If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

A midwife is called a midwife not because the midwife is in the middle of anything, nor because during the birth of children the midwife is helping the wife as opposed to the husband.

It is pretty uncommon to find men who are midwives but I guess they do exist. The etymology of the word midwife reflects the fact that assisting in bringing a new little person into this world has long been a gender role and almost completely dominated by women.

The wife part of midwife has nothing to do with the marital state of the parents of the baby being delivered, nor that of the midwife herself.

The word wife predates an association with being married or unmarried and in our earliest records just meant “woman.”

If we paste that meaning on midwife we get midwoman.

Unfortunately this doesn’t get us much further along the way toward understanding why these deliverers of babies might be called midwives.

We have to take another step and examine the mid part of midwife.

In this case mid does not mean middle.

There don’t seem to be too many examples of words other than midwife that retain an old meaning of mid but what it is believed to have mean was “with.”

Thus midwife literally means “with woman” and refers to the fact that this woman called a midwife has the job of being with the mother during her labor and delivery.

Ammon Shea is a vocabularian, lexicographer, the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages and a frequent OUPblog contributor.  In light of our Word of the Year 2009 announcement (WOTY) Ammon has taken a closer look at how WOTY is chosen.  In the post below he reveals the process that led to unfriend being chosen as WOTY 2009.

Every year, at about this time, the New Oxford American Dictionary releases its Word of the Year (WOTY), a combination of solid lexicographic practice and a light-hearted look at the changing face of English today. Since there are quite possibly thousands (or at least dozens) of people out there who wonder “where does the Word of the Year come from?” the following is a brief explanation of what this momentous process entails, and what it does not.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Word of the Year is chosen by a group of unruly lexicographers, drunk on whimsy and an inflated sense of their own power, who are hell-bent on introducing silly words into English. So let’s see what actually happens.

The candidates for WOTY are drawn from three main sources, each of which reflects a particular strength of Oxford University Press and its unrivaled language research program. The first of these is the Oxford English Corpus, a database of over two and a half billion words drawn from current English the world over. The corpus is fully searchable, allowing the editors to find words that have either entered the language or changed meaning significantly enough to warrant attention. The use of the corpus allows tracking of words, and the examination of the shifts that occur in geography, register, and frequency of use.

The second body of candidates to merit consideration for the WOTY is composed of those that have been “catchworded” (catchworded words are those that have been identified as new or unusual usages by one of the vast number of readers who provide citations of word use for the OED and other Oxford Dictionaries). An editor who is responsible for new words in English combines the catchworded items into a digital database, a sort of mini-corpus, in which individual words can be analyzed by frequency, register, and region.

The third source for potential Words of the Year comes from the various editors at OUP, who are continually keeping tabs on the varieties of English and the ways in which these varieties are changing. These words come from the editor’s own reading, or from conversations they’ve had, and from lists of new words that are taken from one of the numerous dictionaries published by OUP.

Once the preliminary list of words has been collected it is sent to a group of perhaps 7 or 8 editors, who commence poking at the words with a sharp stick, weeding out those that aren’t in fact new, or which may new, but not yet widespread enough to be more than a regionalism. The words are all checked to make sure that they do not exist in any current dictionary, and that there is sufficient evidence in the Oxford English Corpus, in various forms of print, and on internet search engines to warrant each one’s inclusion.

This list of words is sent around and winnowed to a short list, which is then itself winnowed to a final list, and from the final list a single word is chosen which has been accorded the honor of being the Word of the Year.

Although the process of picking the WOTY is quite similar to that of introducing a word into a dictionary, this status does not guarantee that the word will be included in any future reference works. The word in question may be quite widespread today and have fallen entirely from use within a few years. The WOTY is not a popularity contest, nor is it simply the word that has been used more than any other over the past year. It is a forward-looking examination of one small aspect of our language, one in which the Oxford lexicographers take a chance on picking the word that they think represents the use of language today, and that will continue to have an influence.

It can be a tricky business, trying to figure out which words will stick ahead of time, and there is no shame in making an educated guess that turns out to not be as accurate several years hence as it seems now. James Murray famously decided to leave the word appendicitis out of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary after receiving advice from William Osler (a famous doctor at Oxford) that it was likely not a word that would ever be in widespread use. A short time later the coronation of Edward VII was delayed after he had to undergo an emergency operation for his appendicitis. Although many people wondered why the word was not in the OED, there was no way that Murray could have made the necessary guess to include it.

The WOTY is an attempt to capture some of the breathtaking fluidity of our language, and to look at its semantic change and inventiveness in real time, through the use of solid research, editorial skill, and intuitive guesswork.

By Anatoly Liberman

Specialists seldom agree about anything (that is why they are specialists), and in the field of word history few etymologies are final. But today heated controversies regarding the origin of words seldom spill over into the pages of the popular press. At best, concerned individuals write to editors or Dear X and ask questions. Most of them begin with the statement: “My husband and I (variant: my colleagues in the office) cannot decide whether….” The editor of the word column or Dear X gives a cautious reply (sounding judgmental? God forbid!), intimating that opinions differ but that effect and affect should rather not be confused, that careful speakers distinguish lie and lay (though if you are a Midwesterner, go ahead and say: “I laid for a few minutes”—never mind what), and that the origin of boondoggle is uncertain, but according to — (fill in the blank), it comes from…. Unfortunately, in the English speaking world hardly any outlets for such questions and answers exist, whereas in Germany, for example, any respectable library subscribes to at least one of three language journals aimed at teachers, editors, and everybody trying to speak and write well. The Internet bears witness to the need for an authoritative English magazine specializing in such matters. Countless blogs invite comments on word origins, and people offer them. Etymology has gone underground and rots there.

There was a time in both England and the United States when lances were broken in open etymological tournaments. My database, with its more that 20,000 titles, shows that the history of some words, especially slang, was discussed mainly in Notes and Queries (including this great periodical’s local offspring), The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Athenaeum, The Academy, The Saturday Review, and so forth. The vehemence of those jousts cannot but fill one with wonder. The derivation of English words and phrases also took a good deal of space in books like John Timbs’s Notabilia; Curious and Amusing Facts about Many Things Explained and Illustrated (1872; printers occasionally put a semicolon in titles where we have a colon) and the much more reliable Nuggets of Knowledge by George W. Stimpson, first published in 1925 (it had a sequel and was reprinted as late as 1970). One of the bones of etymological contention was Whitsunday. A look at that old mini-tournament may perhaps be worth a minute. Whitsunday, it will be remembered, means the same as Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, celebrating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. In Old English, Pentecost, the name of the Feast, appeared in the form pentecosten. Whitsunday (also in its archaic form) emerged about a century later. Pentecost is of Greek origin and means “fiftieth” (day after the numeral has been left out; with respect to the root, compare pentagon). The only serious question is: “What is Whit-”?

Several nonsensical etymologies of Whitsunday competed for recognition, of which two were especially hard to eradicate. The first denied any connection between Whit- and white and associated Whit- with wisdom, so that Whitsunday turned out to be a day on which wisdom was acquired or on which wise (“witty”) people were selected by some assembly. But wit never had an h preceding w, while the oldest forms of Whitsunday (hwit-) always did. Norman scribes could not pronounce the consonantal group hw and tended to omit the first letter. This fact is of no importance for the derivation of a native English word. The vowel of Old Engl. hwit- was long (it had the value of Modern Engl. ee). In words of more than two syllables, the first vowel regularly underwent shortening; hence the difference in the pronunciation of south and southern (despite the traditional spelling of both with ou), holy and holiday, homonymous with whole-ly and holly-day, and many others.

Supporters of the other etymology (a sizable crowd) traced Whitsunday to Pfingsten, which is a German modification of the Greek word. I am sorry to report that some reviewers of Hensleigh Wedgwood’s English etymological dictionary (Skeat’s once influential predecessor) and Timbs, the author of Notabilia, held the same view. In their writings, they never asked why in the 12th century the Old English name of a religious holiday should have been borrowed from German and what phonetic tricks transformed Pfingsten into Whitsunday. If I am not mistaken, cows are colorblind, so that a red rag cannot irritate a bull more than any other, but it is a pity to give up the idiom. The derivation of Whitsunday from Pfingsten (occurring in Old High German only in the dative plural as phingstenen) was to Walter W. Skeat like that proverbial red rag to a bull. An irascible man and a hard working scholar, he despised amateurs and had no patience for unprofitable guesswork or smug ignorance. Between 1877 and 1904 he wrote five letters to journals, four of them to Notes and Queries, on Whitsunday, and discussed it at length not only in his great dictionary but also in its concise version. And indeed, before 1400 no High German word was known to English speakers, who already had pentecosten. To boost his argument, Skeat cited the Old Icelandic analog of Whitsunday, unambiguously meaning “White Sunday.” However, the Scandinavian form may have been an adaptation of the Old English one. It tells us how the English word was understood in the North but may have no independent value (this is how we should interpret the remarks in the OED). And Skeat was right when he said as early as 1877: “It is, perhaps, as well to note that Whitsunday is a wretched popular corruption of Whitsunday-week.”

It is not absolutely clear what “white” has to do with Whitsunday. Modern dictionaries explain: “From a tradition of clothing the newly baptized in white baptismal robes on Whitsunday” (sometimes with probably inserted for safety) and refer, as Wedgwood and Skeat did, to Dominica in albis “Sunday in Whites,” which, however, was the name of the First Sunday after Easter but called this for exactly the same reason. Another suggestion about the color white has been offered by T. Oswald Cokayne, a reputable scholar, even if not a luminary in the area of etymology. Originally, he said, Whitsunday was a pagan festival celebrating the coming of summer, and young women appeared on that day in white clothes, “asking for a white clear summer sun.” Pagan and Christian rites merged in post-conversion Europe, and disentangling their roots is not always easy. The reference to Dominica in albis remains the strongest argument in favor of the view we find in our dictionaries, but even Skeat admitted that, although the origin of the word Whitsunday is non-controversial, we are allowed to argue over the reasons for the name.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Wondering what other new words were considered for the New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 Word of the Year?  Check out the list below.

Technology

hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

Economy

freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content

funemployed – taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests

zombie bank – a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Politics and Current Affairs

Ardi – (Ardipithecus ramidus) oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced to the public in 2009

birther – a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s birth certificate

choice mom – a person who chooses to be a single mother

death panel – a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live, when care is rationed

teabagger -a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)

Environment

brown state – a US state that does not have strict environmental regulations

green state – a US state that has strict environmental regulations

ecotown - a town built and run on eco-friendly principles

Novelty Words

deleb – a dead celebrity

tramp stamp – a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman

Notable Word Clusters for 2009:

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

Once upon a time my mother was knitting a style of sweater that had many open holes in the weave. My father looked at it and said “no wonder it’s going so fast, it’s mostly air.”

That’s the thing about nets too, they’re mostly air; but it’s what’s around the air that does the job.

I was looking at the web based dictionary wordnik and one of the features they have is a little graphic representing frequency of a word’s appearance over time. It’s interesting that their plot for the word net falls off during the 1920s to 1950s and then pops back up again in the 1990s.

It seems obvious to me that the frequency of the word net over the past decade would have increased as an abbreviation for the word internet.

I wonder what made the word less frequent after 1950; perhaps more grocery store shopping and less small-scale fishing? I don’t picture small-scale fishermen as being terribly prolific writers who’d have bulked up the word-stock before that.

If you have any ideas let me know.

Of course it could be that the wordnik stats feature has a kink in it.

Clearly the internet is so called because it is full of links between nodes, just like other networks; streets, train tracks, groups of friends.

All of these networks are so called because a real net is strands linking knots.

But it turns out that a real net is called a net not because of the strands but because of the knots.

I mentioned knitting and nodes as well as net and knot and all of these words go back to a knotty origin. They have a granular kind of Old English taste to them don’t they?

By Anatoly Liberman

Dandy first made its appearance on the Scottish border and in the 1780’s became current in British slang. Its origin (most probably, dialectal) remains a mystery—a common thing with such words. Etymologists have grudgingly resigned themselves to the idea that dandy goes back to the pet name of Andrew. How Andrew became Dandy is also unclear (by attracting d from the middle?). But this is not our problem. Pet names behave erratically. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Beth make sense, but Bill (= Will) for William? Peggy for Margaret? In any case, Dandy is a recorded short name for Andrew (and incidentally, for Alexander). Trying to discover why Andrew was chosen to represent London overdressed young men (assuming that such a thing happened several hundred years ago) would be a waste of time. This mythic character is a member of the club to which Sam Hill, Smart Aleck, and Jack Sprat (a.k.a. Jack Prat) belong; its whereabouts are lost.

Then there are merry-andrew “buffoon” and jack-a-dandy “a merry foppish fellow” (the latter predates dandy by about a century). The OED is noncommittal with regard to the etymology of dandy but admits a possible connection between it and jack-a-dandy. Here are two quotations in addition to what the OED gives (the second obviously echoes the first or rather is part of a formulaic pattern): “Smart she is and handy, O, /Sweet as sugar candy, O, / Fresh and gay/ As flow’rs in May, / And I’m her Jack-a-dandy, O” (no date given); “My love is blithe and bucksome [sic] / And sweet and fine as can be; / fresh and gay as the flowers in May, / And looks like Jack-a-dandy” (1671). In the 1780s many songs having almost the same refrain were in vogue, with Dandy, O substituting for Jack-o-dandy, O.

We will ignore a few fanciful suggestions (such as the attempt to trace dandy to the name of an ancient tribe, and a few others), for two reasonable derivations have been proposed. One centers around dandiprat “dwarf; urchin; a small coin” (an early 16th-century word). Since its origin is also unknown, no help can be expected from these quarters. But it may be observed that the time gap is significant: if dandy had been “abstracted” from dandiprat, it would probably have surfaced much earlier. Also, dandy does not seem to have been used to mock the ostentatious (and indeed often ridiculously dressed) “swells”: when dandies attracted public notice, they became the object of good-humored, even if vulgar, curiosity and were more often gaped at than vilified. Later, whatever opprobrium might have been associated with them disappeared. Byron was a “dandy.” Around 1830 people spoke about “Winchester gentlemen, Harrow dandies, and Eton bucks” (bucks must have had more than one meaning). Pushkin’s aristocratic Evgeny Onegin was “dressed like a London dandy” (those interested in details should consult Nabokov’s commentary to chapter I of the novel). By contrast, dandiprat never had positive connotations. The second “school of thought” looks for the homeland of dandy in France, even though French lexicographers unanimously state that dandy is an import from England. French dandin means “ninny”; hence the immortal cuckold George Dandin. The verb dandiner has been glossed variously as “to twist one’s body about; have a rolling gait, waddle; occupy oneself with trifles.” Even the earliest dandies were not ninnies, though they did comport themselves in a way that aroused amusement. Apparently, dandy cannot be traced to French dandin.

At this juncture, we could have left our word in its etymological wilderness, but for a certain complication. Dandy “fop” is not an isolated word in English. We find a dandy of punch (that is, a small glass; predominantly Irish), dandy “a vessel rigged as a sloop and having also a jigger mast,” and dandy, a term used as the first element in the names of various contrivances. Whether the boat, the glass, and the contrivances are “neat” is open to doubt. In a local book, the devil’s hounds were called dandy dogs (!). A regional dictionary gives dandy “hand.” And then, whatever the origin of dandiprat, its “prat” must have been dandy. Looking at the words close to dandy in a dictionary, we come across dander “an outburst of anger,” as in get one’s dander up; dander “stroll, saunter,” dander “the ferment (of molasses)” and one more dander “a piece of slag”; dandruff, and dandle “to rock a child” (with which we may, if we wish, compare dangle). In our texts, none of those words predates 1500 (while some were attested much later), and surprisingly, the origin of all of them is unknown (in dandruff only -ruff admits of a convincing explanation). French dandin is also obscure.

While working on the history of English words, I ran into a few instances of what may perhaps be called common old European slang. One example is the family of mooch. The early cognates of this Germanic verb made their way into Italian and almost certainly into French (I will refrain from citing them, for they can be found in my etymological dictionary). Their protoform has a cognate in Old Irish. The puzzling look-alike is Latin muger “a cheat at dice,” which can hardly be related to Germanic-Celtic muk- ~ myk-. It seems that words with the root muk- and mug-, denoting darkness and clandestine dealings, have been current in Europe for at least two millennia. I suspect that a similar, though shorter, story can be told about the dand- words. Middle High German lyric poetry made tandaradei, an exclamation of joy, famous. It has been explained as a shout imitating a bird’s song. Do birds sing tandaradei? Engl. dandle resembles Italian dandolare “swing; toss; dally; loiter.” The OED observes about a possible cognate of a similar sounding German verb that “no word of this family is known in Old or Mid. Eng., and the sense is not so close to the English as in the Italian word.” Yet German tändeln means’ “dawdle, play, etc.”

We will probably never know the origin of dandy for sure, but if we venture into the prehistory of slang, we may risk the conjecture that when dand- words first invaded some West-European languages around 1500, they meant “active, mobile” or “quick, nimble” (is this where dandy “hand” came from? are dandy dogs quick dogs?). “Swing, shake” would be a natural extension of quickness, and the exclamation tandaredei would emerge as a natural expression of animal spirits. Fine and dandy is a tautological binomial like safe and sound; all that is quick and nimble is fine by definition. Jack-a-dandy certainly knew how to win a girl’s heart. At some time dandy “fop” may have had amorous overtones. French dandiner “to twist one’s body” fits the picture well (compare “swing, toss”). Twisting in coils found no favor with the French: it must have struck them as idiotic. Hence dandin, a back formation from the verb? If this is how dandy acquired its meaning, it has nothing to do with Andrew, so that the association between them is late. The origin of dander, in all its manifestations, deserves a special look.

Can my reconstruction of the origin of dandy be taken seriously? Slang travels light from land to land. An expressive word can conquer half of Europe in a matter of a few years; consider our modern cool. In the past, the process was not so quick. Anyway, if we accept the etymology proposed here as a working hypothesis, we won’t be poorer than before, for at the outset we had nothing.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s first job was as an assistant on the staff of the OED, and he later said that he had ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of [his] life.’ In The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, three senior OED editors – Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner – explore more than 100 words found in Tolkien’s fiction, such as ‘hobbit’, ‘attercop’, and ‘precious’. Edmund Weiner has written this original post for OUPblog on Winterfilth (October) and Blotmath (November).

As I write this blog Winterfilth is coming to an end and Blotmath is about to begin. What on earth am I talking about? Well, as the Tolkien enthusiasts out there will know, these are the names that the hobbits used for October and November.

As it happens, although the action of The Lord of the Rings spans October and November (avid readers will remember that a lot of action happens in the one and the other is spent by the hobbits resting in Rivendell), these month names are not used in the story. They are given in an appendix in which Tolkien explains the calendar of the Shire (the land of the hobbits) and the hobbits’ names for the days of the week and the months.

Did Tolkien make these names up? No. Some people will be surprised to learn that he made up none of his ‘English’ words, as opposed to the words of the elvish, dwarvish, and orkish languages. (The one exception, funnily enough, may be the word ‘hobbit’—but the jury on that is still out.) The other strange and archaic-looking words, such as mathom, Arkenstone, eleventy, flet, and barrow-wight, are all based on earlier usage and generally go back either to Anglo-Saxon (Old English, English before the Norman Conquest) or to Old Norse (the language of the Vikings and Sagas).

So what about the months? Tolkien borrowed them for the hobbits from Anglo-Saxon texts that give both the Latin names of the months (the names we use now) and their Old English equivalents. None of the latter seem to have survived the Conquest except (in a different meaning) Yule, and Lide, a now obsolete dialect word for March, which may have meant ‘loud’ (referring to its windiness). Blotmath, or rather Blotmonath or Blodmonath, was the time when in pagan times cattle were sacrificed (blotan ‘sacrifice’ or blod ‘blood’).

And Winterfilth? In Old English this was Winterfylleth, in which fylleth means ‘fulness’, or perhaps ‘full moon’. The word for ‘filth’ was spelt and pronounced differently, but in modern English they would have come to sound the same, and this gave Tolkien an opportunity for one of the scholarly etymological puns to which he was very partial.

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

In his play Measure for Measure Shakespeare makes mention of a garden surrounded by a brick wall. By his time the word brick had been part of the English language for almost 200 years.

It seems to have been brought to England by Flemish construction workers in the 1400s who worked with a newfangled building material that English speakers didn’t have a name for.

By the time of Samuel Johnson the word brick was so familiar that he used it without thinking in relating an opinion about Shakespeare.

Johnson said that anyone who tried to explain Shakespeare “by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.”

If you’ve been following podictionary you’ll know that this sent me off in search of whatever Hierocles was.

Hieroclese was a Greek scholar who lived in Alexandria about 1500 years ago and who many people—including Samuel Johnson—credited as being half of the comedy duo Hierocles and Philagrius.

Modern scholars aren’t really sure if the joke book attributed to these two actually had anything to do with them but there is indeed an old joke book from which Samuel Johnson pulled that old chestnut; although in the edition I saw it was a stone not a brick that the homeowner had in his pocket.

Just to show that (other than bricks) there isn’t really anything new under the sun I came across articles on the web that point to Hierocles and Philagrius as being the originators of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.

• Customer: “The slave you sold me died.”
• Merchant: “By the gods, he never did such a thing when he was with me.”

Compared to that, bricks are relatively new.

Etymologically some sources at least believe that the word brick is related to the word break and that originally bricks were not whole units but broken pieces.

Perhaps more speculatively, the theory goes that it was bakers who broke up their dough to bake loaves who used a similar word for these broken-off portions, and that this word found itself being applied to the material that was baked into bricks.

By Anatoly Liberman

A reader commented on my recent statement that Engl. good and god are unrelated and noted that this statement, in addition to being counterintuitive and undemonstrable, can even lead to schisms. Being a peaceful man, I am very much against all kinds of hostilities. Nor do I think that the history of words should interfere with faith to such an extent as to result in religious wars. But god and good are indeed unrelated, and I decided not to wait for the last Wednesday of November, when my monthly gleanings are due, and to say what is known about the origin of the words in question as early as possible (now people say only to not wait; for me such a split infinitive is worse than a schism).

Good has transparent etymology: gather and -gether are related to it. Their root means “fit, suitable.” This circumstance is borne out by numerous cognates in and outside Germanic. That is “good” which has been “fixed,” “assembled,” “put together” in a proper way. By contrast, the origin of god is debatable, which does not mean that we know nothing about its derivation. But before I come to the point, let me say that already long ago the proximity of good and god (in the other Germanic languages the two words also sound alike) gave rise to the conclusion that such a striking similarity in sound cannot be fortuitous. Here are three quotations dated 1589, 1606, and 1637 respectively. I have borrowed them from the book Folk-Etymology by the Reverend A. Smythe Palmer (1883). His etymologies should be treated with caution (though, naturally, he explains why good and god are unrelated), but his collection of examples is excellent. I have partly modernized the spelling of the originals.

“If that opinion were not [that is, if the opinion that god and good are related proved false], who would acknowledge any God? The very Etimologie of the name with us of the North partes of the world declaring plainely the nature of the attribute, which is all one as if we said good [bonus] or a giver of good things.” (1589) “God is that which sometimes Good we nam’d, / Before our English tongue was shorter fram’d.” (1606) “An indifferent man may judge that our name of the most divine power, God, is…derived from Good, the chiefe attribute of God.” (1637)

It could not escape the readers’ notice that I spelled god with low case g. I did it for a reason. The concept of God, of one Supreme Being, was alien to polytheistic religions. The further back we step into the past, the clearer it becomes that at one time people believed in multitudes of beings controlling our fate. Those invisible spirits were revered, worshipped, or propitiated, if you will, to prevent them from making humans ill. Language has preserved multiple traces of that state of mind. Elves possessed arrows and caused back pain (lumbago): their victims were “elf-shot.” Dwarfs, if my etymology of the word dwarf is correct, made people dizzy (“*dwysig”; the asterisk means that such a form has not been attested; the Old English word was dysig, with *w lost before long y), while trolls seem to have made the inhabitants of the earth “droll” (that is, ridiculous, behaving like buffoons, crazy). The situation with the gods (in the plural!) is especially clear. The Greek for “god” is theos. We find the same root in enthusiastic, or “possessed by a god,” which could mean “deranged” or “divinely inspired.” (Engl. enthusiastic is from French; Greek is its ultimate source.) The Germanic gods made one “giddy” (Old Engl. *gydig—a close parallel to enthusiastic). One can see that the spirits above were not thought of as good. The contrary is true.

With the advent of Christianity, dwarfs, trolls, elves, and the pagan gods, along with witches, giants, revenants, and the rest survived in folktales and superstitions. Even before that they descended from their heights and became anthropomorphic. Originally the singular form god did not exist in the Old Germanic languages; only the plural did. Three grammatical genders were distinguished: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The form of the word for “gods” was neuter plural, the most typical choice for designating such multitudes. Some other modern Indo-European words for “god” are unlike god: compare Greek theos, Latin deus, and Slavic bog. It may be that god does not even have a Germanic etymology. Perhaps the early Germanic-speakers borrowed it from the indigenous population of the lands on which we find them in the historical period. However, since in this case the pre-Indo-European substrate that could have lent god to Germanic is beyond reconstruction (substrate being a technical term for a language submerged in the language of later settlers), reference to it by a language historian is tantamount to an admission of final defeat. Hence the many attempts to find an Indo-European cognate of god. Any “thick” dictionary will inform us that god can be compared with two Sanskrit words: one meaning “to invoke,” the other “to pour.” Today most etymologists prefer the second hypothesis and interpret “pour” as “libation” (in the process of sacrifice), but the idea of invocation also has learned supporters.

My opinion does not weigh more than either of those two, but I believe that both conjectures are wrong. The primitive “gods” may have been invoked or sacrificed to, but the main thing about them was that they were feared. That is why I share the idea of Karl Brugmann, a great German scholar, who was active in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. He also found only a Sanskrit word to guide him, namely the adjective ghoras “awful, frightening.” According to him, Greek theos had the same origin. If he had been right, the result would have been illuminating, but, as it turned out, theos is not related to the Sanskrit adjective, and Brugmann’s etymology lost interest in the eyes of his colleagues. Yet even though theos and god do not belong together, it does not follow that god and ghoras should be kept apart. I think they possibly are, but hardly anyone will side with me. Likewise, I am in the absolute minority in my conviction that Slavic bog “god” is related to such English words as bug, bogy(man), and their kin. The inherent weakness of the etymologies cited above—from “invoke,” “pour,” and “frightening”— is (apart from the uncertainty of our word’s Indo-European provenance) that a single putative cognate of the Germanic word turns up so far from Germanic, in the language of Ancient India. A search for a better solution continues. Not long ago god was represented as the sum of the particle g- “that one” and an old root meaning “upward.” There also are several older etymologies that have been rejected as untenable, because they are untenable. Of the four words—theos, deus, bog, and god—only deus poses no problems: it is related to Zeus’s name and refers to a bright sky; here we are dealing with a primitive sky god.

After the conversion to Christianity, a word for “God” became necessary, and it had to belong to the masculine gender. This is indeed what happened: the singular was abstracted from the plural, and the neuter yielded to the masculine. Whatever the etymology of god may be, god and good are not related. I should also say that reference to intuition, if intuition means an undisciplined emotion, should be avoided. Etymology is a study of word history and presupposes a professional look at the development of sounds, grammatical forms, and meaning in many languages. “Intuitively,” deus and theos are two variants of the same word, but they are not. The term folk etymology covers suggestions of the theos-deus and god-good type: the temptation to connect look-alikes is irrepressible, but, unless we choose to remain in pre-scientific etymology, it should be resisted. Although “scientific etymology” stumbles at every step, there is no need to make it limp even more by burdening it with naïve medieval hypotheses. I sincerely hope that no schism will be the result of this post.