate Germanic as borrowed slang. However, I agree that this imaginary foreign word about which no one knows anything and which may never have existed (my argument rests on a most shaky foundation!) need not have been low or vulgar or part of thieves’ cant. The situation in a modern Frisian dialect is different: a native noun was replaced with a similar and closely related noun from Dutch. The variants of this word in Old Icelandic would require a discussion too special for this blog.

Handsome is as handsome does: the origin of the construction.
Because of the punning grammar of this phrase it may not be immediately clear that the second handsome is an adverb, that is, handsome is as handsomely does. The word as is not only a conjunction but also a relative pronoun. We arrive at the “translation”: “Handsome is who acts handsomely.” Obviously, there is another pun involved. Handsome means “pleasing to the eye, physically attractive” and “magnanimous, general.” To conclude, “he is worthy of admiration who behaves admirably.” The adverb handsome seems to have been preserved in the Standard only in this idiom. In other cases, much discussed in the literature, adjectives often take over the function of adverbs (“Drive safe,” “Do it real quick,” and the like).

Engl. boy, Danish pog, Finnish pojka, and Estonian poeg.
Everything is unclear about the origin of these words, which are partly the same in Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, and Finno-Ugric, and this does not augur well for their interrelatedness. They look like belonging to a Common European stock, but the history of their spread remains undiscovered. In Low (= northern) German and Scandinavian, the prevailing metaphor is from “stick” to “boy,” that is, from “a small thick object” to “a small (fat) child.” Some of them begin with b and have n in the middle (for instance, Danish bengel “rowdy”). Here is part of an almost endless list: Danish pog “thick stick” (so in Old Danish), now usually “boy” (in the other Scandinavian languages the meaning is very close or identical, but in Middle Low German pok, with a long vowel, meant “bodkin”), Dutch dialectal pook “poker” (incidentally Engl. poke, verb, may or even does belong here). Later, Low German pok came to mean “weakling, small person,” while päks designates “a short fat youngster,” exactly as does Swiss German Pfuegg. Dutch pook is “poker” and (rarely) “dagger, bodkin.”

The phallic metaphor seems to be all over the place: “short thick stick,” “poke,” and invariably “a male child,” rather than “any child.” In the recent post “Boys will boys,” I discussed Mr. Cousins’s idea. His focus is on Romance, and he believes that the meaning “boy” goes back to “erect phallus.” None of the words he mentioned has ever been drawn into the wide p-k/p-g/b-k/b-g net, and I found his reference to bodkin, presumably a word of Celtic descent, especially interesting, even though its root ends (uncharacteristically) in -d. But I am not sure that the story, in Germanic or Romance, began with “phallus.” The closest cognates, in so far as they do not mean “boy,” mean “stick,” not “penis,” and the sense “erect phallus” may be secondary. The relations of Finnish pojka to Swedish pojke have been the object of some speculation (who borrowed from whom?); Estonian poeg is obviously related to them.

Herringbone. The big question is whether it comes from the sil or from the sild.

Two minor Scandinavian quibbles.
(1) In touching on the correspondence Engl. thief/Danish tyv, I noted that old th became t in Continental Scandinavia. The question was about a pair like Engl. thou and Swedish du. In both English and Continental Scandinavian, t (from th, voiceless) was regularly voiced in unstressed syllables. This is the origin of d in the definite article and pronoun.
(2) Sil and sild “herring.” The forms I cited (sil and sild) are Old Icelandic, not Danish, so that -d is not mute in the second of them. The modern reflexes of sil have a lengthened root vowel in modern dialects (as Mr. Larsson pointed out), while the reflexes of sild have a short vowel despite the loss of final d. Not that anyone needs proof that -d in Old Icelandic sild was not a mere orthographic sign, but note the pronunciation sil’ (with stød) in Danish, Swedish sill (with ll from ld), and Norwegian sild, which sounds like Swedish sill: with long l in place of ld. And yes, Germanic hun-d “dog” also has d; it is a common Indo-European suffix of animal names.

War of synonyms.
I agree with Mr. Cowan that synonyms crowd out one another both in any given language and between languages, but I was interested in the first case. No two synonyms mean absolutely the same. If their spheres of influence cannot be demarcated with sufficient clarity, at least their frequencies differ, but more often they occur in different stylistic spheres. As to shucks!, all is unclear, and I doubt that it has anything to do with shit, especially because we already have a euphemism for it (shoot!).

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: tweed textile background with herringbone pattern from a vintage book cover. Photo by marekuliasz, iStockphoto.

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Obrigado a todos que participaram no período de acesso gratuito à Oxford Reference e ao OED pela Semana da Biblioteca Nacional. Tanto o OED quanto a Oxford Reference oferecem algum conteúdo gratuito adicional para o público e ambas estão disponíveis para teste gratuito por um período de 30 dias (Bibliotecas podem enviar por e-mail solicitações de períodos de teste gratuito para library[dot]marketing[at]oup[dot]com).

A Oxford Reference é o lar da publicação de referência da Oxford que reúne mais de 2 milhões de verbetes, muitos dos quais ilustrados, em um recurso pesquisável de plataforma única.

Conteúdo gratuito na Oxford Reference inclui:

• Linhas do tempo Oxford Reference – Explorando a história
• Citações Oxford Essential – Descubra quem disse o que e quando em
• ‘Você sabia?’ feed – Inscreva-se para receber fatos interessantes entregues diariamente a você
• Artigos em destaque – Descubra o que o jornalista e ex-político Matthew Parris pensa sobre a importância das palavras na política, ou o que Garrett Oliver, cervejeiro mestre da The Brooklyn Brewery e autor do livro Oxford Companion to Beer pensa sobre a evolução da enciclopédia e natureza convincente do conteúdo de referência.

O OED é um dos maiores dicionários do mundo e autoridade reconhecida na evolução do idioma inglês, acompanhando o uso de mais de 600.000 palavras durante os últimos 1.000 anos através de 3 milhões de citações. O OED define:

• como uma palavra tem sido usada
• de onde ela veio
• quando ela se tornou parte do idioma inglês
• como seu significado mudou com o tempo e ao redor do mundo

Ele ilustra estas definições citando mais de 100.000 textos modernos e históricos, desde literatura clássica como peças de Shakespeare a roteiros de filmes e televisão como Buffy – A Caça-Vampiros, como também testamentos, livros de culinária, blogs e outros.

Conteúdo gratuito no OED inclui:

• A palavra do dia – Assine e receba uma nova palavra e definição todos os dias
• Histórias de palavra
• O OED atrai
• Inglês em uso – Considere diferentes formas de inglês por lugar (regional e internacional)
• Modelador do inglês

Assinantes do OED também podem acessar o Historical Thesaurus do OED em www.oed.com. Este recurso único permite que você explore as riquezas do idioma inglês por tema, e mapeie o progresso linguístico no tempo de um objeto, conceito ou expressão escolhida.

Exemplos de perguntas que você pode responder com o OED:

• É uma palavra específica de Londres ou da Austrália?
• Quais foram as novas palavras para falar sobre corrida de cavalos em 1700?
• Quais palavras rastreamos de volta a Shakespeare?
• Qual década apresenta mais palavras relacionadas a futebol registradas primeiro?
• Quais são os 93 substantivos que têm sido usados para chuva na história do inglês?
• Quem contribui com a mais antiga evidência conhecida para mais palavras em inglês, Chaucer ou Milton?
• Como as mudanças sociais são refletidas na linguagem, desde as 250 palavras relacionadas à motorização datadas de 1900-09, e o número de palavras relacionadas a filmes entre 1920-1939?

Obrigado mais uma vez a todos por nos ajudar a celebrar bibliotecas semana passada.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Gracias a todos los que participaron en el periodo de acceso gratuito a Oxford Reference y al OED para la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas. El OED y Oxford Reference ofrecen periodos de prueba gratuitos adicionales y ambos se encuentran disponibles por 30 días. (Las bibliotecas pueden escribir sus solicitudes para periodos de prueba gratuitos a library[dot]marketing[at]oup[dot]com ).

Oxford Reference es el lugar por excelencia para encontrar las calificadas publicaciones de referencia de Oxford, y reúne más de 2 millones de entradas, muchas de ellas ilustradas, en un recurso único multibúsqueda.

El contenido gratuito de Oxford Reference incluye:

• Líneas de tiempo de Oxford Reference — Explorando la Historia
• Citas esenciales de Oxford — Descubra quién dijo qué, cuándo y cómo lo dijeron
• ‘¿Sabía qué?’ –  Regístrese para obtener datos interesantes diariamente
• Artículos Destacados — Averigüe lo que piensa el periodista y ex político Matthew Parris sobre la importancia de las palabras en la política, o lo que Garrett Oliver, maestro cervecero del Brooklyn Brewery y el autor de Oxford Companion to Beer piensa de la evolución de la enciclopedia y la naturaleza del contenido de referencia.

El OED es uno de los diccionarios más grandes en el mundo y rastrea la evolución y el uso histórico de  más de 600,000 palabras en los últimos 1,000 años a través de 3 millones de citas.

El OED define:

• cómo un apalabra ha sido utilizada
• de dónde vino
• cuándo entro por primera vez al idioma inglés
• cómo su definición ha cambiado a través del tiempo y alrededor del mundo

Ilustra estas definiciones citando más de 100,000 textos históricos y modernos, desde la literatura clásica cómo las obras de Shakespeare a guiones de películas y televisión, como Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hasta blogs, testamentos, libros de cocina y más.

El contenido gratis del OED incluye:

• La palabra del día – Regístrese y reciba un apalabra y definición nueva cada día
• Historias de Palabras
• El OED Appeals
• Inglés en uso — Considere las diferentes formas del inglés por lugar (regional e internacional)
• Transformadores del Inglés

Suscritores al OED pueden acceder el tesauro histórico del OED en www.oed.com. Este recurso único le permite explorar la riqueza del idioma inglés por tema, y trazar el progreso lingüístico a través del tiempo de un objeto escogido, concepto o expresión.

¡Gracias nuevamente a todos por ayudarnos a celebrar las bibliotecas la semana pasada!

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Oxford Reference  is the home of Oxford’s reference publishing bringing together over 2-million entries, many of which are illustrated, into a single cross-searchable resource.

Free content on Oxford Reference includes:

• Oxford Reference timelines — Exploring history
• Oxford Essential Quotations — Find out who said what and when they said it
• ‘Did you know?’ feed — Sign up to get interesting facts delivered to you daily
• Feature Articles — Find out what the journalist and former politician Matthew Parris thinks about the importance of words in politics, or what Garrett Oliver, brew master of The Brooklyn Brewery and author of Oxford Companion to Beer thinks about the evolution of the encyclopedia and compelling nature of reference content.

The OED is one of the largest dictionaries in the world and the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language, tracing the use of more than 600,000 words over the last 1,000 years through 3 million quotations. The OED defines:

• how a word has been used
• where it came from
• when it first entered the English language
• how its meaning has changed over time and around the world

It illustrates these definitions by quoting from more than 100,000 modern and historical texts, from classic literature such as Shakespeare’s plays to film and television scripts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as wills, cookery books, blogs, and more.

Free content on the OED includes:

• The Word of the day – Sign up and receive a new word and definition each day
• Word Stories
• The OED Appeals
• English in use – Consider different forms of English by place (regional and international)
• Shapers of English

Subscribers to the OED can also access the Historical Thesaurus of the OED on www.oed.com. This unique resource allows you to explore the riches of the English language by theme, and to chart the linguistic progress over time of a chosen object, concept, or expression.

Examples of questions you can answer with the OED:

• Is a particular word from London or Australia?
• What were the new words to talk about horseracing in 1700?
• Which words do we trace back to Shakespeare?
• Which decade sees the most words relating to football first recorded?
• What are the 93 nouns that have been used for rain throughout the history of English?
• Who contributes the earliest known evidence for more English words, Chaucer or Milton?
• How are social changes reflected in language, from the 250 words related to motoring dated from 1900-09, and the number of film-related words from between 1920-1939?

Thanks again for everyone for helping us celebrate libraries this past week. See who won our National Library Week Photo Contest on Tumblr.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Today is Earth Day. At least, that’s the date of the official International Mother Earth Day, as adopted by the United Nations in 2009. It’s a day when we’re asked to reflect on the interdependence of all living things, our responsibility to restore damaged environments to health, and to cherish the world around us.

It was in the 1960s, the decade in which the modern environmental movement emerged, that the idea was born of dedicating one day of the year to celebrating the natural world and publicizing the injuries being inflicted on it. There had been several recent spectacular disasters. In 1967 the oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on the Scilly Isles, causing the world’s first major oil spill. Between 1953 and 1960, people living near Minamata Bay, Japan, were slowly poisoned by eating fish and shellfish contaminated with mercury compounds in effluent from a chemical factory. Londoners had long experience of the winter smog, a mixture of fog and smoke, which afflicted most industrial cities, but in December 1952 the smog killed some 4,000. It was so dense that a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells Theatre had to be cancelled because the audience couldn’t see the stage. Cinemas closed because no one could see the screen. Gaylord Nelson, a US senator from Wisconsin, saw the damage caused in 1969 when an oil well blew out not far from Santa Barbara, California, releasing between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude oil, and called for an ‘environmental teach-in’ to be held on 22 April 1970 to raise awareness of the harm being done. That was probably the first Earth Day.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books and articles appeared around that time, warning of the dire consequences of allowing the situation to continue. And in June 1970 the first edition of The Ecologist magazine hit the newsstands, dedicated to describing and analyzing what many saw as an impending crisis of existential proportions. It all came to a head early in 1972, when The Ecologist devoted the whole of its January issue to one long article called ‘A Blueprint for Survival.’ Meanwhile, the United Nations was preparing for its first major international conference, which was also the first conference on the state of the global environment. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment—the Stockholm Conference—was held in Stockholm in the summer of 1972.

June in Stockholm was sunny and warm, and the summer days were long. I was there as a member of a team from The Ecologist that collaborated with the recently formed Friends of the Earth to produce a daily conference newspaper, the Stockholm Conference Eco. Each morning we set out to attend meetings, returning in the evening to our office at a technical college in a Stockholm suburb to type our stories—no desktop computers in those days. The reports were cut out, pasted down, headlined, and finally taken to a Stockholm daily where it was printed. The following morning, volunteers distributed copies to all the hotels where delegates were staying and after the first few days they were allowed to take it into official conference premises.

The ‘Stockholm Conference Eco,’ (c) Michael Allaby.

The Stockholm Conference exposed the conflict between environmental protection and the need for economic development, a conflict that still remains unresolved. But it also encouraged governments to work together in addressing the most urgent environmental problems. Mainly under the auspices of the United Nations, a series of treaties followed, and in subsequent years there were more environmental conferences. Stockholm led to the creation of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme, which coordinates much of this activity.

On 22 April, as we mark the forty-third Earth Day, we can perhaps take stock of what was achieved. There are no more London smogs. Factories are no longer permitted to discharge their untreated effluents into rivers, so the rivers are cleaner. There are fish—lots of fish—in the Thames. Nor are industries allowed to release harmful dust and gases into the air. The condition of regional seas, such as the Mediterranean, is monitored and regulated by the countries bordering them. Pesticides are rigorously tested for their effects on non-target organisms before being licensed for use. The list of improvements is a long one, and the improvements are very real.

It is not to say that no problems remain. Of course they do, and some are serious. But they are acknowledged and serious professionals dedicate their lives to finding and applying solutions, and environmental protection and nature conservation now offer rewarding careers. There is always more to be done. But experience shows that we can advance, and that a better, healthier, and more interesting environment is within our grasp.

Michael Allaby has written many books on environmental science and especially on climatology and meteorology. He is an editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, and the General Editor of several other Oxford Dictionaries, including the Dictionaries of Earth Sciences, Ecology, Plant Sciences, and Zoology.

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This post is an answer to a letter I received from our correspondent Jonathan Davis. Not too long ago, I mentioned the differences in the pronunciation of niche: in the speech of most Americans it rhymes with pitch, but the rhyme niche/leash can also be heard, and it seems to be prevalent in Britain. Mr. Davis is an Englishman living in Texas and, not unexpectedly, favors the vowel of ee and sh in niche, while those around him prefer short i and ch. This difference made him raise the general question about the norm governing such words. He cited valet and ballet as examples. My inconclusive answer follows.

The fear of sounding snobbish is familiar to many people who use the French pronunciation of niche, valet, and their likes. As a radio host I am regularly asked whether forte “a strong point” should have one syllable or two. Some listeners castigate those who do not know the “correct” pronunciation; others are confused and unhappy. In my capacity as a public figure I am supposed to increase the amount of happiness in the world, but all I can say is that the “norm” does not exist in this area. Sounding more educated than one’s neighbors is awkward because neighbors never forgive those who (they think) put on airs. On the other hand, sounding under-educated to gratify the “lowbrows” is also a torture. You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Dictionaries sit on the fence (assuming that dictionaries can sit): they register the existing variants and, by ordering them, indicate which are more common.

In the process of assimilating French words English has always been torn between two tendencies: it either retained their foreign shape or Anglicized them. Equally important has been the tyranny of writing: spelling pronunciation tips the scale more than once. Not only borrowed words succumb to spelling. Consider the sad fate of often and forehead. Nowadays, everybody I hear says often (of-ten) and fore-head. Yet both are Germanic words. Forehead used to rhyme with horrid—except in “vulgar speech,” as old sources inform us; now the “vulgar” have won (as always: that is why language changes). Often is puzzling. Listen, glisten, whistle, and thistle stayed with mute (silent) t. So why often? Hypercorrection, the fear of the timid and the insecure to appear illiterate? It should be added that American English arose as a colonial language and is therefore in some respects more conservative than the language left behind in the metropolis. In the former colonies we regularly find variants that were current in Shakespeare’s days but are no longer admitted into the British Standard (dialects, to be sure, go their own way). This also holds for grammar and usage.

Lily of the Valet?

Jonathan Swift knew the pronunciation of verdict as verdi and vardi. We dutifully mimic the French in dealing with éclat, croquet, crochet, chalet, and bouquet (in all its senses), except that, since a word of Modern English cannot end in a short vowel unless it is schwa (as in sofa) or i (as in icky), the final vowel becomes long (éclat rhymes with spa) or turns into a diphthong (chalet rhymes with lay). Trait has fared even worse. It stuck to its heritage in England (that is, it has become a homophone of tray) but not in America, where it is indistinguishable from the root of the noun traitor. Extra care is needed in dealing with buffet: being buffeted is not the same as enjoying buffet dinner, regardless of the length of the food line. I remember reading about the rich and generous Mr. Buffet and wondering how to pronounce his family name.

French has lost not only final t but also s. Fracas and tapis (as in the phrase on the tapis) are words with a checkered history. Robert Burns rhymed fracas with Bacchus, and for a long time both British and American dictionaries registered final s in the word. It seems that Americans now know only the spelling pronunciation (with -s), while British English does without s. On the tapis occurs rarely, but most people probably understand it. American lexicographers, including Webster (the first edition of his dictionary appeared in 1828), and the authors of pronouncing dictionaries used to recommend tapis rhyming with lapis; at present this does not seem to be the case. One never hears the phrase, so it is hard to judge.

Niche is spelled with ch. At one time, the group (digraph) ch designated in French the same affricate it does in Modern English. When chamber, chance, charge, charity, chief, to cite a few, were borrowed from Old French, ch sounded similarly in them. When French ch yielded to sh (compare chief and its doublet chef), the pronunciation, but not the spelling, of borrowings began to reflect the change as evidenced by chagrin, champagne, charlatan, chemise, moustache, and so forth. If a word of Modern English is spelled with tch, it follows that the preceding vowel has always been short (catch, itch, wretch), while ch indicates length (each, reach, coach). Touch also had a long vowel (that is why we spell it with ou), but which, much, and such are real exceptions. According to this rule, the vowel in the etymon of niche was long. Consequently, nitch is a spelling pronunciation. May those say nitch who feel like it! May every speaker go his or her own way (it is their language they mold or trample underfoot): our withers are unwrung. German also appropriated this word, but Nische has a short vowel after the French consonant.

The valet or the varlet?

The French for the lowest playing court card (“jack” or “knave”) is valet. The character on this card usually bears demeaning names ranging between “servant” and “rogue.” Since valet is a cognate, almost a doublet, of varlet, who would be surprised that the knave of hearts stole some tarts? Let us hope that the dealings of this lady killer with tarts did not go much further.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credits: (1) Convallaria majalis, Rusaceae, Lily of the Valley, inflorescence; Karlsruhe, Germany. Photo by H. Zell, Creative Commons License, via Wikimedia Commons. (2) The knave of hearts, he stole those tarts. From R. Caldecott’s picture book (no.1) . NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Celebre a Semana Nacional da Biblioteca com acesso gratuito ao OED e à Oxford Reference, disponível para todos na América do Norte e do Sul até 20 de abril. Acesse o site e use o

nome de usuário: libraryweek e a senha: libraryweek

para entrar e acessar tudo o que o site tem a oferecer. Todas as pessoas terão acesso através do mesmo logon, sem necessidade de registro. Estamos liberando essa quantidade inédita de conteúdo da OUP em agradecimento a todo o trabalho vital que os bibliotecários realizam para apoiar seus patronos e em celebração à semana que honra as bibliotecas.

OED

O Oxford English Dictionary(Dicionário Oxford de Inglês) acompanha a evolução e o uso das palavras e é amplamente reconhecido como o registro mais competente e abrangente do idioma inglês. O Oxford English Dictionary Online  (Dicionário Oxford de Inglês Online) oferece o conteúdo mais recente do Oxford English Dictionary completo, bem como o Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Tesauro Histórico do OED). O OED Onlineinclui mais de 600.000 significados de palavras com mais de 3 milhões de citações, cobre o inglês britânico, americano e todas as variedades do inglês e é atualizado quatro vezes por ano com novas entradas.

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Oxford Reference

A Oxford Reference reúne mais de dois milhões de entradas em um único recurso de pesquisa cruzada, de referência de assunto, citação e dicionários de idiomas na coleção Oxford Quick Reference (Consulta Rápida Oxford) e nas premiadas publicações Oxford Companions e Encyclopedias na Oxford Reference Library..

Click here to view the embedded video.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Celebre la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas con acceso gratuito al OED y Oxford Reference, disponible para América del Norte, del Sur y el Caribe hasta el 20 de Abril. Visite cualquiera de los sitios Web y utilice libraryweek como nombre de usuario y contraseña  para acceder a todo el contenido que los sitios tienen que ofrecer. Todo el mundo tendrá acceso a través del mismo nombre de usuario y contraseña  y no se requiere ningún registro.

Estamos librando el acceso a este contenido gracias al trabajo arduo y vital que los bibliotecarios realizan para apoyar a los usuarios y para celebrar esta semana honrando a las bibliotecas.

OED

El Oxford English Dictionary describe la evolución y el uso de las palabras y es reconocido como el recurso más comprensivo y autoritario del idioma inglés. El Oxford English Dictionary Online brinda el contenido más reciente del Oxford English Dictionary al igual que el Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. El OED Online incluye más de 600,000 significados de palabras, utilizando 3 millones de citas y cubre todas las variedades del idioma inglés incluyendo el estadounidense y el británico, y es actualizado 4 veces al año con nuevas entradas.

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Oxford Reference

Oxford Reference reúne más de 2 millones de entradas en un sólo recurso, desde referencias temáticas, citas, y diccionarios de lenguajes en el Oxford Quick Reference a los galardonados Oxford Companions y enciclopedias en el Oxford Reference Library.

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First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Celebrate National Library Week with free access to the OED and Oxford Reference, available to everyone in North and South America through the 20^th of April. Visit either site and use

Username: libraryweek / Password: libraryweek

to login and access everything the sites have to offer. Everyone will have access through the same login and no registration of any kind is required.

We are freeing up this unprecedented amount of OUP content in thanks for all the vital work that librarians do to support their patrons and in celebration of the week honoring libraries. In addition, we’ll announce a contest just for librarians on Tumblr, which will bring attention to the events that libraries hold during National Library Week.

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the evolution and use of words and is widely acknowledged to be the most authoritative and comprehensive record of the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary Online gives you the latest content of the full Oxford English Dictionary as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED Online includes more than 600,000 meanings of words using over 3 million quotations; coverage of British, American, and all varieties of English; and is updated 4 times a year with new entries.

Visit the OED National Library Week webpage for helpful tips on exploring the OED during this free week.

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Oxford Reference

Oxford Reference brings together over 2-million entries into a single cross-searchable resource, from subject reference, quotation, and language dictionaries in the Oxford Quick Reference collection to award winning Oxford Companions and Encyclopedias in the Oxford Reference Library.

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First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Within a year, two recent articles on the origin of the word boy have come to my attention. This is great news. Keeping a talent of such value under a bushel and withholding it from the rest of the world would be unforgivable. Nowadays, if a philological journal does not come as a reward for the membership in a popular society, its circulation is extremely low (seldom beyond a hundred subscribers, most of them being libraries), and I suspect that relatively few of our readers open every volume of Studia Anglica Posnaniensia (SAP, obviously, from Poznań, Poland) and Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis (IJGLSA, Berkeley, USA). However, I do, and it is my duty to enlighten the non-subscribers.

The publication in SAP by Boris Hlebec is probably a joke. The author derives the English nouns child, boy, and girl from Slavic. Since he is not aware of the many attempts to find the etymology of the words he set out to explain, the joke did not strike me as particularly funny, but I am afraid that someone with an insufficiently developed sense of humor may take the article seriously. The other piece, by Nigel T. Cousins (in IJGLSA), first struck me as another joke, but, as I went on reading, my initial resentment yielded to a good deal of sympathy.

Cousins dug up a fair number of obscure but disconcertingly suggestive words that may shed light on the history of boy. I will skip his references and cite only the most revealing nouns and adjectives. There is French boiel, an old word for “tube”, used obscenely for “the male member.” In the French dictionary, this word, glossed as “tube,” is explained with the help of boyau, which, among other things, means “sausage” and not unexpectedly “penis.” Next, Cousins remarks that bodkin, with its obsolete variant boidekin, may be part of the puzzle. Modern English-speakers remember the word thanks to Hamlet’s bare bodkin. It seems to have a diminutive suffix borrowed from Dutch (perhaps an illusion), but the root is impenetrable. Of course, boy-kin would have suited us better, but then everybody would have guessed that bodkin is a little boy (which it, at first sight, is not). A word meaning “dagger” can certainly acquire the sense “penis,” and here we have more than a conjecture because this transference of the name happened in French: poignard “dagger” is time-honored slang for “male organ.” (The use of poignard in public, in front of women—it was intended as a taunt for a fellow officer who had the habit of walking around with daggers adorning his Caucasian uniform—provoked the fateful duel between the great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, 1814-1841, and Nikolay Martynov; in Russia, the language of high society and the drawing room was at that time French.)

Venus and Cupid. Lorenzo Lotto. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The unfamiliar English adjective boistous “full of vigor; thick, stiff” is a rather close synonym of boisterous, whose sexual implication comes clearly to the surface in Romeo and Juliet (I, 4: 25-26). Romeo: “Is love a tender thing? It is too rough/ Too rude, too boisterous; and it pricks like thorn.” Mercutio’s response is facetious, and much in it is made of pricking. Then we encounter the forgotten term poy (again of unknown etymology) “a punting pole” and “a float used to keep a sheep’s head above water” (thus, for all intents and purposes, a buoy). Those who read or have ever read Shakespeare aloud will remember that spirit in his verses should often be pronounced as sprit. From a historical point of view, sprit “a small pole or spar” has nothing to do with spirit, but mischievous phonetics resulted in regular ambiguities in Shakespeare’s texts, because sprit merged with spirit and could denote both “an erect penis” and “sperm”; hence the double entendre of the opening line in Sonnet 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action.” Poy, it appears, became a synonym of sprit (in addition to being a synonym of buoy) and a near homonym of boy. Very old words are also boyne “to swell,” boine “swelling,” and boysid “swollen.” Boy could also mean “devil.” Cousins emphasizes the fact that devil and penis were often synonymous. Indeed, the image of the Devil turning men into the slaves of their sexual urge was common. Hence hell “vagina” in Elizabethan English and another double entendre in Sonnet 129 (the last two lines): “…yet none knows well/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

Boy emerged in Middle English with the sense “servant”; “male child” developed later (at least, such is the evidence of the extant texts). The beginning of the story is lost. Not improbably, boy is one of the numerous b- and p-words, from bug and bud to pug and puddle, that have something to do with swelling.  Some of them are of unquestionable Germanic descent, others are certainly Romance. Many, whatever their country of origin, seem to be sound-imitative and refer to bursting and noise. It was not unusual for them to arise in Germanic, travel to French, and return “home.” Some were coined in France and came to England from there. Constant travels back and forth often make the question—Germanic or Romance?—almost unanswerable. This is especially true of slang and vulgar language carried from land to land by mercenaries, thieves, prostitutes, and all kinds of riffraff (ragtag and bobtail). The vocabulary of copulation has always been in the forefront of international slang (consider the universal spread of the English F-word, at one time probably borrowed from Low German but now a world celebrity).

Whatever the ultimate source of boy, in English it found itself surrounded by words that could designate “penis.” They probably formed a willing union. One aspect of the problem Cousins did not explore (and it is not clear how one can tackle it) is the frequency of the nouns and adjectives he discussed. It has been known for a long time that similar sounding words interact and influence one another. The path from “servant” to “male child” is not particularly circuitous, but the process may have been accelerated or even triggered by the word’s environment. Although boy will of necessity remain obscure (which is not tantamount to saying “origin unknown”), it will pay off to stop deriving it from some one well-defined word and considering the mission accomplished. Among the fringe benefits of Cousin’s research is the idea that bodkin, about which nobody knows anything definite, may have some connection with the circle of boy. Things bursting, sharp, and swollen surround us in our hunt for the etymology of boy on all sides. The plot thickens, and this is a good thing.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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The post Will boys be boys? appeared first on OUPblog.

In 1903, the motto “Deeds not Words” was adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst as the slogan of the new Women’s Social and Political Union. This aimed above all to secure women the vote, but it marked a deliberate departure in the methods to be used. Over fifty years of peaceful campaigning had brought no change to women’s rights in this respect; drastic action was, Emmeline decided, now called for. The “deeds” encouraged by the WSPU, such as stone-throwing, arson, window-breaking, and parliamentary deputations, would all be widely reported over the ensuing years. In the collective memory, it was however not deeds but words — and one word, suffragette, in particular — which came to epitomise this period and its aims.

The (UK) National Archives Catalogue Reference: AR 1/528

-ette and the conflicts of meaning

Suffragette neatly evokes the conflicted history of this time. If some women (and men) campaigned for the female right to vote, others campaigned against it. Even among those who supported female suffrage, there could be marked divides. First used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,  in the Daily Mail in 1906, suffragette was not only new but a deliberate (and deliberately negative) coinage, intended to divide the suffragists, whose campaigns remained peaceful, from those who, as Pankhurst urged, should henceforth adopt more ‘militant’ methods. Suffragette, as a compound of suffrage (“The casting of a vote, voting; the exercise of a right to vote,” as the Oxford English Dictionary would confirm) plus the suffix -ette, was by no means complimentary. On one hand, -ette was a diminutive and was often seen as trivialising in intent, as well as distinctly patronizing; a lecturette (first used in 1867) was “a short lecture,” a meteorette “a small shooting star.” Both were very different from their non-diminutive counterparts.

-Ette had moreover another meaning which had become familiar in recent years. This, as in leatherette, first used in 1880 and cashmerette, used in 1886, signalled the idea of imperfect imitation, as well as inauthenticity. As a result, just as leatherette was a fake version of leather, so too, by implication, were the suffragettes ‘fake’ — and profoundly improper — versions of the suffragists. Densely polysemous, -ette was also starting to emerge as a specifically female suffix, a use which can be seen in forms such as poetette. Defined as “A young or minor poet; (sometimes esp.) a young female poet” in the Oxford English Dictionary, this already indicates the transitions at work, as the diminutive shades into the specifically female — a semantic development which was undoubtedly aided by the prominence of suffragette itself. Here too, notions of true and false, norm and other, intervene. ‘True’ women, as anti-suffrage writers regularly stressed, would never engage in militant activities of this kind. “Woman—or suffragette?” the writer Marie Corelli demanded in 1907. One could not, at least in anti-suffrage rhetoric of this kind, be both.

Lashing the wind

Trying to control meaning, as Samuel Johnson long ago affirmed in his Dictionary of 1755, is, however, rather like trying “to lash the wind.” One might feel better, but little result will be achieved. Suffragette, in fact, offers a precise illustration of Johnson’s point. Intended as a term of derision, it was nevertheless swiftly appropriated by the suffragettes themselves. Rather than a mark of stigmatization, it became a positive badge of identity — of shared aims and aspirations. A magazine was launched, named The Suffragette (copies of which were often left at sites of militant activity). In 1911, Sylvia Pankhurst published a history of the campaign so far. She called it The Suffragette: the History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910. Even the pronunciation could be hijacked for positive ends. Writing in the Observer in 1906, Lady Hugh Bell stressed the genuine appropriacy of the word. The dismissive -ette could, she argued, be converted into -gette, conveying not powerlessness but the “jet of enthusiasm” which united action for the vote across the land. It was also “feminine enough,” she noted — “a fine flowing word.” The Pankhursts suggested another version by which -gette was to be pronounced ‘get’ — succinctly indicating the suffragettes’ determination to ‘get the vote’ on equal terms with men.

Acts of definition

Whether dictionaries can ever capture this complexity of meaning is an interesting question. “A female supporter of the cause of women’s political enfranchisement, esp. one of a violent or ‘militant’ type,” wrote Charles Onions, defining this word in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1915. A single pronunciation appears in the accompanying transcription. One suspects that, had the Pankhursts been asked to define this word, it would have been very different. As the opening of Pankhurst’s The Suffragette extolled: “the adventurous and resourceful daring of the young suffragettes who, by climbing up on roofs, by sliding down through skylights, by hiding under platforms, constantly succeeded in asking their endless questions, has never been excelled.” “Instantly the crowd roared, “Votes for Women!”—”Three cheers for the Suffragettes!”” Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1914 My Own Story records, here describing events in 1907. Words, then as now, can mean different things to different people. Point of view can influence the act of meaning, in dictionaries as well as outside them. Were the suffragettes brave, or foolhardy? Courageous or ‘violent’? Women or suffragettes — or, of course, both?

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of History of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College. She edited the newly revised and updated Oxford History of English. She is the author of Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction and Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. She is the editor of Johnson’s Pendulum (with Freya Johnston) and Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest. She has contributed to The Oxford History of English Lexicography and The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel.

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The title of this post is meant to warn our readers that the origin of the word thief has never been discovered. Perhaps an apology is in order. I embarked on today’s seemingly thankless topic after I received a question from Denmark about the possible ties between Danish to “two” and tyv “thief.” Although our corresponded knows that they cannot be related, the implications of the to / tyv case and the attempts to discover the etymology of thief are worthy of a short essay.

To and tyv begin with the same consonant (t), but from a historical point of view the identity of t¹and t² is misleading. In the past, the relevant forms were tvau and þjóf, similar to Modern Engl. two and thief (the letter þ designates the same sound as Engl. th). For some reason, th has been lost in most of Modern Germanic (but not in Icelandic or English). In the continental Scandinavian languages it turned into t, while old t remained unchanged. In German old th became d. That is why the German for thief is Dieb. Hence the rule: English (or Icelandic) th corresponds to Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian t and German d. I have dwelt on this uninspiring subject because it is exactly such correspondences that bear the grandiloquent name “phonetic laws.” Since theory is always more straightforward than practice, the “laws” often give researchers trouble. When words are obviously related but something goes wrong with phonetics, the deviation has to be explained.

For instance, Engl. thousand = Danish tusind (everything is fine!) = German tausend. But the German word was expected to begin with d! Why doesn’t it? The reason, which I won’t discuss here, came to light long ago, and the integrity of phonetic laws was saved. In other cases we may be out of luck. Thus, the vowels of heath and heather are incompatible (again I’ll skip the explanation why). Can we venture the conclusion that heather and heath look almost like homonyms by chance? It seems we should! The game has to be played according to the rules, for, if we disregard them, the game will stop. Historical linguists hope to win a fair wrestling match with the material, rather than participating in a skirmish. Sounds change more rapidly than non-specialists think. That is why etymologists always try to deal with the oldest forms recorded in texts. Danish to and tyv look close enough, but as long as we realize that their t’s have different sources, we won’t even try to compare them.

In Broad Daylight

The main Germanic word for “thief” is old. Gothic had þiufs (spelled þiubs), and with Gothic we are in the fourth century CE. The other related languages had similar forms, none of which resembles any non-Germanic word designating a person who steals. Given such evidence, the etymologist faces at least three possibilities.

1. Perhaps the root of þiufs (to be more precise, of its protoform) existed in Sanskrit (Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavic—one or all of them) but had a different sense. If so, we should remember that Germanic f corresponds to non-Germanic p (as in Engl. father versus Latin pater) and look for words with the root teup- (in þiufs, i goes back to e, and -s is an ending) or even teu-, because -p may turn out to be a suffix.
2. Or þiufs, from the unattested þeofs, is a Germanic coinage and never had cognates in other languages. Considering the meaning of the word thief, it could come into existence as slang. Perhaps that is how thieves once called themselves, but with time the word gained respectability and became part of the Standard. To cite a parallel: In the middle of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, the author of a famous English dictionary, called the noun slum low. Slums are still slums, but the word is no longer “low”: it is neutral.
3. The word may have been borrowed from another language (not necessarily as part of international thieves’ cant).

Despite the absence of unquestionable cognates (nouns or verbs that refer to stealing) students of Germanic tried to find some phonetically acceptable words that could have been related to thief. The most successful find was Greek typhlós “blind,” with the idea that þeof- meant either “hidden” or “imaginary.” Perhaps a more appropriate gloss would have been “a thing unseen; secret.” The Gothic adverb with the root of þiufs meant “clandestinely” (compare Engl. steal and stealthily). But several circumstances make this etymology suspect. Most important, the oldest Germanic sense of thief was not “someone who steals things under cover of darkness” (in Dickens’s days they said under cover of the darkness), but rather “criminal, violator” and “robber.” (The distinction between “thief” and “robber,” attested in Greek and Latin, doesn’t seem to have existed in the oldest Germanic society, while burglars in our sense of the word were unknown.) As far as we can judge, the ancient Germanic þeof- was not the proverbial thief in the night. The overtones of secrecy inherent in our thief and steal do not predate the introduction of Christianity.

Putative cognates, such as mean “cower,” “strike,” and “violence” (all of them have been offered), match the earliest sense of “thief” tolerably well, but one wonders why they occur in Lithuanian, Greek, and Avestan (an Iranian language). Not that distant and isolated connections among words are impossible. It just so happens that we cannot reconstruct the path from Lithuanian “press together” and “attack,” Greek “strike,” or Iranian “violence” to Germanic “thief.” If those words meant “robber” or if Germanic had words obviously akin to them, there would have been no problem. But even with the written history of a word for “thief” at our disposal, we often wonder at the zigzags in its development. Russian vor “thief” (with congeners elsewhere in Slavic) is probably related to the verb vrat’ “to lie, tell falsehoods,” and the noun’s oldest recorded senses were “cheat, swindler; adulterer.” French voleur “thief” is a metaphor borrowed from falconry. In other cases, the origin of the word for “thief” is as obscure as it is in Germanic. For example, the Romans connected latro “thief” with Greek látron “payment, compensation” (other words aligned to it meant “service; servant, slave”) and Latin latus “side” (compare Engl. lateral). The second derivation was definitely, and the first, quite possibly, a tribute to folk etymology. In Latin, latro “thief” was opposed to fur “robber,” a borrowing from Greek, as though the Romans could not coin their own noun for someone who sat in an ambush and waylaid them. It seems that honest people (and etymologists’ honesty has never been called into question) find it hard to follow thieves’ ways.

I am inclined to think that þeof- was a native coinage, possibly a slang word, perhaps even a taboo alternation of some other well-known noun (unless it was a borrowing from another language whose speakers were famous for their dishonest ways). That this supposition is not entirely groundless can be seen from the history of Old Icelandic þjófr. It should have been þjúfr, and no one knows who and when violated the “right” form.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: “Stop thief! stop thief! a highwayman!” from Randolph Caldecott’s picture books, series. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.

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“You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.”
- Rabbit of Owl in A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, chapter 5

As part of his agenda to improve primary school education, Michael Gove plans to invest more teaching time in driving up standards of spelling; his proposals include a list of 162 words which all eleven-year old children will be expected to spell correctly. As his critics were quick to point out, Gove’s belief in the importance of accurate spelling was somewhat undermined by a number of misspellings in the White Paper itself; Tristram Hunt gleefully suggested that Gove, “of all people,” should be able to spell bureaucracy. This highlights one of the golden rules of orthography: before you criticise someone else’s spelling, be sure your own is up to scratch.

This clamp down on spelling standards raises a question which has been debated for centuries. Should we be investing so much school time in teaching children to acquire a spelling system which is bedevilled by idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies?  Wouldn’t it be simpler to reform English spelling to make it easier to learn? Calls for spelling reform have been voiced since the sixteenth century, although the proposers often had conflicting agendas. Where some reformers wished to restore a closer link between spelling and pronunciation, proposing phonetic spellings like niit “knight,” others sought to restore the link between spelling and etymology, introducing silent letters into doubt, scissors, language, thereby driving speech and writing further apart.

While spelling may pose many hurdles for unwary learners, it is by no means clear that it is the reason for comparatively low levels of literacy. Calls for reform today often draw on exaggerated and alarmist claims about the difficulties of English spelling, making unfounded links between English spelling and youth illiteracy and unemployment, and other social ills.   Claims that more transparent spelling systems have resulted in higher levels of literacy in countries like Finland and Spain, where there is a closer relationship between spelling and pronunciation, are based on intuition rather than evidence, and ignore the wide range of social and educational factors that inevitably impact upon early literacy.

The English Spelling Society continues to fly the flag for spelling reform today, lobbying for wholesale simplification of the system. In September 2008 its president, John Wells, proposed relaxing spelling rules, accepting variants such as thru and lite, and ceasing to distinguish between they’re, their and there. In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2008 David Cameron attacked Wells’s proposals, reformulating them as a direct assault upon educational standards:  “He’s the President of the Spelling Society. Well, he’s wrong. And by the way, that’s spelt with a ‘W’.”

There is, however, an important question that gets lost in the politicisation of this debate. Is it necessary to have a standard spelling system? Why do we all need to spell the same way?  It’s easy to imagine that a single spelling system is a necessity rather than a choice, but it is a comparatively recent phenomenon.  In the Middle Ages there were literally hundreds of spellings of common words like through, including drowgh, yhurght, trghug, trowffe.  By comparison, the proposed tolerance of thru seems positively mild.  The proposal to tolerate variant spellings is not new; Mark Twain expressed a disdain for people who were only capable of spelling a word one way, while H.G. Wells viewed unusual spellings as an expression of character and personality. George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to fund an entirely new, “Shavian,” alphabet to replace the current system, whose surplus letters led to the waste of so much time and money: “Shakespeare might have written two or three more plays in the time it took him to spell his name with eleven letters instead of seven.”

Proposals to tolerate spelling variation are not merely evidence of recent liberal attitudes and slipping standards; a similar proposition to that of John Wells was made in a letter to the Times Educational Supplement in 1960, in which the writer questioned the need for a common orthography, suggesting that variants such as sieze, seize and seeze should be deemed equally acceptable.  Who is responsible for these trendy, permissive suggestions? C.S. Lewis. Such a policy would also encourage a more phonetic system, since alternative spellings could accommodate the different accents spoken in Britain and throughout the world.  For instance, speakers of English differ in their pronunciation of words like car and card, depending on their accent.  For Scots, Irish and most North American speakers, who pronounce the r in such words, these are logical spellings.  But for southern English speakers, for whom the r is silent, it would make more sense to spell such words without it.

Standardised spelling is a development closely linked with the introduction of printing; it is the role of copyeditors and proofreaders to ensure that an author’s spelling conforms to the standard. The recent publication of the manuscripts of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens provoked outrage in the media at their poor spelling. But their relaxed attitude to spelling is entirely unremarkable, given that correct spelling was imposed during the printing process. While printing has led to the establishment of a standard spelling system, the private spelling practices of diaries, letters and journals have continued to show considerable diversity up to the present day. The role of publishing houses as the gatekeepers of the standard is coming under increasing pressure today, as private spellings are now diffused more widely via websites, blogs, tweets, emails and other forms of unmediated online communication. There is a tacit acceptance that variant spellings are acceptable in such contexts and consequently the grip of the standard has begun to be loosened. Definitions in the online Urban Dictionary often view such misspellings as superior to conventional spellings; Teusday is labelled an “alternate spelling for Tuesday that better people use.”  C.S. Lewis regularly used this spelling in his private letters; perhaps his extensive reading in medieval literature meant he was reviving an earlier form, or perhaps he agreed with Rabbit that there are some days when spelling Tuesday correctly just doesn’t matter.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His book, Does Spelling Matter?, examines the role of spelling today, considering why English spelling is so difficult to master, whether it should be reformed, and whether the electronic age signals the demise of correct spelling. He also writes a blog about English spelling.

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Image credit: Rykneld School Spelling Certificate by Lindosland (Own work), shared under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The long-awaited third season of Game of Thrones premiers on HBO 31 March 2013 and Oxford University Press has everything you need to get ready, whether you’re looking to brush up on your dragon lore, forge your own Valyrian steel, or learn about some of the most dramatic real-life succession fights culled from our archives.

For the aspiring Daenerys Targaryen:

Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook
By Daniel Ogden
This comprehensive collection of dragon myths from Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources is perfect for any would-be Mother of Dragons.

Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times
By Seán McGrail
Having trouble finding boats to take you to Westeros? This collection of ancient vessels is all you need to build your own.

Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine
By David Leeming and Jake Page
A history of divine women, from Hera and Pandora to The Holy Mother.

History’s greatest “real life” Game of Thrones:

Poisoned Legacy: The Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty
By Aidan Dodson
Aidan Dodson explores the mysteries of the origins of the Egyptian usurper-king Amenmeses and the career of the ‘king-maker’ of the period, the chancellor Bay (sort of an Egyptian Petyr Baelish). Having helped to install at least one pharaoh on the throne, Bay’s life was ended by his abrupt execution, ordered by the woman with whom he had shared the regency of Egypt for the young and disabled King Siptah.

The Children of Henry VIII
By John Guy
Henry VIII fathered four children who survived childhood, each by a different mother. Their lives were consumed by jealously, mutual distrust, bitter rivalry, hatred…sound familiar?

“John Snow (1813–1858)” in the Oxford DNB
By Stephanie J. Snow
OK, so he only shares the same name as the member of the Night’s Watch, but still…he discovered that cholera was a waterborne infection! That’s pretty heroic.

For the student of the Common Tongue:

 
From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages
Edited by Michael Adams
Think Dothraki is a cool language? You may be interested in some other made-up languages.
 
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, First Edition
By Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner
No study of invented languages is complete without the father of them all, J.R.R. Tolkien.

“Words are wind – the language of Game of Thrones” on the OxfordWords Blog
By Adam Pulford
Pulford examines Martin’s language, some truly archaic and some only archaic-sounding.

For those looking to besiege King’s Landing:

Masters of the Battlefield: Great Commanders From the Classical Age to the Napoleonic Era
By Paul K. Davis
Vivid portraits of fifteen legendary military leaders on and off the battlefield. Tywin Lannister would fit right in.

The Illustrated Art of War: The Definitive English Translation by Samuel B. Griffith
By Sun Tzu
Translated with an Introduction by Samuel B. Griffith
Robb Stark could take a lesson or two from this masterpiece of battle tactics and strategy.

How to trade like you’re the richest man in Qarth:

“The Medieval Spice Trade” in The Oxford Handbook of Food History
By Paul Freedman
If you’re applying for a spot in the Ancient Guild of Spicers, this article is a must-read.
 
The Silk Road: A New History
By Valerie Hansen
Xaro Xhoan Daxos would have a whole chapter in this book if he were, you know, real.

Some of George R.R. Martin’s literary inspirations:

 
Oxford Book of British Ghost Stories
By Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert
George R.R. Martin has his own list of recommended authors, a good many of whom are collected here.
 
The Classic Horror Stories
By H. P. Lovecraft
Edited by Roger Luckhurst
While note exactly fantasy, there are enough ghouls and monsters here to frighten a White Walker.
 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon
Revised by Norman Davis
Knights, castles, and magic. A classic.

That’s it! So crack open some of these books (and some Iron Throne Ale) and enjoy Season Three!

Jonathan Kroberger is an Associate Publicist in the New York office of Oxford University Press. Special thanks to Kimberly Hernandez for research assistance.

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Image credit: All images from the Game of Thrones television series copyright HBO. Used for purposes of illustration.

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This has been a good month for the “gleanings”: I have received many questions and many kind words through the blog and privately. My usual thanks to those who read and react.

Idioms: dictionaries.
Our Polish correspondent wants to know where he can find a dictionary giving the origin of English idioms. I can list several such reference books but should first “issue a warning.” The origin of an idiom is often harder to ascertain than the origin of a word. Idioms tend to appear from thin air, and all we know about many of them is the date of their first attestation in print. To exacerbate matters, as journalists like to say, those who compile etymological dictionaries of idioms refrain from saying where they found their information (from whom they copied it), but without references one should take their pronouncements with a whole saltcellar at one’s side. Many compilations are called Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (after Ebenezer C. Brewer). If published by reputable presses, they are worth consulting. Familiar quotations, which often become idioms, have been investigated very well, and dictionaries of them are helpful.

Try Linda and Roger Flavell, Dictionary of Idioms (several editions and reprints). Charles Funk was the prolific author of superficial books on “curious word origins” (words and idioms are given there pell-mell). Something can be found in Webb B. Garrison, Why Say It (another moderately reliable source). I occasionally open Dictionary of Word Originsby Jordan Almond; Why Do We Say… by Nigel Rees; To Coin a Phrase by Edwin Radford and Alan Smith; and the 1937 book Everyday English Phrases by J.S. Whitebread. In the past, the volumes of Notes and Queries (most of them are now available online) contained discussion of astounding local idioms (in addition to the more common ones). People offered their suggestions, and I am sorry that no one has put together and tabulated this precious material. The idioms (“phrases”) in N&Q can be easily retrieved through the indexes. But to repeat: Don’t take anything you will find anywhere for the ultimate truth.

Idioms: salad days.
The question about this idiom has been asked and answered countless times. It is known that my salad days first appeared in print in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (1606) and meant “the time of one’s youthful inexperience” (rather than “the peak of my career,” as in Modern American English). Salad apparently referred to one’s green years (cf. The Green Years, a novel by Archibald J. Cronin). But it is not known whether Shakespeare coined this bold metaphor or whether it was current in his time (the second alternative is less likely).

Shucks!
In distinction from those who commented on my recent discussion of the exclamation shucks!, I don’t believe that it has anything to do with the F-word (even though the taboo origin seems “obvious” to one of our correspondents). When taboo forms come up, the first consonant is usually preserved (compare Gosh for God, Land for Lord, bally for bloody, and so forth), so that focks, ficks, or something similar might be expected. The plural also speaks against the taboo derivation. In f— it or f— you, there is no s. From a morphological point of view, shucks! belongs with jiggers! (and it even resembles it: just devoice the consonants and you will get shickers!). Finally, shucks expresses embarrassment or disappointment, not anger or frustration.

Sound symbolism: wr-.
Does only English use the group wr- for designating twisting of all kinds? I will confine myself to a nonbinding general statement. Onomatopoeia seems to be near universal. All over the world, groups like gr-, kr-, br- make people think of various noises (grinding, raucous cries, breaking, rupture, and the like), but sound symbolism is language-specific, especially when it comes to consonants. (Vowels are more obviously “symbolic”: the tit for tat situation, with short i denoting a small object and short a a big one, has been observed in numerous unrelated languages.) Some associations probably arise by chance, that is, thanks to statistics. For example, so many English words for smooth surfaces and gliding and glowing begin with gl- that gl- acquired a life of its own, and neither gloom nor gloaming can ruin the connection. Also, we often detect symbolism in retrospect. For instance, we know what collywobbles means, and it begins to seem that the sound shape of collywobbles suits the word’s meaning in the best way possible.

On the same note: cur.
Cur is possibly sound imitative (kr-kr). In English, the word may be of Scandinavian descent, as evidenced by the Scandinavian verbs kurra and kurre for screeching, cooing, etc. Chirp, screech, and scream are close to kurr-.

Twerp and twill.
I was very pleased to learn from Stephen Goranson that twerp was already current in 1917. This confirms my suspicion that the word does not go back to a proper name. And yes, of course, tw- in twill is related to tw- in two. I paired twill with tweed because they so well go together. But thief does not belong with them. The word is of unknown origin, and I may devote a special post to it.

“Vikings” and “herring” (as opposed to cabbages and kings).
(1) If víking was pronounced with a short vowel, wouldn’t the word have been spelled with -kk-? Probably not, especially in Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic, in which kk seems to have been preaspirated, that is, to have had the value of ^hk(k). For example, in Modern Icelandic, rekja “unravel” (or its homonym rekja “humidity, moisture; rain; dew”) has a long vowel, while rekkja “bed” has a short one (and preaspirated k), but in Old Icelandic both had short e and were distinguished only by consonant length. It should also be remembered that medieval spelling is inconsistent. Thus, in Old Icelandic, an accent mark over a vowel designated length, but one cannot always rely on the form attested in manuscripts. The evidence of modern languages sometimes carries more weight for reconstructing the pronunciation of the past.
(2) The Scandinavian word for “herring.” Both sil and sild exist, and, assuming that they are related (a safe assumption),-d must be a suffix, but its exact meaning remains unclear.

“Dance” in the Romance languages.
Spanish has both danzar and bailar. Likewise, Italian has danzare and ballare. Old French had baller (extant in Modern French as baller “make merry; dance,” now obsolete alongside danser). As always, when close synonyms coexist, they divide their spheres of influence and try to gain the entire available territory.

Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? 
This is the famous catchphrase by Goebbels (1943; “Do you want a “total,” that is, “an all-out, all-embracing, all-pervading” war, “war and nothing else”?). Our Danish correspondent wonders why there is no infinitive (haben “have”) in the phrase and quotes sentences in Modern Danish in which ville is also used “absolutely,” without an infinitive, and means “want, prefer”or something similar. This usage seems natural to me. In German, wollen is quite possible without an infinitive. I am not sure whether phrases like du hast es gewollt “you wanted it” arose under French influence (compare the now proverbial French tu l’as voulu, George Dandin), but something like ob man will oder nicht “whether one wants it or not” (with an exact analog in Danish) must be a hundred percent native. In older texts, “be,” “have,” and “go” were regularly omitted after modal verbs. Old Icelandic is especially typical in this respect.

An etymologist reborn

Personal.
(1) Brianne Hughes likes my blog and says that she would be glad to give me a hug if we met but fears that it would be improper. Oh, quite proper! I often hear that callous men objectify women, and shudder, but I, not being a woman, would love being objectified. Also, I heard our neighbor once complain that her teenage son was too much in demand. “Girls exploit him!” she whimpered. Since I knew very well how the young man was used by the opposite sex, it occurred to me that some forms of exploitation might be welcome. One of the basic principles of dialectics is that truth is always concrete.
(2) Anne Morgan does not have much trust in incarnation but hopes that, if she is ever reborn, she will be an etymologist. I too have a confused notion of (re)incarnation, except that I fear reemerging as a woodpecker, for in this case I will continue my present occupation, which is pecking away at hard wood in search of edible grubs.

Spring has come (congratulations!), and the seventh year of this blog began with it.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis , chromolithograph, 1888. Birds of North America by Jacob H. Studer, John Graham Bell, Frank Chapman, Theodore Jasper, (artist). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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I am saying goodbye to the Harlem Shake. The miniseries began two weeks ago with dance, moved on to twerk and twerp, and now the turn of the verb shake has come round. Reference books say little about the origin of shake. They usually list a few cognates and produce the Germanic etymon skakan (both a’s were short). This form adds nothing to what we already know, because Old Engl. scacan ~ sceacan, Old Saxon scacan, and Old Icelandic skaka have been attested; their Old High German cognate existed too. All of them meant “shake” and were obviously related. Dictionaries frequently stop in the most interesting place. After being presented with the information that once upon a time the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, and others had the verb skakan, we would like to know why the sound complex skak- meant what it did. Oh yes, quite possibly, Sanskrit khajati “agitate, churn” also belongs here, and a dubious Old Irish congener need not be ignored. Nothing like being informed that so many Indo-Europeans once shook in sync, but the main question remains unanswered.

This “main question” can seldom be answered. If we lack the means to show that a word is sound imitative or sound symbolic, we usually end up with hypothetical roots that never existed in isolation and whose earlier history we are unable to reconstruct. Where do we go from skakan? The first editors of OED saw no helpful forms in Germanic and only one outside it (Sanskrit khajati). James A.H. Murray and Henry Bradley, OED’s first editors, adhered to the admirable principle that less is more and discouraged idle speculation. This policy had the result that their etymologies aged remarkably well, but it also had a negative side effect: countless authors who copied from OED (or should we say plagiarized it?) seldom dared offer original conclusions and stayed with what they found in that work. As a result, English etymological lexicography stagnated. To be sure, there also was Skeat, but he lacked the authority of the greatest dictionary in the world. Apparently, what was good for OED was good enough for everybody else. (I may once have quoted the probably fictitious remark of an English speaking student who refused to waste time on learning French and said: “The language that was good for Jesus Christ is good enough for me.”)

Group of Shakers. [1860?-1910?] ca. 1880. GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Shock has a more complicated history. In addition to shock¹, as in shell-shocked and in this news shocked us, there are shock² “a pile of sheaves of grain” and shock³ as in a shock of hair. The first shock came to English from French, but despite some doubts expressed in dictionaries it is, very probably, of Germanic origin. Its base can be seen in Middle High German schocken ~ schucken “to swing” (Old High German skokka meant “swinging,” and its phonetically unexpected modern continuation is Schaukel “a swing”). Words that traveled from Germanic to Romance and back to Germanic are numerous. Shock² and shock³ are almost certainly of Germanic descent. They seem to be part of a loosely related sk-family. Nothing is known about the origin of Engl. shuck “husk.” But I have always wondered how the exclamation shucks! (an expression of sham modesty or disappointment) came about. Exclamations of this type (at-a-boy!, oh boy, and so forth) sometimes preserve the oldest sense of an etymologically obscure word. Could the story begin with a dialectal verb shuck “to discard or dismiss contemptuously a worthless thing (by shaking it off),” a synonym or doublet of chuck “throw with the hand” (unless chuck is a doublet of shuck), with a later development to the noun “worthless thing” and ‘’the inedible part of the grain”? Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary cites (among others) shuck “shake; shirk; yawn, stretch.”

Engl. shack “fall, as grain at harvest; grain fallen from the ear and eaten by hogs” and shack “rove around, as a stroller or beggar; worthless person; truant” are on record. In this volatile part of the vocabulary, given shack (of course, unrelated to shack “hut”) and shock, the existence of shuck is easy to imagine. Old Icelandic skokkr meant “a loose board in a boat”—another disposable object? In the entry shackle, Skeat cited Swedish skakel “loose shaft of a carriage” (Old Engl. sceacul meant “a loose bond”) and connected them with shake. This etymology has been called into question on account of the words’ semantic incompatibility, but in such cases everything depends on what common denominator the researcher chooses. Perhaps it was “throw away with a shake of the hand; get rid of.” Our family swells. Even skate (as in a pair of skates), which cannot be separated from French échasse “stilt,” seems to belong to it too.

Someone pursuing such creeping etymologies encounters many pitfalls. More and more words are drawn into the net, phonetic correspondences become weaker, and underground semantic passages provide arbitrary links from one point to another. Shake, shock, shack, shuck, chuck, shog, jog…. In my forthcoming posts I will explore some other similar cases, but this is what can be said by way of general explanation. Some words are clearly and nobly related, for example, Engl. three and Latin tres. Others are more like mushrooms growing on the same stump: no roots but unquestionable affinity. Perhaps the historical linguistics of the future will deal not only with roots but also with spores.

The greatest master of creeping etymologies was Jost Trier, a distinguished twentieth-century scholar. He purported to show that many seemingly unrelated words can be traced to some basic concept or activity, for example, “foliage,” “underwood,” “love,” “work in a community,” or “wall building.” He had many admirers and as many detractors. Some of his solutions are not only ingenious but probably correct (I say probably, because unclear etymologies are bound to remain unclear). Others are fanciful. Neither following him all the way nor dismissing him out of hand should be recommended. Each of his proposals has to be evaluated for its merits and demerits. But, in principle, jumping from one look-alike to another poses numerous dangers. It is a fact that sk- and sk-k enter into words for springing and shaking in many languages. It is less clear what made those groups fit for designating strong movement. Be that as it my, perhaps my proposal won’t strike anyone as too foolhardy: shake, from skakan, means what is does for good reason, even though at the moment this reason escapes us.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Social workers around the world are being invited to celebrate World Social Work Day on 19 March under the banner “Promoting Social and Economic Equalities”, taken from the Global Agenda (2010). Such a call to arms is sorely needed in the face of the growing influence of neoliberalism on global social work, an influence manifested in marketisation, consumerisation, and managerialisation. These dynamic processes and trends represent neoliberalism on the move as it colonises the world. This is not to suggest that the same detailed and identical neoliberal template for social work is emerging in many disparate countries. Rather, these three developments represent an overall direction of travel. In individual countries the extent to which the developments have progressed and in what combinations they have developed is path-dependent; it depends on political institutions, constitutional arrangements, the extent of opposition to them, and so on. Nevertheless, as a direction of travel neoliberalism is increasingly prominent in many countries as a bounded rationality, governing the limits and forms of what is know-able, say-able, and do-able in social work as a result of the impact of the three developments.

Marketisation

Neo-liberalism tells us that markets are needed in social work and that the role of the state is to create the institutional framework within which the social services market operates. In neoliberal rhetoric the installation of markets is supposed to produce competition on quality and price, with the former going up and the latter going down. All too quickly, markets introduce a race to the bottom on price alone and undermine the sense in which social services previously countered market values by stressing citizenship rights, entitlements, and needs; the market is not an arena of social justice. Conveniently this means that governments are able to hold the consequences of punitive policies and cuts in funding at arms-length because market outcomes are, allegedly, neither fair nor unfair but simply flow from “impersonal” market forces.

Consumerisation

Markets require customers. Neoliberalism promises that markets will liberate the users of social work from their alleged role as passive recipients of social workers’ attentions and turn them into active, rational, self-interested, choice-making customers. Neoliberalism argues that customers have high expectations, forged in consumer culture and carried over into their encounters with social work. However, the neoliberal rhetoric slips all too easily into managerial definitions of what being treated well as a customer means, usually through simplistic and narrow definitions of customer satisfaction such as the use of proxy measures. For example, when I returned to a period of practice as a social worker, the proxy measure of the quality of an assessment was the social worker giving the service user a copy of the written document that resulted. I could have undertaken the worst possible assessment — not listened to a service user, behaved in an oppressive manner, and so on — but as long as I gave her or him a copy of the written document my assessment would be judged to have met the standard laid down to measure customer satisfaction.

Such narrow approaches sidestep questions of justice, inequality and oppression, and ignore the extent to which we have to learn to behave as consumers; proficient consumerism is not a ready-made experience that all possess innately. Our consumer learning is located within a class position that intersects with a range of other social divisions in our biographies (age, disability, gender, “race”, sexuality). In addition, consumerism hides the reality of how most, maybe all, people come into contact with social work. They aren’t making a “customer choice”. They come from stressful conditions, they have lives that seem unbearable, their contact with social work may have been initiated by someone else and may be unwelcome. They are, therefore, likely to be trying to get their circumstances or improved rather than seeing themselves as customers accessing a particular “commodity”.

Managerialisation

In order to move in the direction of marketisation and consumerisation, social work becomes increasingly managerialised. The search for “better” management focuses on the world of private business in the belief in a generic model of management, which minimises the differences between private businesses and social work. This has three main consequences. First, the commodification of services through managerial identification of discrete problem categories and a menu of service options, quantifying and costing service outputs. This results in social workers being deprived of meaningful working relationships with and commitments to service users and reduces social work to a series of one-off transactions. Secondly, cuts in funding and expectation of efficiency gains exert a general downward pressure on costs. Thirdly, greater managerial control is exerted over professional space. An example of this is performance management: organisational objectives are identified, performance indicators are developed to reflect the objectives, targets are set in terms of the performance indicators, and progress is monitored using the PIs. Even its supporters identify a range of dysfunctional consequences, such as tunnel vision (an emphasis on phenomena that are quantified in the performance management system at the expense of unquantified aspects of performance) and gaming (minimising the apparent scope for performance improvement to avoid increased expectations and higher targets in the future). Another example of the extension of managerial control over professional space is the introduction of call centres into social work. This is the epitome of treating users of social work as customers. It introduces a process for dealing with them taken from the business sector that ignores the potential complexity of their “transactions” and jettisons social work’s emphasis on seeking to establish trust with and appreciate the unique circumstances of the service user.

Call centres are much-vaunted by their proponents because they overcome barriers of place and time. However, a sense of place and locality has other connotations in terms of service users’ identities and where and how they want services to be provided. These kinds of concerns were traditionally seen as integral to the nature of social work. In many progressive aspirations for social work, the notion of responsiveness to the ‘local patch’ has had pride of place. With the advent of call centres, the ability of social workers to be aware of and utilise local networks and resources is rendered unimportant.

Think global, act local

Some readings of these three developments suggest that neoliberalism is now indelibly inscribed in the consciousness of service users, social workers and managers so that neoliberal social work is the only form of social work with which it is possible to identify. An alternative is to see service users, social workers and managers as interpellated (being “called”) by neoliberalism. From this perspective, social workers (and others) may be called but may not respond to the call or may respond to it in ways that were not anticipated. This potential gap between neoliberalism’s intentions and accomplishments needs to be exploited not only by individual social workers struggling to work in the interests of service users in their day-to-day practice but also through collective struggles that support World Social Work Day’s Global Agenda at the national and local level (see Social Work Action Network).

John Harris is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was a social worker, training officer, and manager prior to moving into social work education. He is the co-author of The Oxford Dictionary of Social Work and Social Care with Vicky White.

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I decided to throw a look at a few tw-words while writing my previous post on the origin of dance. In descriptions of grinding and the Harlem Shake, twerk occurs with great regularity. The verb means “to move one’s buttocks in a suggestive way.” It has not yet made its way into OED and perhaps never will (let us hope so), but its origin hardly poses a problem: twerk must be a blend of twist (or twitch) and work (or jerk), a close relative of such verbs as squirm (possibly a blend of dialectal squir “to throw with a jerk” and worm) and twirl (? twist + whirl). When blends are coined “in plain sight” — as happened to brunch, motel, and Eurasia — no one has questions about their descent. Nowadays, blending has become a tiresome custom, and the stodgy products of grafting one word on another are usually as transparent as Texaco or Amtrak and equally inspiring. But no one can prove that twirl is indeed a sum of twist and whirl. Its origin will forever remain “unknown.” Be that as it may, twerk does look like a blend, even though we don’t know who, where, and when launched it into the linguistic space of North America.

Most people sense an element of sound symbolism in words like twerk, even regardless of its rhyming partners jerk, quirk, and shirk. By the way, dictionaries inform us that quirk is also of unknown origin and that jerk is a symbolic formation. Shirk is obscure and, according to some authorities, may have experienced the influence of German Schurke “scoundrel; rogue.” I have moderate trust in the shirk-Schurke connection. Initial j- is such a common expressive substitute for sh- that I wonder whether jerk is a doublet of shirk or vice versa. In English, tw- suggests something fidgety and inconsequential: compare, in addition to the words cited above, tweak, twitter ~ Twitter, tweet, tweedle ~ twiddle ~ twizzle. As with blends, sound symbolism cannot be “proved.” Some speakers hear derogatory or humorous overtones in tw-, while others do not, especially because, for example, tweed and twill are perfectly respectable. It would be too much to expect that some combination of sounds would occur only in semantically related words. I once mentioned the symbolic (perhaps onomatopoeic, frightening) character of English gr- (grim, grind, growl, grueling, and so forth) and had to defend my unoriginal idea against the presence of grace, the gentlest word one can imagine.

Snow White and the Seven Twerps.

Unfortunately, two “serious” etymologies of twerp do not carry conviction. According to one, twerp owes its origin to Danish tvær “running all the way across, diagonal.” This etymology was rejected as soon as it was suggested and for good reason. How could a twentieth-century English slang word (a noun) be a phonetic alteration of a Modern Danish adjective? According to another guess, twerp is a doublet of dwarf. The senses correspond perfectly, but the path from dwarf to twerp cannot be reconstructed. Dwarf, although lacking cognates in the rest of Indo-European, has existed in the Germanic languages forever, as evidenced by Old Engl. dweorg ~ dweorh, Old Icelandic dvergr, Middle High German getwerk, plural; Modern German Zwerg, and other similar forms. Twerp could not be a borrowing; that is, it could not come from an outside source (such a source does not exist; reference to Danish is a bad joke, and, incidentally, the same word exists in Swedish and Norwegian), and no process known to English historical phonetics would have changed dwarf to twerp. A striking coincidence, an ingenious conjecture, but an unacceptable etymology.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the modern verb twerk has a variant twerp: such coinages usually have “inconsequential” variants. However, the most common English words beginning with tw- are of course those akin to the numeral two. In Modern English, only the spelling reminds us that centuries ago two was pronounced with tw-. (Despite my steady aversion to etymological spelling, I would perhaps retain w in two, to preserve it affinity with twelve, twenty, twin, twilight, twine, twice, and twain ~ Twain.) Twist belongs here too. The noun designates a rope made of two threads, a twirl, and refers to various distortions. Hence the verb twist “to intertwine; curve; wring.” Especially characteristic are the Germanic congeners of twist: German Zwist ~ Low German twist “quarrel, discord”; Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish also have tvist (the same meaning). Twig “a small shoot of a tree” seems to be akin to some words for “fork.” If this is true, then a twig once denoted a forked branch, an object with two prongs. How it acquired its modern meaning remains unclear. German Zweig does not conjure up a picture of a tiny branch, though it is smaller than an Ast “bough.” (Did Dickens hint to the vicissitudes in the fate of his hero when he called him Twist? After all, it was he, rather than Mr. Bumble, who invented the name.)

It is anybody’s guess whether the idea of being divided into two parts influenced the semantic development of twirl, twitch, and the rest. Such ties can seldom be reconstructed with confidence. Some tw-words have nothing to do with those being discussed here. Among them are twill and tweed (mentioned above), the other twig (“to understand”) traditionally derived from Irish, and twit (“find fault with”) from Old Engl. æt-witan (read æ like a in Engl. at), which lost its prefix and today looks like a simplex. Compare mend from amend. (James A. H. Murray of OED fame coined the term aphetic for such words.) Tweezers has a rather complicated history. Twee- in it is an aphetic form of French étuis “case,” but I wonder whether the fact that doctors used to carry a pair of ’twees, with twee so conveniently resembling two, played a role in the word’s development. However, a detailed discussion of such nuances would take us too far afield. In this post, we, merry twerkers, have been mainly interested in things not going beyond the understanding of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Poster depicting Snow White with the prince surrounded by the Seven Dwarfs by Aida McKenzie. New York City W.P.A. Art Project, [between 1936 and 1941]. Public domain via Library of Congress.

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How do we speak and how do we understand language? It is widely believed that the scientific study of these uniquely human abilities was launched during the 1950s with the advent of Noam Chomsky’s generative linguistics. True, modern psycholinguistics received a major impulse from this “cognitive revolution,” but the empirical study of how we speak and listen and how children acquire these amazing skills has its roots in the late 18th century. By the end of the 19th century the psychology of language was an established science and the field was booming up to World War II. Empirical psycholinguistics emerged from four roots.

The Viennese engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen spent 20 years constructing a “speaking machine”. His 1791 book contains a precise construction manual. Copies have been built and indeed, the machine can articulate complex utterances such as Leopoldus secundus. It is the first serious working model of the vocal tract. During the 19th century the study of speaking became an experimental endeavor. It became possible to exactly measure the “mental durations” involved in naming pictures, colors, or numbers. Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology laboratory in Leipzig, the first of its kind, became the cradle of experimental psycholinguistics.

Franz Joseph Gall, also in Vienna, was the first to develop serious brain anatomy during the final two decades of the 18th century. His dissection classes there and later in Paris attracted some of the best medical students. Gall proposed the theory that mental faculties such as the memory for words were localized in specific regions of the brain. The stronger such an innate ability, the larger the corresponding brain region. This idea was never entirely lost in neuroscience. Paul Broca’s advanced brain anatomy made it possible in 1865 to localize an important region involved in the production of speech in the left frontal lobe. With Carl Wernicke’s localization of a second region, involved in speech understanding, the study of language in the brain had become a mature chapter of psycholinguistics.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile of 1762 pleaded for a reform of education, a “natural” education without drill. Rousseau’s plea for the careful observation of children initiated the keeping of diaries by parents and teachers. Philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann was the first to publish a diary, in 1787. It follows his son’s development during the 30 months since his birth and includes a number of observations on Friedrich’s acquisition of speech. More diaries followed during the 19th century, but diary studies became a real boom after Darwin (1877) published his own observations on son William’s early development. Studies of language acquisition, for a variety of languages, kept appearing till the present day. They became an important database for theories of language acquisition.

Sanskrit scholar William Jones formulated the lexical affinities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin in his 1786 lecture for the Asian Society of Calcutta. Such affinities among Indo-European languages had been observed since medieval times, but the budding Romantic notion of evolution became the impetus of explaining these affinities from a common origin of these languages. There must have been some proto-language from which all languages in the family evolved. This raised the question of how primordial human beings began to speak such a simple proto-language. This, one realized, was a psychological issue. Ever since, the empirical study of language origins and language functions in human communication has been an important chapter of psycholinguistics. Studying the emergence of language, in particular of sign languages, is still a rich chapter of psycholinguistics.

Peace did not always reign in the community of psycholinguists. Major controversies arose around World War I. In the European tradition it had always been a matter of course that language use is a mental phenomenon. But this was anathema for emerging American behaviorism. Speech acts are mere responses to stimuli; there is no mind mediating between the two. But peace was literally and seriously disturbed during Hitler’s regime. European leaders in psycholinguistics emigrated, mostly to the United States, in two waves. First, right after Hitler came to power in 1933, almost immediately ordering the dismissal of Jewish staff at German universities. Second, after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and the following invasions all over the European continent. It was only after World War II that the four roots of psycholinguistics sprang to live again as an interdisciplinary theory of human communication.

Willem Levelt is the author of A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era. He is director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, which he founded in 1980. He is also emeritus honorary professor of psycholinguistics at Nijmegen University. He has a PhD in psychology from Leiden University (1965), was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University, a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, full professor of psychology at Groningen University, member at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1971-1972), professor of experimental psychology at Nijmegen University and, since 1980, scientific member of the Max Planck Society. He has published widely in psychophysics, mathematical psychology and psycholinguistics. His books include On binocular rivalry(1965), Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics (3 Vols, 1974, republished in 2008) and Speaking: From intention to articulation (1989).

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Image Credits: (1) Dr. Joseph Francis Gall. Print Collection portrait file. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery
(2) Sir William Jones. Print Collection portrait file. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery

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American schools dance nonstop. A wild display of “flailing arms and wriggling torsos,” known as the Harlem Shake, is the latest addition to our civilization. High school “kids” writhe eel-like on the floor, chairs, and tables, fall, sometimes break arms and legs, and have fun, which is the unassailable backbone of our educational system. At some places, teachers and principals dance with the kids and thus double the amount of fun. Elsewhere, administrators take measures against this activity (for fear of self-mutilation) and are severely criticized for impinging on their students’ freedom. Englishmen never will be slaves. Neither will Americans. As a student of history, I am familiar with Greek maenads (those were so-called mountain dancers killing strong animals with their hands and eating their victims’ raw flesh, women inspired to ecstatic frenzy by Dionysus) and with medieval dancing manias. I would be happy to offer an essay titled “Today We Are All Greeks” or “Hippety Hop to St. Vitus.” However, this blog is about etymology, not about events or mores. That is why I decided to write a post on the word dance. In Romance philology, its obscurity is second only to that of French aller “go” and trouver “find,” if obscurity can be measured by the number of publications that produce lots of data without definitive results. Engl. dance is of course from French. The question is how the corresponding verb and noun appeared in the Romance languages.

Latin provides no help because no similar word meaning “dance” turned up in it. The difficulty in reconstructing the etymon of any word for “dance” consists in that dancing is associated with various types of movement: shaking, twisting, whirling, walking around in a group, stamping, or jumping. It can but does not always accompany merriment and jubilation. For instance, Latin salire meant “dance,” while its frequentative form saltare meant “leap” (compare Engl. saltation and somersault). Some of the older Germanic verbs for “dance” were Old Engl. tumbian (still recognizable from tumble; it migrated to the Romance speaking lands, and in French it ended up as tomber “to fall”), hoppian (obviously, today’s hop), and sealtian, a borrowing of saltare. In other lands, “dance” merged with “play”: so in Old High Germen (spilan, Modern German spielen) and Gothic (laikan, as opposed to Old Icelandic leika “play”). Lacan, the Old English cognate of laikan, survived in dialects and is often believed to be the source of lark “frolic.” Considering that “dance” is invariably a metaphorical sense, the search for the original meaning looks like wandering in a desert.

To complicate matters, the word for “dance,” as we have already seen, may be borrowed. The Goths, whose Germanic language we know only from a fourth-century translation of the Bible, had laikan but, not content with that piece of native vocabulary, appropriated its Slavic synonym (hence Gothic plinsjan). Since dance is current in both Germanic and Romance, it must have arisen in one area and spread to the other. As could be expected, two schools exist. One posits the way from Germanic to Romance, the other from Romance to Germanic. While dealing with loanwords, especially when they reflect customs and material culture, it is always important to ask why they were taken over. Some dances are “popular,” the enjoyment of common people; others accompany religious festivals, secret rites, and all kinds of ceremonies. Perhaps laikan belonged to the first group, while plinsjan, because of its foreign provenance (or provenience, as they said in the nineteenth century), sounded more dignified (mere guesswork). Many good dictionaries say that the Romance offshoots of Latin ballare “to dance” (a very late borrowing of a Greek verb; compare Engl. ball, from French) belonged to the more solemn sphere, while dansare (assuming there was such a verb) tended to be popular, but some recent investigations do not confirm this conclusion. This leaves us ignorant of the circumstances in which one culture took over dance from the other.

Here are the Latin words that have been proposed as the etymons of dansare, the reconstructed progenitor of Old French dance (note that c in it was pronounced as ts, in distinction from s, as in Modern French danse). Densare “thicken, close up” (compare Engl. dense); *demptiare (the asterisk designates a form not attested in texts), the putative source of demerere “to deserve”; *dentiare “supply with teeth,” derived from dens “tooth” (pure fiction); *de-ante-are “to step forward”; *dantia, a noun formed from dare “give”; cadentia, from cadere “to fall,” and rotantiare “walk in circles” (rota “wheel”; compare Engl. rotate). Even an unprofessional look at that list will tell us how little any of the words in it makes the impression of a convincing etymon of dansare. Rotantiare provides the best semantic match, but great phonetic leaps are needed for it to yield the desired form, while de-ante-are is supported only by the existence of two or even one similar form (ab-ante-are, as in French avancier “advance”).

Before examining the Germanic hypothesis, a short interlude is in order. It would be wonderful if we could forget all the asterisked forms and explain dance as a sound imitative word. The siren of onomatopoeia tempts us most when we deal with obscure verbs of movement, such as dandle and dangle, to cite two of them beginning with the letter d. Hensleigh Wedgwood (the most influential predecessor of Walter W. Skeat), who generously assigned sound symbolic origins to the words of various languages, said that dance “undoubtedly” arose with the sense “stamp.” I cannot resist the temptation to repeat for the umpteenth time that, whenever an etymologist says undoubtedly or certainly about a difficult word, he (and she) is probably wrong. Wedgwood cited Swedish dunsa “fall heavily” and a few other Scandinavian verbs that go back to the word for “noise,” as does Engl. din. But we do not know whether our story began with stamping and stomping, especially because later dance, whatever its antecedents, did designate an entertainment of courtly culture. We are not told how and from where the Germanic verb spread to Romance. Old Engl. dynian and its West Germanic cognates meant only “roar, rumble.” Their Scandinavian siblings also mainly refer to a loud noise. Apparently, Wedgwood did not show us the way.

The most favored Germanic etymon of dansare has been Old High German danson “pull.” The sense is again uninspiring, and, as noted, after n we need a consonant that sounded like ts, not like s. Numerous old dictionaries gave danson in the entries on dance. They should not be trusted; at least they should not be trusted unconditionally. Germanic confronts us with another difficulty. The German for “dance” is tanzen. Engl. d corresponds to German t only in very old words, for example Engl. do ~ German tun. But neither the Romance nor the Germanic forms for dance predate the twelfth and the thirteenth century. At that time, we could have expected German danzen. I will not go into detail and only state that the explanation of the d ~ t trouble given in German dictionaries carries little conviction. However, the idea that tanzen is a truly ancient word is even less persuasive.

I am sorry that at the end of the way we have only a series of riddles. Even with regard to the Romance area the traditional view that the word spread to Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese from French may be wrong. We have dealt with the noun and the verb, without making distinctions between them, but it remains unclear which came first. Intuitively, it seems that dance is a Romance rather than a Germanic word. Yet one cannot help wondering why its root proved to be so evasive. Also, intuition is an unsafe guide to etymology. The moral of the story is that dancing the Harlem Shake takes at least as much energy as finding the etymon of the word dance.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Furious maenad. She holds a thyrsus in her right hand and with her left hand shakes a panther in the air. A whistling snake is rolled up over her head like a diadem. Tondo of an Attic white-ground kylix, 490–480 BC. From Vulci. Brygos Painter. Staatliche Antikensammlungen. Beazley, ARV2, 371, 15. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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When friends heard that I was working on a book on insults, I typically had some explaining to do: “It is not a book of insults; it is a book about insults and the role they play in human society.”

They would go on to ask whether, in my research, I had come across any good insults. Indeed I had. In the process of doing research, I had not only read every insult anthology I could get my hands on but categorized the insults I found there, the way an entomologist might spend time collecting and categorizing beetles.

And what, they would ask, was my favorite insult? I would explain that I didn’t have a favorite—not if by favorite they meant an insult that I liked better than the others. This is because I disliked them all! Indeed, in my book I argue that the world would be a better place if we could curb our insulting tendencies. But having made this point, I admitted that there were some insults that I found particularly interesting because of the cunning manner in which they inflicted harm on their target. In particular, I was intrigued by secondhand insults.

To understand how these insults work, it is first necessary to understand behind-the-back insults. If Al makes disparaging remarks to Bob about Charlie, who isn’t present, Al will have insulted Charlie behind his back. By doing this, Al might be able to hurt Charlie’s social standing, without Charlie knowing about the insult and therefore without the danger that he will retaliate.

Bob can react to Al’s attack on Charlie in a number of ways. He might join in the attack. He might chastize Al for attacking Charlie. Or he might instead react to Al’s attack by telling Charlie what Al has been saying. Bob’s motives for doing this might be laudable: he might want Charlie to know what is going on so he can defend himself against Al’s attacks. Alternatively, he might report the insult simply because he knows Charlie will be upset to hear about it.

Reporting the insult allows Bob, in effect, to insult Charlie without himself being the author of that insult. Furthermore, if asked why he passed on the insult, Bob can defend himself by claiming to have had Charlie’s best interests in mind: he needed to know what was being said about him! His insult, in other words, will have what CIA operatives call plausible deniability. Charlie’s day will be ruined, but it will be Al, not Bob, who is ultimately to blame. This is a textbook example of what I call a secondhand insult.

There are even more subtle ways to inflict these insults. Suppose Diane invites Elsie but not Frances to a party. Suppose Elsie, on the following day, calls Frances to ask why she wasn’t at the party, and suppose she makes this call not because she wants to know why Elsie was missing: she already knows that Elsie wasn’t there because she hadn’t been invited! Then why make the call? So Frances will know that she hadn’t been invited and thereby experience the pain of having been slighted. This behavior sounds catty, but such things do happen.

Secondhand insults interest me because they show just how ingenious people can be in their use of insults as a means for raising their position on the social hierarchy. If only this ingenuity could instead be used for the good of mankind! More generally, one of the best ways to immunize ourselves to the insults that others might inflict on us is to withdraw from the social-hierarchy game.

For one last example of a secondhand insult, allow me to quote entertainer Oscar Levant. When asked whether he ever read bad reviews of his performances, he replied that he didn’t have to, inasmuch as “my best friends invariably tell me about them.”

William B. Irvine is professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt — and Why They Shouldn’t, and before that of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

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Image credit: High school class series photo by sjlocke, iStockphoto.

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