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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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.

The post Panning for etymological gold: “aloof” appeared first on OUPblog.

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.”

Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology posts via email or RSS.
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Image credit: tweed textile background with herringbone pattern from a vintage book cover. Photo by marekuliasz, iStockphoto.

The post Monthly etymological gleanings for April 2013 appeared first on OUPblog.

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.

The post Does the lily grow in the valet? Is good ballet bally good? appeared first on OUPblog.

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.

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.

The post It is hard to stop thief appeared first on OUPblog.

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.”

Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology posts via email or RSS.
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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.

The post Monthly etymological gleanings for March 2013 appeared first on OUPblog.

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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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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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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My usual thanks to those who have commented on the posts, written me letters privately or through OUP, and corrected the rare but irritating typos. I especially appreciate comments that deal with the languages remote from my sphere of interest: Arabic, Farsi, Romany, and so forth. But, even while dealing with the languages that are close to my area of expertise (for example, Sanskrit and Frisian), quite naturally, I feel less comfortable in them than in English, German, or Icelandic (my “turf”). I remember my astonishment when as a student I read an introduction to Meillet’s booklet on Germanic in which he, among other things, said that he had added some small things to the previous edition and corrected the mistakes. Meillet, a living god, the greatest specialist in the history of Indo-European, corrected his mistakes! More than fifty years later that surprise has not worn off. Of course, I understand, quod licet Iovi…, but still….

Some things I say sound wrong, but I say them intentionally, not to complicate matters. Having spent decades on grammatical morphology, Propp’s morphology of the folk tale (and thanks to him on Goethe’s morphology), I, as could be suspected, know that morph- is a Greek root. But the modern English verb morph (which I dislike) did not come to us from Greek. Even morpheme and its cognates reached English from French, and there their source was usually Latin. So, when I called morph a Latinism, I did not commit a terrible error. The same is true of gh- in the Sanskrit verb I cited in connection with guest/host. Brugmann, the author of the etymology to which I referred, for an obvious reason did not mark palatalization and I reproduced his form because I did not want to modernize him. However, as noted, all suggestions, friendly and critical, are welcome, even though like most people I prefer to be praised rather than hauled over the coals.

The present perfect.
The comment of our correspondent reflects the classic rule: this tense allows the speaker to include a past action in the present moment, but the important thing is not the formulation but the various uses of the tense in related languages. The perfect is not a Germanic invention, but the analytic form that needs an auxiliary verb and a participle is a Germanic-Romance innovation. American speakers do not “include” the past in the present when they say he just left, while British speakers do (he has just left). With today, usage varies. I saw her today seems to be acceptable even in British English, though today, by definition, is not yet over. In teaching foreigners, it is important to mention “national” distinctions. Fortunately or unfortunately, unified usage for the countries in which English is spoken does not exist, though in cultivated written form the distinctions are much less noticeable.

Whose advocate is this laughing devil?

Over the years, I have collected a small glossary of redundant prepositions and adverbs. In British English, one brushes up one’s French; Americans brush up on their French. The same happens to give up. The idiom give up the ghost preserves the original usage, but Americans tend to give up on things. Many of them have given up smoking but are unwilling to give up on life’s little pleasures. I am perpetually puzzled by the collocation continue on. How else can one continue? Infection can penetrate the lungs but can probably also penetrate into the lungs. I think everybody will prefer penetrate into the thicket but penetrate the problem. And a final remark. “Even on public radio and in print.” Why should journalists be more refined than the rest of the world? That might make them sound and look elitist, the worst sin one can think of. And I would like to repeat what I have said so many times. If “everybody” says something, the usage becomes correct. Swimming against the current is noble, but don’t expect the stream to turn back because of your efforts.

In the same spirit was the wrathful letter condemning the phrase combine together. Indeed, together is redundant. But if we look around, we will notice that many things are said to be joined together. The society of which I happen to be a member states that it is a group of people assembled together (with an explanation of what the purpose of the assembly is). I have several examples of gather together. Are they all wrong?

Aroint.
Can it be related to the Germanic verb for “run” (German rennen, Swedish ränna, etc.)? The meaning of aroint thee would then be run! The line from Macbeth with the word aroint has been the object of numerous conjectures. Years ago, an eminent editor of Shakespeare suggested that Old Engl. rinnan was the etymons of aroint; consequently, our correspondent’s suggestion is not new. To my mind, it has little appeal. All the forms cognate with run have a short vowel, while modern dialectal rynt seems to go back to a diphthong. From the same post I received a question about the Latin phrase dii te averruncent . Dii: pl. of deus “god” (here, “pagan god, devil”), averrunco “deflect, divert” (here, 3^rd p. pl. present, subj.); hence “may the devils take you from here.”

Viking.
The word has a long vowel, but what would have happened if it were a borrowing of a noun with a short vowel in the lending language? I think it would then have retained the short vowel, at least at the epoch that did not require lengthening in this position (assuming that it would not have fallen prey to folk etymology).

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: Laughing demon by Katsushika Hokusai, 1831. Public domain via Wikipaintings.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for February 2013 appeared first on OUPblog.

Dozens of words have not been forgotten only because Shakespeare used them. Scotch (as in scotch the snake), bare bodkin, and dozens of others would have taken their quietus and slept peacefully in the majestic graveyard of the Oxford English Dictionary but for their appearance in Shakespeare’s plays. Aroint would certainly have been unknown but for its appearance in Macbeth and King Lear. From the speech of the first witch (Macbeth III, opening scene): “A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap, / And munch’d and munch’d and munch’d.—‘Give me,’ quoth I: / ‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries.” And in King Lear Edgar, pretending to be mad (III. 4, 129), also says “Aroint thee.”

The origin of aroint has been the object of an intense search. In 1874 Horace H. Furness, the editor of the variorum edition of Shakespeare, knew almost everything said about the word, but he offered a dispassionate survey of opinions without comments. Very long ago, in Cheshire, rynt, roynt, and runt were recorded. Milkmaids in those quarters would say “rynt thee to a cow, when she is milked, to bid her get out of the way.” The phrase meant “stand off.” “To this the cow is so well used that even the word is sufficient.” Rynt you, witch as part of the proverbial saying rynt you, witch, said Besse Locket to her mother turned up in a provincial dictionary published in 1674, approximately sixty years after Macbeth and King >Lear were written. The lady whom Robert Nares, the author of an 1822 glossary of obscure words, consulted added: “…the cow being in this instance more learned than the commentators on Shakespeare.” The taunt missed its target: philologists are not cows, and neither the lady nor the milch cows elucidated the word’s origin. (In my experience, no one understands the word milch, and this is why I have used it here.)

The fanciful derivation of aroint as a compound from some verb for “go” and a cognate of (be)hind does not merit attention. The familiar dialectal pronunciation of jint for joint suggests that the etymological vowel in the verb rynt was oi, not i. Old English had the verb ryman “to make room,” and Skeat derived aroint from the phrase rime ta (ta = thee), imperative, “which must necessarily become rine ta (if the i be long).” I am not sure why the change was necessary, but Skeat sometimes struck with excessive force. Anyway, he reasoned along the same lines as most of his predecessors and followers, who thought that aroint meant ‘begone’. A similar idea can be observed in several attempts to find a Romance etymon of aroint.

Horne Tooke, famous, among other things, for a two-volume book EPEA PTEROENTA, Or, The Diversions of Purley (1798-1805), traced Shakespeare’s word to “ronger, rogner, royner; whence also aroynt… is a separation or discontinuity of the skin or flesh by a gnawing, eating forward, malady” (compare Italian rogna “scabies, mange” and ronyon in Macbeth, above). He obviously glossed aroint as “to be separated” and found several supporters. Other early candidates for the etymon known to me (for nearly all of which I am indebted to Furness’s notes on Macbeth and King Lear) are French arry-avant “away there, ho!”, éreinte-toi “break thy back or reins” (used as an imprecation), Latin dii te averruncent “may the devils take thee,” and Italian arranca (the imperative of arrancare “plod along, trudge”). A strong case has been made for aroint being an expected phonetic variant of anoint or acquiring in some contexts the figurative sense “thrash” (the latter derivation was defended by George Hempl, a distinguished American philologist), or because it “conveys a sense very consistent with the common account of witches, who are related to perform many supernatural acts by means of unguents.” Finally, Thomas Hearne’s Ectypa Varia ad Historiam Britannicam… (1737) contains a print in which “a devil, who is driving the damned before him, is blowing a horn with a label issuing from his mouth and the words: ‘Out, out Arongt’.” Arongt resembles aroint but its existence does not clarify the etymology of either.

The opinions, as one can see, are many, but only one conclusion is almost certain. Shakespeare, a Stratford man, knew a local word, expected his audience to understand it even in London, and used it in his plays dated to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thus, he did not invent aroint, and the suggestion that it is his adaptation of around cannot be entertained, for how would it then have passed into popular speech in that form? As follows from the facts summarized above, in addition to witches, cows in Cheshire understood aroint thee and the phrase became proverbial in some parts of England. The milkmaids’ experience notwithstanding, it will probably not be too risky to propose that aroint thee was coined to ward off witches, damned souls, and their ilk (arongt does look identical with aroint) and that only later it spread to less ominous situations. Perhaps its origin has not been discovered because nearly everybody glossed it as “begone, disappear, stand off.” But (and this is my main point) aroint thee may have meant something like beshrew thee, fie on you. Louis Marder, in updating Furness’s Macbeth (1963), said: “The local nature, the meaning, and form of the phrase, seem all opposed to its identity with Shakespeare’s Aroint,” because ryndta! in Cheshire and Lancashire is “merely a local pronunciation of ‘round thee’= move around.” Except for having doubts about the currency of ryndta in Lancashire, OED endorsed this verdict. In my opinion, the match is quite good. Ryndta does not necessarily have to go back to round thee, while the local character of the phrase cannot be used as an argument for or against its identity with what we find in Macbeth and King Lear.

At least as early as 1784, it was suggested that aroint has something to do with rauntree, one of several variants of the tree name rowan. This tree, perhaps better known as mountain ash, is famous in myth and folklore from Ancient Greece to Scandinavia. One of its alleged virtues is the ability to deter witches and protect people and cattle from evil. The great Scandinavian god Thor was once almost drowned in a river because of the wiles of a mighty giantess but threw a great stone at her, was carried ashore, caught hold of a rowan tree, and waded out of the water; hence the tree’s name “Thor’s rescue.” It would be quite natural to shout rauntree or rointree, in order to chase away a witch: on hearing the terrible word, she would be scared and flee. Rowan is a noun of Scandinavian origin (Icelandic reynir, Norwegian raun; the earliest citations in OED do not predate the middle of the fifteenth century), so that various diphthongs, including oi, developed in it. An imprecation like a raun ~ reyn to thee seems to have existed and become aroint thee. The only lexicographer who entertained a similar idea was Ernest Weekley. He wrote: “Exact meaning and origin unknown. ? Connected with dialectal rointree, rowan-tree, mountain-ash, efficacy of which against witches is often referred to in early folklore.” I take it to be the most promising hypothesis of all. The word (rowan), pronounced differently in different dialects, reached England from Scandinavia, but the curse is probably local. In any case, its Scandinavian analogs have not been found.

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: Rowan by Ivan Shishkin, 1892. Public domain via Wikipaintings.org.

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The questions people ask about word origins usually concern slang, family names, and idioms. I cannot remember being ever asked about the etymology of house, fox, or sun. These are such common words that we take them for granted, and yet their history is often complicated and instructive. In this blog, I usually stay away from them, but I sometimes let my Indo-European sympathies run away with me. Today’s subject is of this type.

Guest is an ancient word, with cognates in all the Germanic languages. If in English its development had not been interrupted, today it would have been pronounced approximately like yeast, but in the aftermath of the Viking raids the native form was replaced with its Scandinavian congener, as also happened to give, get, and many other words. The modern spelling guest, with u, points to the presence of “hard” g (compare guess). The German and Old Norse for guest are Gast and gestr respectively; the vowel in German (it should have been e) poses a problem, but it cannot delay us here.

The hostess and her guests

Let us stay with Latin hostis for some more time. Like guest, Engl. host is neither an alien nor a dangerous adversary. The reason is that host goes back not to hostis but to Old French (h)oste, from Latin hospit-, the root of hospes, which meant both “host” and “guest,” presumably, an ancient compound that sounded as ghosti-potis “master (or lord) of strangers” (potis as in potent, potential, possibly despot, and so forth). We remember Latin hospit- from Engl. hospice, hospital, and hospitable, all, as usual, via Old French. Hostler, ostler, hostel, and hotel belong here too, each with its own history, and it is amusing that so many senses have merged and that, for instance, a hostel is not a hostile place.

Unlike host “he who entertains guests,” Engl. host “multitude” does trace to Latin hostis “enemy.” In Medieval Latin, this word acquired the sense “hostile, invading army,” and in English it still means “a large armed force marshaled for war,” except when used in a watered down sense, as in a host of troubles, a host of questions, or a host of friends (!). Finally, the etymon of host “consecrated wafer” is Latin hostia “sacrificial victim,” again via Old French. Hostia is a derivative of hostis, but the sense development to “sacrifice” (through “compensation”?) is obscure.

The puzzling part of this story is that long ago the same words could evidently mean “guest” and “the person who entertains guests”, “stranger” and “enemy.” This amalgam has been accounted for in a satisfactory way. Someone coming from afar could be a friend or an enemy. “Stranger” covers both situations. With time different languages generalized one or the other sense, so that “guest” vacillated between “a person who is friendly and welcome” and “a dangerous invader.” Newcomers had to be tested for their intentions and either greeted cordially or kept at bay. Words of this type are particularly sensitive to the structure of societal institutions. Thus, friend is, from a historical point of view, a present participle meaning “loving,” but Icelandic frændi “kinsman” makes it clear that one was supposed “to love” one’s relatives. “Friendship” referred to the obligation one had toward the other members of the family (clan, tribe), rather than a sentimental feeling we associate with this word.

It is with hospitality as it is with friendship. We should beware of endowing familiar words with the meanings natural to us. A friendly visit presupposes reciprocity: today you are the host, tomorrow you will be your host’s guest. In old societies, the “exchange” was institutionalized even more strictly than now. The constant trading of roles allowed the same word to do double duty. In this situation, meanings could develop in unpredictable ways. In Modern Russian, as well as in the other Slavic languages, gost’ and its cognates mean “guest,” but a common older sense of gost’ was “merchant” (it is still understood in the modern language and survives in several derivatives). Most likely, someone who came to Russia to sell his wares was first and foremost looked upon as a stranger; merchant would then be the product of semantic specialization.

One can also ask what the most ancient etymon of hostis ~ gasts was. Those scholars who looked on ksénos and hostis as related also cited Sanskrit ghásati “consume.” If this sense can be connected with the idea of offering food to guests, we will again find ourselves in the sphere of hospitality. The Sanskrit verb begins with gh-. The founders of Indo-European philology believed that words like Gothic gasts and Latin host go back to a protoform resembling the Sanskrit one. Later, according to this reconstruction, initial gh- remained unchanged in some languages of India but was simplified to g in Germanic and h in Latin. The existence of early Indo-European gh- has been questioned, but reviewing this debate would take us too far afield and in that barren field we will find nothing. We only have to understand that gasts ~ guest and hostis ~ host can indeed be related.

There is a linguistic term enantiosemy. It means a combination of two opposite senses in one word, as in Latin altus “high” and “deep.” Some people have spun an intricate yarn around this phenomenon, pointing out that everything in the world has two sides (hence the merger of the opposites) or admiring the simplicity (or complexity?) of primitive thought, allegedly unable to discriminate between cold and hot, black and white, and the like. But in almost all cases, the riddle has a much simpler solution. Etymology shows that the distance from host to guest, from friend to enemy, and from love to hatred is short, but we do not need historical linguists to tell us that.

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: Conversation de dames en l’absence de leurs maris: le diner. Abraham Bosse. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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I am picking up where I left off a week ago.

Mare and Mars. Can they be related?
The chance is close to zero. Both words are of obscure origin, and attempts to explain an opaque word by referring it to an equally opaque one invariably come out wrong. Although Mars, the name of the Roman war god, has been compared with the Greek verb márnamai “I fight,” this comparison may be the product of folk etymology. Some festivals dedicated to Mars involved horses, but the connection was not direct. Since the success of campaigns depended on the good state of chariots, war and steeds formed a natural union. Mare has multiple Germanic and Celtic cognates. However, it may be a migratory word of Eastern origin. For example, Russian merin “gelding” has almost the same root. A similar case is Latin caballus “packhorse; nag,” later just “horse” and Russian kobyla “mare” (stress on the second syllable).

Monkey.
Along the same lines, I must defer judgment with regard to the word for “monkey” in Arabic, Farsi, and Romany. At the end of my post on monkey, I suggested that we might be dealing with a migratory animal name. If I am right, the etymology of one more hard word will be partly clarified.

Better.
In the post on suppletive forms, I wrote that better is the comparative of a nonexistent positive degree (good has a different root).The question from our correspondent concerned Farsi beh, behtar, behtarin. Are those forms related to better? Not being a specialist in Indo-Iranian, I cannot answer this question. (However, if h is a separate phoneme belonging to the root, the relation is unlikely.) I will only say that better is akin to Engl. boot in to boot and bootless (all such cognates refer to gain and improvement) and that the standard etymological dictionaries of Indo-European (Walde-Pokorny and Pokorny) mention only Sanskrit and Avestan congeners of better (Gothic batiza); they mean “happy.”

En gobelet (French) ~ en vaso (Spanish).
These phrases designate a vine pruned to the shape of a hollow cup. Was the drinking vessel named after the shape of the vine, or was the shape of the vine named after the drinking vessel? I am sure the second variant is correct.

Overused Words

As noted last time, I received a sizable list of words that the listeners of Minnesota Public radio “hate.” It is an instructive list. I also have my peeves. For example, I wince every time I hear that so-and so is a Renaissance man. In some circles, it suffices to know the correct spelling of principle and principal to become an equal of Leonardo. Fascinating is another enemy, and so is the cutting edge (in academia, to be on the cutting edge, one has to be interdisciplinary). Nothing is nowadays good, acceptable, or proper: the maid of all work is sustainable: sustainable behavior, sustainable budget, sustainable tourism—every quality and object has its sustainable niche (rhyming in the Midwest and perhaps everywhere with kitsch, witch, and bitch). Some of my “enemies” are pretentious Latinisms. For instance, I never accepted utilize outside its technical context (use is good enough for me) and morph for “change.” Why should things morph instead of changing? And why do students hope to utilize my notes? Do they want to recycle them?

I began to pay attention to other buzzwords only after they were pointed out to me:

Amazing. 
True enough, newspapers and TV find themselves constantly enraptured. Their frame of mind is one of permanent astonishment and wonderment: the simplest things amaze them: a readable book, cold weather, and even cheap pizza. As a result, amazing has come to mean “worthy of notice.” It followed the same “trajectory” as Renaissance man. Rather scary are also the adjectives epic and surreal. The protagonists of epic poetry are larger than life, but with us every important event acquires “epic” dimensions. Likewise, though reality is full of surprises, every unexpected situation need not be called surreal.  

Trajectory.
The word has been worked to death. Path, road, way, development, direction, and the rest have yielded to it. This holds for journalists and speech writers at all levels. President Obama: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.”

Impact.
This word has killed influence and its synonyms. I remember the time when the concerned guardians of English usage fought the verb impact. Now both the verb and the noun have become the un-words of the decade. Everything “has an impact” and “impacts” its neighbors. Impact is a tolerably good word, but, like chocolate, it cloys the appetite and produces heartburn if consumed in great quantities.

I will now quote some of the messages I received. Perhaps our correspondents will comment on them:

Dialogue.
“I absolutely hate dialogue used as verb, as in let’s dialogue about that. Also hate go-to as in it’s my go-to snack or it’s my go-to workout.” Both do sound silly, for go-to (never a beauty) originated in contexts like this is the person to go to (= turn to) if you need good advice. Shakespeare would have been puzzled: in his days go to was a transparent euphemism for go to the devil. As for dialogue, it has succumbed to the powerful rule that has “impacted” English since at least the sixteenth century: every noun, and not only nouns, can be converted into a verb (consider “but me no buts,” “if ifs and buts were candy and nuts,” and the like). Sometimes the opposite process occurs: meet is a verb, and meet, a noun, came into being. It does not follow that we should admire the verb dialogue.

Folks.
“My least favorite word… when politicians use the word folks, like they are intimately familiar with their audience.” I agree! Folks should not be used as a doublet of folk.

Clearly.
“Whenever so-called experts weigh in on news stories, they preface their statements with the word clearly. Clearly somehow makes whatever they say irrefutably true.”

Actually.
“…count the number of times the word is used in a culture of growing mistrust of analysts and experts who make predictions about news before it happens…” I have waged a losing war against such adverbs (actually, really, clearly, definitely, certainly, doubtlessly) for years, but actually is the worst offender, a symptom of what I call advanced adverbialitis (–Where were you born? –Actually, I was born in California.)

Doubling down.
“The one I started hearing a lot this year is ‘So-and-so is doubling down on [a provocative statement or position]. Holy cow, political commentators, what did you do before this phrase crawled into your brains!” I guess they were milking some other venerable cow, possibly unrelated to gambling.

Evolve.
There was a complaint about the use of the verb evolve as meaning “develop; change” (“…so many people describe themselves or their opinions as ‘evolving’….”). In the past, I resented devolve as a synonym of degenerate, because I had been using this verb only in contexts like “I devolved all authority to my assistant,” but gradually accepted the other sense. By now I have heard evolve “change” so many times that it no longer irritates me (unlike morph).

Organic/natural.
In my talk show, I said that I am tired of hearing that nearly everything I buy is called organic or natural and was reprimanded: “There are strict standards set by government for the term organic, while the term natural is not regulated. You are maligning the organic food industry by proffering the incorrect information.” I stand corrected and apologize.

Random.
One of the listeners resented the promiscuous use of the adjective random (the epithet above is mine). Mr. Dan Kolz wrote in a letter to me: “In programming circles, a random value is one generated by the computer which is not predictable or predefined by the programmer. It can be used like: ‘I found a bug in test which generated random values as parameters’. It is sometimes used as a synonym for arbitrary or in a longer form ‘an arbitrarily chosen value’. This indicates that from the programmer’s perspective the value was unpredictable (if not actually from the user’s). It is in this sense that the word random could have acquired the meaning ‘selected or determined for no reason I know or could have predicted’, as in ‘I went to the party, but there were just a bunch of random people there’.” This strikes me as a reasonable explanation. Computer talk has really (clearly and actually) had a strong influence on Modern English. For instance, cross out and expunge have disappeared from the language: everything is now “deleted.”

May I repeat my old request? Sometimes people discover an old post of mine and leave a comment there. I have no chance to find it. Always leave your comments in the space allotted to the most recent posts. Above, I rejected a connection between mare and Mars. By way of compensation, you will see an equestrian print of the Roman war god, though I suspect that his horses were chargers rather than mares.

Char de Mars. Engraving. Wonders: Images of the Ancient World / Mythology — Mars. Source: NYPL.

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.”

Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology posts via email or RSS.
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The post Monthly etymology gleanings for January 2013, part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.

Last time I was writing my monthly gleanings in anticipation of the New Year. January 1 came and went, but good memories of many things remain. I would like to begin this set with saying how pleased and touched I was by our correspondents’ appreciation of my work, by their words of encouragement, and by their promise to go on reading the blog in the future. Writing weekly posts is a great pleasure. Knowing that one’s voice is not lost in the wilderness doubles and trebles this pleasure.

Week and Vikings.
After this introduction it is only natural to begin the first gleanings of 2013 with the noun week. Quite some time ago, I devoted a special post to it. Later the root of week turned up in the post on the origin of the word Viking, and it was Viking that made our correspondent return to week. My ideas on the etymology of week are not original. In the older Germanic languages, this noun did not mean “a succession of seven days.” The notion of such a unit goes back to the Romans and ultimately to the Jewish calendar. The Latin look-alike of Gothic wiko, Old Engl. wicu, and so forth was a feminine noun, whose nominative, if it existed, must have had the form vix. Since the phrase for “in the order of his course” (Luke I: 8) appears in Latin as in ordine vicis suae and in Gothic as in wikon kunjis seinis, some people (the great Icelandic scholar Guðbrandur Vigfússon among them) made the wrong conclusion that the Germanic word was borrowed from Latin. In English, the root of vix can be seen in vicar (an Anglo-French word derived from Latin vicarius “substitute, deputy”), vicarious, vicissitude, vice (as in Vice President), and others, while week is native. Its distant origin is disputed and need not delay us here. Rather probably, German Wechsel (from wehsal) “exchange” belongs here. Among the old cognates of week we find Old Icelandic vika, which also had the sense “sea mile,” and this is where Viking may come in. “Change, succession, recurrent period” and “sea mile” suggest that the oldest Vikings (in the beginning, far from being sea robbers and invaders) were called after “shift, a change of oarsmen.” But many other hypotheses pretend to explain the origin of Viking, and a few of them are not entirely implausible.

The present perfect.
More recently, while discussing suppletive forms, I mentioned in passing that the difference between tenses can become blurred and that for some people did you put the butter in the refrigerator? and have you put the butter in the refrigerator? mean practically the same. This remark inspired two predictable comments. The vagaries of the present perfect also turned up in one of my recent posts and also caused a ripple of excitement, especially among the native speakers of Swedish. As with week and Viking, I’ll repeat here only my basic explanation. In Germanic, the perfect tenses developed in the full light of history, and in British English a good deal seems to have changed since the days of Shakespeare, that is, the time when the first Europeans settled in the New World. To put it in a nutshell, there was much less of the present perfect in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century than in the nineteenth. In the use of this tense English, wherever it is spoken, went its own way. For instance, one can say in Icelandic (I’ll provide a verbatim translation): “We spent a delightful summer together in 1918, and at that time we have seen so many interesting places together!” The perfect foregrounds the event and makes it part of the present. In English, the present perfect cannot be used so. Only a vague reference to the days gone by will tolerate the present perfect, as in: “This has happened more than once in the past and is sure to happen again.” Therefore, I was surprised to see Cuthbert Bede (alias Edward Bradley) write in The Adventures of M^r Verdant Green: “Who knows? for dons are also mortals, and have been undergraduates once” (the beginning of Chapter 4). In my opinion, have been and once do not go together. If I am wrong, please correct me.

However, in my next pronouncement I am certainly right. British English has regularized the use of the present perfect: “I have just seen him,” “I have never read Fielding,” and so on. I mentioned in my original post that, when foreigners are taught the difference between the simple past (the so-called past indefinite) and the present perfect, they are usually shown a picture of a weeping or frightened child looking at the fragments on the floor and complaining to a grownup: “I have broken a plate!” American speakers are not bound by this usage: “I just saw him. He left,” “I never read Fielding and know no one who did,” while a child would cry: “Mother, I broke a plate!” A British mother may be really cross with the miscreant, whereas an American one may be mad at the child, but their reaction has nothing to do with grammar. Our British correspondent says that he makes a clear distinction between did you and have you put the butter in the refrigerator, while his American wife does not and prefers did you. This is exactly what could be expected. My British colleague, who has not changed his accent the tiniest bit after decades of living in Minneapolis and being married to an American, must have unconsciously modified his usage. I have been preoccupied with the perfect for years, and once, when we were discussing these things, he said, with reference to the present perfect, that during his recent stay in England, his interlocutor remarked drily: “You have lived in America too long.”

Blessedly cursed? Tamara and Demon. Ill to Lermontov’s poem by Mikhail Vrubel’, 1890. (Tretiakov gallery.) Demon and Tamara are the protagonists in the poem by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841). The poem is famous in Russia; there is an opera on its plot; several translations into English, including one by Anatoly Liberman, exist; and Vrubel’ was obsessed by this work.

Lewis Carroll’s name.
I think the information provided by Stephen Goranson is sufficient to conclude that the Dodgson family pronounced their family name as Dodson, and this confirms my limited experience with the people called Dodgson and Hodgson.

PS. At my recent talk show on Minnesota Public Radio, which was devoted to overused words, I received a long list of nouns, adjectives, and verbs that our listeners hate. I will discuss them and answer more questions next Wednesday. But one question has been sitting on my desk for two months, and I cannot find any information on it. Here is the question: “I was wondering if you knew what the Latin and Italian translations would be of the term blessedly cursed? I know this is not a common phrase, but I would think that there would be a translation for it.” Latin is tough, but our correspondents from Italy may know the equivalent. Their help will be greatly appreciated.

To be continued.

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.”

Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology posts via email or RSS.
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The post Monthly etymology gleanings for January 2013, part 1 appeared first on OUPblog.

Primates have given Germanic language historians great trouble. In the most recent dictionary of German etymology (Kluge-Seebold), the entry Affe “ape” is one of the most detailed. In the revised version of the OED, monkey is also discussed at a length, otherwise rare in this online edition. Despite the multitude of hypotheses, the sought-for solution is not in view. (Mine, however, will appear at the end of the present post.) Only one thing is clear: wherever the ancestors of the modern Germanic speakers lived, including the southernmost areas of the lands they once inhabited (Italy and the shores of the Black Sea), they could not observe monkeys and apes roaming tropical woods. This means that the names of both animals are, most probably, borrowed.

No extant citation of monkey predates 1530 (so the OED), and the word cannot be much older. Before the sixteenth century, ape was the generic term for both species. The question is about the original land of the import. The suspects are two: northern Germany and some Romance country. In Spanish, mona (feminine) and mono (masculine) resemble monkey, and in Middle French monne (Modern French mone) has been attested. Likewise, Italian had monna ~ mona. The source of those words remains undiscovered; clearly, monkeys were as foreign to the Romance speaking lands as they were to the English and Germans. In the nineteenth century, etymologists accepted the explanation of Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance comparative philology, who looked upon mona as a “corruption” of Madonna. He based his conclusion on the fact that the name of a female monkey surfaced before the name of its masculine partner.

Skeat, The Century Dictionary, and others followed him, though Skeat suggested that monkey was an alteration of Old Italian monicchio, a diminutive of monna. He traced it back to Latin domina and referred to Madonna “my lady”: “The degradation of the term is certainly very great; but there is an exactly parallel instance in the case of the term dam, which has been degraded from the Latin domina, in French ‘notre dame’, till it now means only the mother of racehorse, or of a less important animal.” This reconstruction is but slightly different from Diez’s. Later researchers went to Greece, Turkey, India, and the Arab lands for the elusive etymon. I am leaving out of account a few fanciful suggestions that may amuse but not enlighten our readers. In no modern Romance language, except Spanish, is mono the main name of the monkey. In Italy, it turned up in 1438, a century before it reached an English book. The first French citation goes back to 1545.

The central argument in my reasoning resolves itself into the following. The English hardly coined the word monkey; they must have borrowed it. Therefore, I have no sympathy for the conjecture of Klaus Dietz (not to be confused with Friedrich Diez!) that monkey is a native word, made up of the root monk and the suffix -ie ~ -(e)y. Little capuchin monkeys allegedly resembled little Capuchin friars; moreover, apes were traditionally used in satiric portrayals of the clergy. Dietz advanced his idea in 2006 and wrote a short article on this subject in 2008. The most recent entry in the OED online testifies to Dietz’s influence. Long ago, Eduard Mueller (or Müller) remarked in his useful but now forgotten dictionary of English etymology (1865-67; 1878) that English speakers could not help noticing a strong resemblance between monkey and both monk and man. Before him, Franciscus Junius (1743; a posthumous edition) had the same idea, and in 1863 August Lübben considered but rejected this possibility. I also refuse to treat monkey as a word initially endowed with the sense “little monk.”

William Caxton, the first English printer. In 1481 he brought out his translation of the Dutch version of Reynard. The Booke of Reynarde the Foxe (in prose; the original is a versified poem) is a delight to read. It exists in several excellent modern editions.

The real question is why the ape’s son bore the name Moneke, and it was answered ingeniously and, I think, persuasively, in 1869, but etymologists have a short memory, which is not their fault, for without exhaustive bibliographies unearthing a relevant note with a vague title is impossible. Moneke was a familiar name for Simoneke, that is, Simon. Simon is a Greek word, derived from the adjective simós “snub-nosed” or “flat-nosed,” and the meaning of the name was known, even though in the late Middle Ages few people may have realized that Simon had been confused with Hebrew Simeon. Apparently, Moneke “the flat-nosed,” was, in addition to the pet name for Simoneke, a slang word for “monkey,” with reference to the German-Latin pun, for the Latin for “monkey” was simia (a borrowing from Greek; feminine, like Modern French guenon and the Romance words, cited above). Judging by Dutch simminkel, the unattested Latin simiuncula “little monkey” also had some currency; hence the name of the ape’s son in Reynke. It is this word that must have become known in England. In German and Dutch it did not stay, but in English it did. The phonetic difficulties (the quality of the stressed vowels) are hardly insurmountable here. To be sure, I have no proof that moneke “monkey” existed, but if this word had been recorded, the riddle would have been solved centuries ago and saved us a lot of monkey business. In any case, Martin must have had a good reason for calling his son Moneke.

Something should also be said about the Romance words. One might suggest that in French and Spanish we are dealing with the Germanic noun that lost its suffix, but this would hardly be a convincing solution. Also, Italian mona was recorded a hundred years before monkey surfaced in English, and a loan from German or Dutch is probably out of the question. I would risk the hypothesis that the Romance names of the monkey have nothing to do with their Germanic look-alikes. In Kanarese, a Dravidian language, the male monkey is called manga; a related Tamil noun sounds mandi. One may perhaps ask whether a migratory culture word for the monkey, known from India to northern Germany, enjoyed some popularity in the past. It may not be for nothing that so many similar simian forms have been found. If some such word traveled with the animal, in every country speakers would adapt it slightly under the influence of folk etymology. Whatever the answer, I believe that, as regards the etymology of Engl. monkey, both monks and the medieval animal epic should be left in peace.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Themas 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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One more drinking vessel, and I’ll stop. Strangely, here we have another synonym for bumper, and it is again an old word of unknown origin. In English, goblet turned up in the fourteenth century, but its uninterrupted recorded history began about a hundred years later. Many names of vials, mugs, and beverages probably originated in the language of drinkers, pub owners, and glass manufacturers. They were slang, and we have little chance of guessing who coined it and in what circumstances.

Goblet may have been one of such coinages. French gobelet means the same as Engl. goblet, a word with a history not less obscure than that of its English namesake. The diminutive suffix -et is Romance, so that gobelet looks like the name of a little gobel. Unfortunately, we have no idea what a gobel is or was. Only gobeau has been attested. Nor does the suffix provide secure guidance to the origin of goblet. To be sure, the word may have been French, suffix and all, though it is strange that gobeau, not gobel, has turned up. On the other hand, a Romance suffix could be added to an English noun. Strumpet is almost certainly a Germanic word, but -et, as I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, turned a homegrown English whore into a classy Frenchified harlot. We had similar trouble with -ard in tankard.

An Old High German Reader by Theodor Wilhelm Braune.

Gobelet ~ goblet are not restricted to French and English. Spanish cubilette seems to be a close cognate going back to Medieval Latin cupellum “cup.” However, the similarity may be due to chance, because it remains unclear why the French and the English reflex of initial c (that is, k) should have been g. Derivation of gobelet from cup/cupellum, directly or via French, was proposed long ago. However, since the beginning of English lexicography it has had a strong rival. French gober means “swallow, gulp down.” Given such a root, goblet can be understood as a vial whose contents had to be gobbled up hurriedly or greedily — less than a fully convincing interpretation. Besides, we are in the dark about the origin of gober. Braune (1850-1926), one of the most distinguished German language historians, who had a rather frustrating habit of giving his name as Wilhelm on book covers but Theodor when signing his articles (so that for a long time I could not decide whether Wilhelm and Theodore, those precursors of Oscar Wilde’s Mr. Bunbury, were one person or two), isolated the root g-b ~ g-f in the Romance languages and traced it to Germanic. A seemingly ill-assorted group of words, including goblet, gag, giggle, goggle, javelin, jig, jug, and quite a few others, found themselves in the same group. If a scholar less solid and of less fame than Braune had come up with such a list, it would have been laughed out of court. As a matter of fact, a series of articles by him, all of which are like the one in which gob and gobletoccur (1922), had minimal influence on Germanic etymologists; it seems because they have been ignored rather than rejected as containing fanciful ideas.

Not unexpectedly, a connection between gob and goblet occurred to many people before 1922. To justify it, goblet was defined as “a cup containing a long quantity for one opening of the mouth, for one draft or swallow” (Charles Richardson). How much one can drink at one opening of the mouth depends on the size of the consumer’s throat and cannot serve as a foundation for a secure etymology. Hensleigh Wedgwood, who always tried to detect sound imitative roots in English words, explained goblet so: “The names of vessels for containing liquids are often taken from the image of pouring out water, expressed by forms representing the sound of water guggling out of the mouth of a narrow-necked vessel.” As usual, he cited numerous words from various languages bearing out his conclusion. Wedgwood’s etymology makes sense, and many dictionaries offer some version of it, specifying that the source of gob might be the Irish word for “mouth” and “beak.” I have a curious confirmation of his hypothesis. Russian drunks are in the habit of sharing a half-liter bottle among three people. But how can 500 grams be divided into three equal parts?  Strangely, in the process of careful pouring a half-liter bottle yields 21 “glugs.” Each thirsty alcoholic receives seven glugs. This is (at best) what scholars call anecdotal evidence. We still face the question whether gob and goblet are related. Nor should it be forgotten that goblets are not narrow-necked.

Uncle Toby

Those who have read my essay posted two weeks ago will remember that Ernest Weekley derived tankard from a proper name. He offered a similar etymology for goblet and many other vessels. This is what he said (I will only expand his abbreviations): “goblet. Old French gobelet, diminutive of gobel, gobeau. All these words are French surnames, Old High German God-bald, god-bold (cf. Engl. Godbolt), and the vessel is no doubt of same origin. Cf. Engl. dialectal gaddard, goblet, Old French godart, Old German Gott-hart, god-strong, named in same way. See goblin, and cf. demijohn, jack, gill, jug, tankard, Middle Engl. jubbe (Job) in Chaucer, etc.” In the entry tankard, he also mentioned toby-jug, bellarmine, and puncheon. Under his pen goblin ended up as a diminutive name of Gobel. A Toby Philpot jug, or simply Uncle Toby, was made in the shape of a stout man in a long coat, knee breeches, and three-cornered hat, seated. The phrase no doubt, when used in etymological studies, always makes me wince. Toby is a clear case. Perhaps Weekley guessed well that tankard has something to do with Tancred, but the path from God-bald to gobletis not straight. As concerns style, Weekley’s entries resemble Braune’s article: inspiring but a bit reckless.

Thus, we have several conjectures: goblet may go back to Latin cupellum, via French, or to Engl. gobble (which may be traced to Irish gob), or to the name God-bald, admittedly, not much to choose from. In a very general way, Braune may have been right. It seems that goblet is ultimately a Germanic word (regardless of its putative ties with Irish gob “beak, mouth”) and that its derivation from Latin and French, though supported by such authorities as Skeat, should be treated with a grain of salt.

When dictionaries explain the rhetorical figure of hendiadys, they sometimes give the example drink from gold and goblet for drink from golden goblets. Let this fact efface the salty impression left by the last sentence, above.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Themas 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) Cover page for Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (1888) via Open Library. (2) Toby Jug, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England. Reptonix free Creative Commons licensed photos via Wikimedia Commons.

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Very long ago, one of our correspondents asked me how irregular forms like good—better and go—went originated.  Not only was he aware of the linguistic side of the problem but he also knew the technical term for this phenomenon, namely “suppletion.” One cannot say the simplest sentence in English without running into suppletive forms. Consider the conjugation of the verb to be: am, is, are. Why is the list so diverse? And why is it mad—madder and rude—ruder, but bad—worse and good—better? Having received the question, I realized that, although I can produce an inventory of suppletive forms in a dozen languages and know the etymology of some of them, I am unable to give a general reason for their existence. I consulted numerous books on the history of the Indo-European languages and all kinds of “introductions” and discovered to my surprise that all of them enumerate the forms but never go to the beginning of time. I also turned to some of my colleagues for help and came home none the wiser. So I left the query on the proverbial back burner but did not forget it. One day, while feeding my insatiable bibliography and leafing through the entire set of a journal called Glotta (it is devoted to Greek and Latin philology), I found a useful article on suppletion in Classical Greek. Naturally, there were references to earlier works in it. I followed the thread and am now ready to say something about the subject.

This introduction might seem unnecessary to our readers, but I have written it to point out two things. First, it sometimes happens that finding an answer to what looks like an elementary question proves a difficult enterprise. Second, the episode has a sobering aspect. The main work on the origin of suppletion is a “famous” book written more than a hundred years ago, and it had important predecessors. “Everybody,” as various authors say, knows it. Well, apparently, the book’s fame is not universal, and one can devote long years to the study of historical linguistics and stay outside the group defined by the cover term “everybody.” Nothing like a question from a student, friend, or reader to prick one’ vanity! And now to business.

Regular forms exist in both grammar and word formation. For instance, many languages use a special suffix to derive the name of a feminine doer from its masculine counterpart. Thus, German Freund “(male) friend” ~ Freundin “(female) friend.” English borrowed from French the suffix -ess; hence actor ~ actress, lion ~ lioness, and many others. But in no language are the words for “girl” and “woman” derived from those for “boy” and “man.” German and Italian have resigned themselves to the existence of Professorin and Professoressa, whereas English does without professoress despite the fact that the number of women on our faculty is now considerable. Man and woman, boy and girl form natural pairs (and their referents form natural couples); yet language keeps them apart, and no one feels the inconvenience caused by the separation.

This is a portrait of Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of the novel We, who already in the early twenties of the past century showed what happens when we becomes the plural of I.

The speakers of early Indo-European who coined the words for “first” and “second” understood them as “the foremost one” and “the next one” and saw no intrinsic connection between what we call ordinal numerals and the cardinal numerals one and two. Suppletive forms in the pairs one/first and two/second turn up in various languages with rare consistency. We wonder why the comparative of good is better. We should ask ourselves what the positive degree of better is! It has never existed. From an etymological point of view, better means approximately “improved; remedied; compensated for.” Good needed a partner meaning “more than good” and better offered its services. We would have preferred “gooder,” but our indomitable ancestors chose to do their work the hard way. They did the same all over the Indo-European world (compare Latin bonus/melior/optimus, and be grateful for the similarity between better and best). Worse probably meant “entangled.” Yet the suffix -er in better (it once existed in worse too) indicates that the comparative force of both adjectives was not a secret.

Perhaps the hardest case is suppletion in verbs. We encounter cases like go/went everywhere. Moreover, the present is affected as often as the preterit. In Italian, the infinitive is andare, but “I go” is vado; the French pair is aller and vais. A look at the entire panorama of Indo-European shows that suppletive forms occur in the conjugation of the verbs for “come; go,” “eat,”, “give,” “take, bring, carry, lead” (those who studied even a bit of Latin had fero/tuli/latum beaten into them at the very beginning),  “say, speak,” strike, hit,” “see, show,”, and of course “be, become.” In most cases the relevant forms are individual (like andare and aller), that is, each language invented, rather than inherited, suppletion. The example of English is especially dramatic. The past of Old Engl. gan “go” was eode, a word derived from a different root. In Middle English, went, the historical preterit of wend (as in wend one’s way), superseded eode. The language had a chance of producing a regular past of gan but chose to replace suppletion with suppletion. Even in the carefully edited text of the Gothic Bible (a fourth-century translation from Greek) the preterit gaggida (of gaggan; read gg as ng) occurred once. In Gothic, but not in English. Those who know German may think that gehen/ging “go/went” are related, but they are not. The source of the illusion is the initial consonant g-.

No fully convincing explanation of this phenomenon exists, but some facts can be considered with profit. Early Indo-European did not have some of the tenses we take for granted. A classic example is the lack of the future in Germanic. This statement need not cause surprise. Even today we sometimes do very well without the future: the context does everything for us. Compare: I am leaving tomorrow and If I leave tomorrow…. The difference between the preterit and the perfect can also be hazy: “Did you put the butter in the refrigerator?” or “Have you put the butter in the refrigerator?” The difference is insignificant. Nor does any English speaker bemoan the absence of the aorist. Centuries ago, verbs were often classified according to whether they designated a continuous (durative) or momentary (terminative) action, and occasionally verbs like see (durative) and look (momentary) were later merged within a single paradigm. One thing is “go, walk”; something quite different is “reach one’s destination.” Consider the difference between speak and say. This is probably how went made a union with go. Eode is a word of obscure origin and its inner form meant as little to speakers in the fifth century as it does to us.

The merger of synonyms within one paradigm may not have been the only source of suppletion, but it was an important one. Perhaps the most intriguing question is why languages choose the same verbs and adjectives for defying regular grammar. It appears that the usual target is the most common of them: “good; bad,” “be; come; go; take; eat; speak” and the like (see the list above). Frequency in language always tends to defy regularization. Not every irregular form is the product of suppletion: man/men, tooth/teeth, do/does also have to be learned individually, but none of them is “suppletive.”

We have thrown a quick look at this vexing problem and see that final clarity avoids us, but such is the fate of all things whose past has to be not simply recorded but reconstructed. In any case, I have answered an old question, and my conscience is clear.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Themas 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: Boris Kustodiev. Portrait of the author Yevgeny Zamyatin. 1923. Drawing. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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One drinks to the coming New Year, and one drinks while remembering the old one. Besides, some do it according to the Gregorian calendar, while others prefer the Julian one. As could be expected, the end of the world has been delayed and life continues. I was touched by the kind words from our regular correspondents; over time they have become my good friends. Although I cannot provide them with drinks (distance learning is possible, but no software has yet been invented for distance drinking), I am ready to go on with my series “Drinking Vessels.” Now that we have dispensed with bumper, the turn of tankard has come around.

If you want to know the origin of tankard, you are advised to look it up in some of our best reference works. In The Century Dictionary (CD), you will read: “…origin unknown. The notion that the word is from tank ‘a pool of deep water, natural or artificial’ is wholly untenable.” The first edition of the CD appeared in 1889, before the birth of armored cars on caterpillar wheels. Henry Cecil Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1932. Like CD, it contains excellent etymologies and says the following about tankard: “…origin uncertain; perhaps connected with tank.” Enlightened by this information, we can now start from scratch.

As early as 1266, the Latinized form tancardus turned up in a British source. In a 1317 inventory of golden and silver vessels from Florence, two grandi tancardi and two piccoli tancardi are mentioned, which means that tankards have not always been large. In French, tancquard surfaced only in Rabelais, so at least two centuries later. Old Dutch tancquaert, which graces the pages of many English dictionaries, is misleading, because the word has not been attested until the early Modern Dutch period (the digraph ae designates long a, as in Engl. spa). Given the order of the forms at our disposal, tankard looks like a genuine English word, genuine not as meaning that it is of Anglo-Saxon descent but that it was coined in England. Its structure makes one think of the elements tank (the root) and the suffix -ard. However, tank had not been recorded in English until the seventeenth century, and despite Wyld’s and many other people’s suggestion could not be the etymon of tankard, as Skeat pointed out long ago. The suffix provides no clue to the word’s origin. The home of -ard was Old High German, from where it spread to Old French. In Modern English it is mildly productive and turns up in both French borrowings (bastard, coward, and the like) and native words, such as drunkard (a nice dialectal noun is dizzard “blockhead”). The origin of some words ending in -ard, including buzzard and blizzard, has been a matter of involved speculation, while leopard has no suffix at all.

Tankard does not have to be tank + ard; it may be tan- + -kard (or -card). A modern tankard contains a quart, and more than one scholar has derived the name of the vessel from the volume of the liquid that fills it to the brim. Tri-quart? This is not a good idea. Tri- would be hard to change into tan-, and we should not forget the piccoli tancardi of the Florentine inventory: piccoli (plural) means “small,” and, to make matters worse, why three? Also, the French spelling with final -d complicates the connection between -kard and quart. Or perhaps tan- is from tin-, which is from French étain “tin,” unless it is from étang, the French reflex of Latin stagnum “pool”? The last etymology is not too different from the one that traces tankard to tank + -ard, because in at least two languages of India (the country from which tank came to England) tank “pool” has possible Sanskrit antecedents. Among some impressive-looking etymological dictionaries of English some are unoriginal and often unreliable. Such is, for example, the work by Ernest Klein. He says about tankard: “From tant quart,” that is, “only a quart.” Perhaps he borrowed this etymology from one of his predecessors, but I have not seen it anywhere else. Unfortunately, Yoshio Terasawa copied it in his English-Japanese dictionary. Stay away from hasty products and dissociate tankard from both tank and quart.

This is a tank, and THIS IS A TANKARD.

Charles Mackay, my constant target of regretful derision, suggested that tankard had come from Irish Gaelic teann “stretch forth” and caraid “friend”: “…the etymology would point to the same original idea as that of the English loving cup, a goblet stretched forth in friendship or affection, for friends to partake of.” This conjecture, of the same order as bumper from bon père, is fanciful and doesn’t explain why the medieval British term should have come to English from Gaelic. Equally unconvincing were attempts to reduce tankard to sound imitation, as though from twang. One should of course beware of dismissing anything Skeat said as unacceptable, but the etymology he offered in the first edition of his dictionary (1882) has little to recommend it. He derived (tentatively) tankard from Swedish stånka “large wooden can; tankard” (before him, Wedgwood looked for a Norwegian source of tankard). As a parallel, he referred to Engl. standard “a standing bowl.”

Drinks have frequently been used as a form of punishment. Consider students’ emptying a sconce at Oxford and Cambridge. Some victims have been obliged to drink a huge quantity of intoxicating swill at one gulp (Peter I of Russia enjoyed this entertainment; he was a great czar). To add an element of hilarity to public humiliation, the construction of the vessel might prevent it from being stood on its bottom. The best proof that such glasses existed is the word tumbler “footless goblet,” which needs little help from etymologists to tell its story. But just as we are puzzled by the Irish heritage of tankard in Mackay’s explanation, we wonder why a Swedish word should have become so popular all over Europe. If borrowed from the Vikings, it would hardly have been Latinized and made its way to Italy. Skeat had moderate trust in his etymology from the start but never quite gave it up.

The author of the first English etymological dictionary (1617) was John Minsheu. He derived tankard from Latin cantharus (originally a Greek word) “chalice; tankard,” by metathesis (cantha- to tanka-). The coincidence is indeed striking. Minsheu’s etymology was known very well. Skinner (1671), Junius (1743), Todd (in Johnson-Todd, 1827), and Eduard Mueller (1867) endorsed or at least mentioned it, and it emerged in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1768. That is why I was surprised to read in Skeat that, when all is said and done, the best hypothesis can be found in Webster-Mahn (1864): tankard is probably an alternation of cantharus. What gross injustice! Mahn replaced Webster’s Armenian-Hebrew derivation with Minsheu’s, and Skeat couldn’t possibly be ignorant of the authorship of the cantharus-tankard idea. Apparently, he wrote the entry in a hurry.

Minsheu’s idea is clever. Switch around cantha- and tanka-, add a suffix, and you will get tankard. Similar examples of metathesis are not too few, but why should the change have occurred in this word? I will quote Ernst Weekley’s suggestion (with abbreviations expanded). “I take it [tankard] to be a jocular metathesis (? due to the fame of the Crusader Tancred), of Latin cantharus, … suggested by the personal name Tankard, once common and still a surname…. A similar metathesis is seen in Norwegian, Danish hopper, pox, for earlier pokker.” So be it. The names of vessels often go back to personal names, as Weekley indicated. Perhaps tancardus, from cantharus, was the result of ignorance, perhaps it originated in the language of topers, who seldom speak distinctly and are prone to cracking silly verbal jokes, or they might have toasted Tancred much too often and got it all wrong. But isn’t it instructive that three centuries after Minsheu we are bound to admire his perspicacity and acknowledge his wit? Tankard, nearly rhyming with drunkard, may have nothing to do with cantharus, but even more probably it does.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Themas 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) Toy Army Tank with Camouflage Paint Scheme Isolated on White. Photo by yusufsarlar, iStockphoto. (2) beer. Photo by Chepko, iStockphoto.

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A Happy New Year to our readers and correspondents! Questions, comments, and friendly corrections have been a source of inspiration to this blog throughout 2012, as they have been since its inception. Quite a few posts appeared in response to the questions I received through OUP and privately (by email). As before, the most exciting themes have been smut and spelling. If I wanted to become truly popular, I should have stayed with sex, formerly unprintable words, and the tough-through-though gang. But being of a serious disposition, I resist the lures of popularity. It is enough for me to see that, when I open the page “Oxford Etymologist,” the top post invites the user to ponder the origin of fart. And indeed, several of my “friends and acquaintance” (see the previous gleanings) have told me that they enjoy my blog, but invariably added: “I have read your post on fart. Very funny.” I remember that after dozens of newspapers reprinted the fart essay, I promised a continuation on shit. Perhaps I will keep my promise in 2013. But other ever-green questions also warm the cockles of my heart, especially in winter. For instance, I never tire of answering why flammable means the same as inflammable. Why really? And now to business.

Folk etymology. “How much of the popular knowledge of language depends on folk etymology?” I think the question should be narrowed down to: “How often do popular ideas of language depend on folk etymology?” People are fond of offering seemingly obvious explanations of word origins. Sometimes their ideas change a well-established word. Shamefaced, to give just one example, developed from shame-fast (as though restrained by shame). Some mistakes are so pervasive that one day the wrong forms may share the fate of shame-fast. Such is, for example, protruberance, by association with protrude. Despite what the OED says, it seems more probable that miniscule developed from minuscule only because the names of mini-things begin with mini-. Incidentally, from a historical point of view, even miniature has nothing to do with the picture’s small size. Most people would probably say that massacre has the root mass- (“mass killing”), but the two words are not connected. Anyone can expand this list.

Sound symbolism. A correspondent has read my book on word origins and came across a section on words beginning with gr-, such as Grendel and grim. Since they often refer to terror and cruelty (at best they designate gruff and grouchy people), he wonders how the word grace belongs here. It does not. Sound symbolism is a real force in language. One can cite any number of words with initial gl- for things glistening and gleaming, with fl- when flying, flitting, and flowing are meant, as well as unpleasant sl-words like slimy and sleazy. But green, flannel, and slogan will show that at best we have a limited tendency rather than a rule. Besides, many sound symbolic associations are language-specific. So somebody who has a daughter called Grace need not worry.

Grendel attacking Three Graces.

Engl. galoot and Catalan golut.  More than four years ago, I wrote a triumphant post on the origin of Engl. galoot. The reason for triumph was that I was the first to discover the word’s derivation (a memorable event in the life of an etymologist). Just this month one of our correspondents discovered that post and asked about its possible connection with Catalan golut “glutton; wolverine.” This, I am sure, is a coincidence. In the Romance languages, we find words representing two shapes of the same root, namely gl- and gl- with a vowel between g and l. They inherited this situation from Latin: compare gluttire “to swallow” and gola “throat.” English borrowed from Old French and later from Latin several words representing both forms of the root, as seen in glut ~ glutton and gullet. As for the sense “wolverine” (the name of a proverbially voracious animal, Gulo luscus), it has also been recorded in English. By contrast, Engl. galoot has not been derived from the gl- root, with or without a vowel in the middle. It goes back to Dutch, while the Dutch took it over from Italian galeot(t)o “sailor” (which is akin to galley).

Judgement versus judgment. This is an old chestnut. Both spellings have been around for a long time. Acknowledgment and abridgment belong with judgment. Since the inner form of all those word is unambiguous, the variants without e cause no trouble. The widespread opinion that judgment is American, while judgement is British should be repeated with some caution, because the “American” spelling was at one time well-known in the UK. However, it is true that modern American editors and spellcheckers require the e-less variant. I would prefer (though my preference is of absolutely no importance in this case) judgement, that is, judge + ment. The deletion of e produces an extra rule, and we have enough of silly spelling rules already. Another confusing case with -dg- is the names Dodgson and Hodgson. Those bearers of the two names whom I knew pronounced them Dodson and Hodson respectively, but, strangely, many dictionaries give only the variant with -dge-. Is it known how Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, pronounced his name?

Zigzag and Egypt. The tobacco company called its products Zig-Zag after the “zigzag” alternating process it used, though it may have knowingly used the reference to the ancient town Zig-a-Zag (I have no idea). Anyway, the English word does not have its roots in the Egyptian place name.

Lark. I was delighted to discover that someone had followed my advice and listened to Glinka-Balakirev’s variations. It is true that la-la-la does not at all resemble the lark’s trill, and this argument has been used against those who suggested an onomatopoeic origin of the bird’s name. But, as long as the bird is small, la seems to be a universal syllable in human language representing chirping, warbling, twittering, trilling, and every other sound in the avian kingdom. It was also a pleasure to learn that specialists in Frisian occasionally read my blog. I know the many Frisian cognates of lark thanks to Århammar’s detailed article on this subject (see lark in my bibliography of English etymology).

Bumper. I was unable to find an image of the label used on the bottles of brazen-face beer. My question to someone who has seen the label: “Was there a picture of a saucy mug on it?” (The pun on mug is unintentional.) I am also grateful for the reference to the Gentleman’s Magazine. My database contains several hundred citations from that periodical, but not the one to which Stephen Goranson, a much better sleuth that I am, pointed. This publication was so useful for my etymological bibliography that I asked an extremely careful volunteer to look through the entire set of Lady’s Magazine and of about a dozen other magazines with the word lady in the title. They were a great disappointment: only fashion, cooking, knitting, and all kinds of household work. Women did write letters about words to Notes and Queries, obviously a much more prestigious outlet. However, we picked up a few crumbs even from those sources. The word bomber-nickel puzzled me. I immediately thought of pumpernickel but could not find any connection between the bread and the vessel discussed in the entry I cited. I still see no connection. As for pumpernickel, I am well aware of its origin and discussed it in detail in the entry pimp in my dictionary (pimp, pump, pomp-, pumper-, pamper, and so forth).

Again. It was instructive to see the statistics about the use of the pronunciation again versus agen and to read the ditty in which again has a diphthong multiple times. If I remember correctly, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others rhymed again only with words like slain, though one never knows to what extent they exploited the so-called rhyme to the eye. Most probably, they did pronounce a diphthong in again.

Scots versus English, as seen in 1760 (continued from the previous gleanings).

• Sc. fresh weather ~ Engl. open weather
• Sc. tender ~ Engl. fickly
• Sc. in the long run ~ Engl. at long run
• Sc. with child to a man ~ Engl. with child by a man (To be continued.)

Happy holidays! We’ll meet again in 2013.

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: (1) Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Three Graces, 1531. The Louvre via Wikimedia Commons. (2) An illustration of the ogre Grendel from Beowulf by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall in J. R. Skelton’s Stories of Beowulf (1908) via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for December 2012 appeared first on OUPblog.

This is a story of again; gain will be added as an afterthought. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, dictionaries informed their users that again is pronounced with a diphthong, that is, with the same vowel as in the name of the letter A. (I am adding this explanation, because native speakers of English with no knowledge of phonetics seldom realize that the vowel in day, take, main consists of two parts: the nucleus and a glide; the formulation that, for example, a in bait is the “long counterpart of short a” in bat makes matters even worse.) Some people still rhyme again with fain, feign, fane. However, most rhyme it with Ben, den, ten; all the recent British and American dictionaries agree on this point.

The history of the adverb again is surprisingly checkered. In Modern English, the use of the digraphs ai, ay, and ei for short e is, as undergraduate students like to put it, not “very unique”: compare said, says, and heifer. But that does not make the puzzle easier, because says and said stand out as abnormal even in English, in which one can sometimes feel uncertain of how to spell the shortest words. Clearly, the spelling, irrational from today’s point of view, goes back to the pronunciation of old, but tracing the fortunes of each freak is no easy matter. This holds especially for heifer, but again too poses many difficulties.

Only the origin of again is clear. Among its cognates we find German entgegen “opposite” and Old Icelandic í gegn “against.” In the English word, the prefix a- goes back to the preposition on. Old Engl. ongean meant “in the opposite direction” and “back,” not “once more.” The oldest sense of -gain has been preserved in gainsay, literally “speak against.” The Germanic root of -gean and -gegn must have been gag-; its meaning need not occupy our attention, The vowel ea in ongean was long, which means that it consisted of two halves, each of which could be stressed, depending on the word’s  place in the sentence, intonation, and emphasis. There was a time when in words of such structure stress shifted from e to a, though it is not clear whether the attested modern dialectal form agan owes its vowel to eá, from éa.

As far back as in Old English, the letter given here as g in ongean designated the sound we now hear in yes, you, and yonder. The interplay of g and y is common in the West Germanic languages. Those who have been exposed to the Berlin dialect know that, for instance, Gegend “area” sounds like yeyend there. In Middle High German, legt “lays” and trägt “carries” were spelled leit and treit. Old Engl. g- also changed to y- before i- and e-, and the modern forms yield and yearn bear witness to that change (their German cognates begin with g-: gelten and begehren). There would have been many more English words like those two but for the Viking raids. In the language of the Scandinavians, g remained “hard,” and that is why Modern Engl. get has not merged in pronunciation with yet. Also, give is a phonetic borrowing from the north, whether directly from the invading Danes or from the northern English dialects in which g- withstood “softening” to y-.

In Middle English, the most common form of again was ayen, still with a long vowel. To an unschooled observer the phonetic history of every well-documented language looks like an endless exercise in futility, a conspiracy invented for obfuscating beginning students. Long vowels become short and some time later undergo secondary lengthening, only to lose the hard-gained length a century or two later. Monophthongs turn into diphthongs, while diphthongs become monophthongs and occupy the slots vacated by their former neighbors. Wouldn’t it have been more natural for them to stay put and avoid playing lobster quadrille? Language is a self-regulating mechanism, and many changes only look erratic, but others are accounted for by the fact that sounds, like people, succumb to contradictory rules: from one point of view it may be expedient for a vowel to lengthen, but from another it would be better if it remained short or became long and then returned to its initial state. Phonetic system is like a modern democracy, which faces chaos and in trying to overcome it produces even greater chaos. There is no end to this process. In the history of again we observe how the original diphthong became a long monophthong, shortened, lengthened, and diphthongized. The coexistence of two modern pronunciations of again reflects those changes. Says and said exhibit partly the same picture, but only the short variants have survived.

AYENBITE OF INWYT

Against surfaced as an adverb: Middle Engl. ageines is agein followed by an adverbial suffix. Its final -t is, to use a scholarly term, excrescent. This “parasitic” sound has also made its way after s into amidst, whilst, amongst, and a few others. A well-known vulgarism is acrossed.  A similar change affected Old Engl. betweohs ~ betwyx ~ betwux: betwix became betwixt(e), and the idiom betwixt and between is still alive.

In distinction from again, gain (noun and verb) has an easily recoverable past. It is a borrowing of Old French gain (masculine; feminine gagne); the verb was gaigner (Modern French gagner). But the ancient word came to Romance from the Germanic verb for “hunt” and acquired the senses “cultivate land” and “earn.” It follows that gain in gainsay, in which again appears without its old prefix, and gain, as in gainful occupation, are distinct words, and only chance turned them into homophones and allowed them to meet in Modern English. Such is the story of gain¹ and gain². It is more complicated than what one could expect from a blog posted in late December, but nothing venture, nothing win, as the British say, or nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say in America.

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: King David does repentance via wikipaintings.org.

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Some time ago, I devoted three posts to alcoholic beverages: ale, beer, and mead. It has occurred to me that, since I have served drinks, I should also take care of wine glasses. Bumper is an ideal choice for the beginning of this series because of its reference to a large glass full to overflowing. It is a late word, as words go: no citation in the OED predates 1677. If I am not mistaken, the first lexicographer to include it in his dictionary was Samuel Johnson (1755). For a long time bumper may have been little or not at all known in polite society. Even Nathan Bailey (1721 and 1730) missed it. But once it surfaced in dictionaries, guesswork about its origin began.

Johnson derived bumper from bum “being prominent.” Etymology was not his forte (to put it mildly), and the source of the consonant p hardly bothered him. Of the revisions of Johnson’s work especially serious was the one by the Reverend H. J. Todd (1827). Although later scholars derided Todd’s etymologies, his explanations were not always useless, despite the fact that he had no notion of the progress historical linguistics had made by 1827. Be that as it may, to discover the origin of seventeenth-century English slang (and I assume bumper was slang), one can dispense with the facts of Indo-European and even of Old English. Todd called Johnson’s conjecture far-fetched, offered none of his own, and only said that others had traced bumper to bumbard ~ bombard. It is most irritating that he did not indicate who the “others” were. I have been unable to find his authority and will be very pleased if someone enlightens me on this point.

Bombard, a word known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, meant “cannon” and (on account of its size or form?) “leather jug or bottle for liquor.” For a long time Skeat had sufficient trust in this etymology. Bumper, he said, appeared in English just as the older bombard, a drinking vessel, disappeared and was “a corruption of it.” This hypothesis fails to convince. A jug or a bottle for liquor is not a glass, and it remains unclear why a word, evidently in common use, should have been “corrupted.” Nevertheless, the bombard-bumper etymology appeared in numerous good dictionaries, though, surprisingly, Skeat’s early competitors Eduard Mueller and Hensleigh Wedgwood passed by the word.

Then there were attempts to present bumper as a disguised compound. Such an idea should not be dismissed out of hand. For example, bridal, now understood as an adjective, derives from Old Engl. bryd “bride” and ealu “ale” and meant “ale drinking at a wedding feast.” The indefatigable Charles Mackay, who traced hundreds of English words to Irish Gaelic, explained bumper as the sum of bun “bottom” and barr “top”: bum-barr or bun-parr “full from the bottom to the top.” A somewhat more reasonable theory looked upon bumper as a borrowing from French and decomposed it into bon “good” and père or Père “father.” A typical statement ran as follows: “When the English were good Catholics, they usually drank the Pope’s health in a full glass after dinner—Au bon Père—whence your bumper.” Perhaps this derivation was first offered in Joseph Spence’s posthumous (1820) Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men…, an amusing and entertaining book. Spence had no idea when bumper surfaced in English and did not doubt that at the time of the word’s appearance the English were still good Catholics. Nor did he provide any evidence that the rite he mentioned ever existed. (Those with a taste for such reading will also enjoy Samuel Pegge’s Anecdotes of the English Language…, 1844.)

This is a country bumpkin. Bumpkin and bumper are not related.

Not unexpectedly, some people thought they had found a tie between bumper and bump up, a rather rare collocation meaning “swell up.” The glass was said to be filled so as to cause the liquid to “bump up” slightly above the rim. Several variations on the bump up theme exist. At this point I need a short digression. Some etymological dictionaries have been written by monomaniacs, as Ernest Weekley called them. They derived all the words of English from several ancient roots or from a few primordial cries, or from one language (Irish Gaelic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.). Criticizing their labors is a thankless task. By contrast, the authors of some dictionaries were so misguided, even if learned, that one wonders how they managed to produce their monstrosities. One such monster is Words: Their History and Derivation, Alphabetically Arranged by Dr. F. Ebener and E.M. Greenway, Jr. (Baltimore and London, 1871). Greenway was, apparently, the translator of this hapless work from German, while Ebener may have been a medical doctor. Among the physicians of the past one can find several crazy etymologists. The dictionary caused such an outcry that its publication was discontinued after the letter B. But my experience has taught me to consult all sources, because a heap of muck sometimes contains a grain of precious metal. (Consider also the dust heaps immortalized in Our Mutual Friend.) This is what I found in the short entry Bumper: “After Grimm [sic], a full glass which in toasting is knocked on the table or against another bumper. He compares [sic] with bomber-nickel.” (It is so easy to translate this text back into German!)

What is a bomber-nickel? And where did Grimm (I assume, Jacob Grimm) say it? His multivolume Deutsche Grammatik has a word index, compiled by Karl Gustav Andresen and published in 1865, but bumper is not in it. Once again I am turning to the assistance of our correspondents. Perhaps they will be able to find the relevant place in Jacob Grimm’s other books or Kleinere Schriften. I cannot imagine that Ebener made up the reference. The OED suggested cautiously that bumper is connected with bumping and its synonym thumping “very large.” Quite possibly, that’s all there is to it. Yet a link seems to be missing, namely some reference to drinking.

The short-lived adjective bumpsy (bumpsie) “drunk,” with an obscure suffix seemingly borrowed from tipsy, has often been cited by those who looked for the origin of bumper. I wonder whether bump up at one time also meant “guzzle” or that the noun bumper “drunkard” existed in colloquial use. Bumper “full glass” may, as suggested above, have been avoided by Samuel Johnson’s closest predecessors because it was current only as occasional slang, even though Johnson did not call the word low (an epithet of which he was fond). Bumper “full glass,” coexisting with bumper “drunkard,” is possible. For instance, a reader is someone who reads and a book for reading. Also, bump “drink heavily,” a homonym of bump “strike” and bump “bulge out, protrude,” may have had some currency as an expressive doublet of the little-known verb bum “consume alcohol.” Verbs ending in -mp (jump, thump, slump, dump, and of course bump) are invariably expressive. I wish it were possible to show that slum, a word of undiscovered origin, is in some way connected with slump!

The etymology of bumper is simple (not a “corruption” or a disguised compound), but, unfortunately, some details have been lost along the way. Let us not des-pair. Good wine needs no bush, so au bon père!

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Themas 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: A portrait of a man aiming a shotgun. Critical focus on tip of gun. Isolated on white. Photo by steele2123, iStockphoto.

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For some time I have fought a trench war, trying to prove that fowl and fly are not connected. The pictures of an emu and an ostrich appended to the original post were expected to clinch the argument, but nothing worked. A few days ago, I saw a rafter of turkeys strutting leisurely along a busy street. Passersby were looking on with amused glee while drivers honked. The birds (clearly, “fowl”) crossed the road without showing the slightest signs of excitement (apparently, after Thanksgiving they had nothing to worry about), though two or three accelerated their pace somewhat. Not a single one flew. This convinced me that my theory was correct, and I decided to stay for a while in the avian kingdom; hence lark.

One of the Old English forms of lark was læwerce (with long æ), later laferce. Its West Germanic (Frisian, Dutch, and German) cognates resemble læwerce more or less closely. Modern Scots laverock and Dutch leeuwerik,* unlike Engl. lark and German Lerche, have retained more flesh. The contraction of læwerce to lark should cause no surprise, because v from f was regularly lost between vowels: for example, head goes back to heafod, and hawk to hafoc.  The protoform of lark must have sounded approximately like laiwazakon (-on is an ending). Obviously, such a long word must either have been a compound or made up of a root and a suffix. Attempts to discover two meaningful elements in laiwazakon began with our first English etymologist John Minsheu (1617). He detected leef-werck “life work” in lark, “because this bird flies seven sundrie times every day very high, so sings hymnes and songs to the Creator, in which consists the lives worke.” No one has ever repeated this etymology. But the search for the elements in the allegedly disguised compound continued.

Old (and Modern) Icelandic lævirki “lark” provided the greatest temptation. The word falls into two parts: læ- “treason, deceit” and virki “work.” It is not quite clear whether the Scandinavians borrowed their name of the lark from the south or whether we are dealing with a genuine cognate. In any case, lævirki is transparent. Unfortunately, too transparent, and it is surprising that Skeat let himself be seduced by such a hoax. He suggested that, according to some unknown superstition, the lark might be a bird of ill omen or, conversely, a revealer of treachery. The OED followed Skeat with a few minor modifications, and Skeat ended up with the tentative gloss lark “skillful worker, or worker of craft” (because læ sometimes meant “craft”; however, it hardly ever lacked the connotations of wiles). I think the time has come to forget it. Icelandic lævirki is the product of folk etymology: an opaque word acquired a deceptively clear shape (compare Engl. asparagus becoming sparrow grass, though everybody knows that sparrows are not herbivorous creatures). Dutch leeuwerk begins with leeuw “lion,” but no one would reconstruct a lost story in which a lark entertained a lion with its songs.

Two features of the lark are especially noticeable to humans: it is an early bird (whence its association with daybreak), and its songs (trills) are loud and melodious (after reading this post, listen to the recordings of Glinka-Balakirev’s “The Lark,” a set of beautiful variations). Quite naturally, most etymologists tried to find reference to morning or sound in the Germanic word. As early as 1846, Wilhelm Wackernagel, a famous philologist, believed that the old form consisted of lais- “furrow” and “waker”; the lark, he said, alerted the plowman that morning arrived and work should begin. Lais- would have been a cognate of Latin lira “furrow” (long i) and Engl. last (literally, “track”), as in cobbler’s last. This etymology was mentioned in a few old dictionaries and rejected, but it has found an enthusiastic modern supporter. The only non-controversial part of the reconstructed form laiwaza-k-on is -k-, a common suffix in animal and bird names. The part -aza- remains obscure; it has been called another suffix, but its meaning has not been discovered. I will skip several fanciful suggestions in which the poor lark lost a good deal of its plumage, and mention only one, because it belongs to an excellent scholar. In Sanskrit, the root lu- enters into many words meaning “cut.” Therefore, it has been proposed that the lark got its name from the habit of pecking at grains — an uninviting idea.

I can now come to the point. In lai- most researchers recognize a sound imitative complex. Last week, while discussing lollygag, I touched on the complex lal- ~ lol- ~ lul- ~ lil-. Among other things, it often refers to sound.  Here we find such different words as Russian lai “barking,” Engl. lullaby, Engl. ululate “howl” (from French, from Latin), Engl. hoopla (from French), and a host of others. It matters little whether the lark’s call resembles la-la-la; in this situation, anything goes. Most dictionaries, unless they say “origin unknown (uncertain),” state that, although the etymology of lark is debatable, the word is onomatopoeic. Some authors add certainly and undoubtedly to their statements. Perhaps lark is indeed an onomatopoeia (la certainly and undoubtedly suggests sound imitation), but the problem of its ultimate origin remains.

The Latin for lark is alauda, and the Romans knew that their word was Gaulish (Celtic). Alauda and laiwazakon do not look like perfect congeners, but they are close enough to invite speculation about their affinity. The Latin noun (speciously) contains the root of laudare “praise” (compare Engl. laud, laudable, laudatory, and so forth), and this fact must have suggested to Minsheu the idea of the lark’s praising the Creator. The best nineteenth-century etymologists were puzzled by the similarity between læwerce and its kin and alauda. Jacob Grimm and Lorenz Diefenbach saw no serious arguments against uniting them, while their younger contemporaries showed some restraint. (Diefenbach’s name will mean nothing to non-specialists, but he was one of the greatest philologists of his generation.) Long ago — my reference takes me to 1887 — Moritz Heyne brought out volume six of the Grimms’ Dictionary and suggested that the hopelessly obscure word for “lark” had been borrowed from some other language. If we accept this hypothesis, the form in both Celtic and Germanic will emerge as an adaptation of the etymon we have no chance of finding. In recent years, the idea of the substrate has been much abused. Numerous words of unclear etymology have been given short shrift and assigned to some pre-Indo-European language of Europe. But the name of the lark does look like a loan from a lost source, for the etymology of Latin alauda is as impenetrable as that of laiwazakon.

Reference to the substrate leaves some phonetic details unexplained. Also, we will never know why the new inhabitants of Europe had no native name for such a widespread bird and how exactly the original word sounded. But perhaps we can risk the conclusion that lark is neither a Celtic nor a Germanic word (so that it cannot be represented as a compound made up of two Germanic roots) and that it probably contains an onomatopoeic element. This is a familiar denouement: the sought-for answer escapes us, but we seem to be closer to the truth than we were at the outset of our journey.

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: Book cover. Jean Anouilh. The Lark. Christopher Fry, translator. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. via Bryn Mawr.
*Updated 7 December 2012 with the correct information.

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It has been a tempestuous month in the world but a quiet one in the department of English etymology. Both the comments and the questions I received dealt with separate words, and there have been not too many of them.

Lollygag. In July 2007 I already wrote what I thought about this word. Although most people, at least in America, say lollygag, its doublet lallygag is well-known. The variation is typical. We are dealing with a sound imitative or perhaps sound symbolic complex endowed with a vague sense, and vowel alternations emphasize the scope and fluidity of its meaning (a good example of what semioticians call iconicity). Outside English and partly in it, including its past periods, rather many words begin with lall- and lill-, synonymous with loll-; also, lolly once meant “tongue.” Even Engl. lull is “sort of” (those around me say “kinda”) related. Nor are compounds with loll- too rare. I could cite loblolly “thick gruel” (to be strictly distinguished from the thin gruel Oliver Twist was fed), later “bumpkin, hayseed, hillbilly,” and lollypop, along with British dialectal lollpot “lazy, lounging fellow” and lollypot “idiot.”   

Lollygag too is probably of dialectal origin. Although seemingly an Americanism, lollygag aligns itself very well with lollypot and the rest. Gag is another sound imitative word, as evidenced by gaggle, giggle, dialectal guggle, and their kin. Loll- covers the territory from mumbling to loafing; gag- refers to actions as different as choking and cheating. Conjoined, they produce the effect of a wasteful activity, whose overtones vary. A specific difficulty in etymologizing such formations is the dubious character of the third vowel. Perhaps lollygag arose as loll-a-gag (compare lack-a-daisical, jack-a-napes, rag-a-muffin, and so forth). In pronunciation, the difference between connecting i and a is not too significant. Anyway, lollygag resembles the tautological compounds mentioned in the previous post. Both elements of this verb seem to mean approximately “kill time.” Those are odd words: lollygag, bullyrag, scalawag….

Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit. We have fallen prey to the ambiguity of the word bully. Roosevelt was fond of the adjective bully, which in his usage meant “excellent.” He, quite correctly, believed that the White House is a splendid (“bully”) place for propagating ideas. Since the positive sense of bully is now nearly forgotten, most people understand the phrase as referring to a platform from which you can bully your opponents.

Fowl and dog. I agree that no facts militate against connecting fowl with fly. But is this enough for the onus probandi? Unfortunately, facts supporting the derivation of fowl from fly are also absent. The question should, of necessity, remain open. As for dog, I, naturally, have read the relevant article in Indogermanische Forschungen (naturally, because I regularly follow the main publications for my database and later try to catch up with the less visible journals). The hypothesis suggested there is one of many. Perhaps it solves the problem, and perhaps it does not. The other words of the same type (pig, stag, frog, and one or two others) are also obscure, as is, incidentally, fox. The Indo-European root of hound is reconstructible, but its meaning is not. We can only say that people called the dog a “dog.”

Bald-faced lie. This is a late phrase, apparently, an American (US) alteration of barefaced lie. Its origin is not quite clear. Perhaps it refers to a “white,” that is, “unblushing,” rather than hairless, face. Mere guesswork, once again quoting Skeat’s favorite phrase. Bold-faced lie is an alteration of the otherwise incomprehensible locution, a product of folk etymology. While on this topic, I may mention the circumstance that Mr. Verdant Greene, the hero of Cuthbert Bede’s evergreen novel, went to Brazenface College, Oxford, which, though usually full, was not known for “overcrowding” and was by all accounts a nicer place than Mr. Squeers’s Dotheboys Hall (Nicholas Nickleby).

Fresh and stale tidbits

Spelling. The only practical way to reform English spelling is to get very many people involved. This means inundating newspapers and journals with letters to the editor. In 1907 Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary and a passionate supporter of Spelling Reform in the United States was in a position to announce in The Nation: “Information on this subject may be had by writing to the Simplified Spelling Board, No. 1 Madison Avenue, New York,” and the Board’s headquarters bombarded the media with letters and discussion. So far, despite a few splashes, the reformers have kept the proverbial low profile.

More from The Nation. Chicago, I understand, was in narrow straits at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One reads in a letter responding to Professor Blackburn’s address to the Central Division of the Modern Language Association of America (1906): “Where shall we find the teachers who may ‘do much’ to restore to our children their lost inheritance? Not in Chicago’s schools. Here, I can assure him, he will find dozens of schools in which not one teacher is capable of setting an example of pure and beautiful speech.” It is always comforting to know that our ancestors were as ignorant as we are.

Back to Chicago: CBS and its Progeny. Apart from what everybody recognizes, CBS means hundreds of useless things, for example, “can’t be stuffed” and “can’t stop laughing.” This type of English has become a curse to those who have not mastered it. The problem is not new. A hundred year ago, there was “an eruption in Chicago of the expression curious to know.” One popular journalist was so fond of it that he wrote c2k instead. Our inventions are far from original.

A second lease. Words tend to disappear and then return with a vengeance. The first edition of the OED recorded obese in 1651, then in 1654, and never again until 1822. Close to it is occupy, which quite early acquired the sense “cohabit” and was therefore avoided in the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century. Who could have thought that both words, especially obese, would become so common in our life!

Scots and English. Speakers on both sides of the Atlantic will be amused to see how many forms considered Scots in 1760 are now proper English, sometimes depending on where it is spoken. Here are a few samples from an article printed in Scots Magazine 22, 1760, pp. 686-688:

• Sc. friends and acquaintances / Engl. friends and acquaintance (for Jane Austen, I remember, acquaintance, was only a collective noun: “those with whom one is acquainted”);
• Sc. maltreat / Engl. abuse;
• Sc. proven /Engl. proved;
• Sc. pled / Engl. pleaded;
• Sc. incarcerate / Engl. imprison;
• Sc. tear to pieces / Engl. tear in pieces.

(To be continued.)

Friends and acquaintance

Sequence of tenses. Some time ago, I noted that journalists use would for no obvious reason: it is neither the subjunctive nor the so-called future in the past. Here is a characteristic passage: “Obama has been clear for more than a year that he would resist direct U.S. intervention, but in August he said one circumstance would cause him to revisit that position.” Only the second would makes sense to me, for I doubt that the first one means “would rather.” I expected will resist.

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: Édouard Manet. Luncheon on the Grass. 1863. Musée d’Orsay. Google Art Project. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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