Word blends are the bunnies of language: they breed like motherfathers.

During the recent American Dialect Society meeting in Portland, plenty of blends were singled out. Assholocracy is an apt description of America, especially in an election year. Botoxionist refers to a doctor specializing in the forehead region of vain people. A brony is a bro who loves My Little Pony. That word was voted Least Likely to Succeed, but you can bet similar words will keep sprouting, particularly in the world of fashion.

Jeggings. Photo by Funkdooby. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

These atrocities aren’t going to stop. I predict the following items will be on sale soon.

(FYI, if any of these are plausible ideas, please call my agent, because I’d gladly sell my soul to the denim industry).

jear muffs
They’re not warm, but fashionistas are warmed by style, not warmth. For the elderly, how about jearing aids?

jonocle
Could be a little itchy for you Mr. Peanut types, but it can’t be worse than peanut allergies. So that evens out.

jape
Maybe Christopher Nolan can work this in to the new Batman movie.

jevlar vest
It doesn’t block bullets, which could be a problem given the recent rise in fashion police brutality.

jinnamon rolls
These will be less fattening than cinnamon rolls because they are inedible.

joon
If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a team of fashion scientists on the moon to change its chemical composition.

jipple
Some say nipples can’t be improved. They’re probably right, but it’s worth a shot.

joodle
The designer dog world, which pumps out teacup malti-poos, toy pitdoodles, and more word blends than a denim-only catalog, could easily mix some denim DNA into one of their hellish kennels of canine copulation.

jystal meth
Jeans and meth are both blue, so this seems like a natural idea that could be the plot of a future Smurfs movie.

jaby
A beautiful, intelligent, precious denim baby. It will look so good with the rest of your jamily.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

I usually try to discuss words whose origin is so uncertain that, when it comes to etymology, dictionaries refuse to commit themselves. But every now and then words occur whose history has been investigated most convincingly, and their history is worth recounting. Such is the word odd. Everything is odd about it, including the fact that its original form has not survived in English. Odd appeared as odde in the fourteenth century. It was a borrowing from Scandinavian, where oddr meant “spear point” and metonymically “spear.” But next to oddr Old Icelandic oddi “triangle; a ‘tongue’ of land” existed. From “triangle” the meaning “an odd number,” as opposed to “an even number,” developed. The compound oddamaðr (ð has the value of th in Modern Engl. the, this, that) meant “the third man, he who gives the casting vote” or simply “an odd man,” that is, the third, fifth, and so forth. It is from oddamaðr that English has “odd man (out).” Icelandic oddatal “odd number” has the same structure as oddamaðr; tal is related to Engl. tell “count,” as in tell the beads and others (compare also the noun teller). Icelandic vera í odda continued into English as to be at odds, and this is also why heroes fight against overwhelming odds. Odd in twenty odd years, three hundred odd (any number between 300 and 400) has the same source. Even oddball, coined apparently in America close to the middle of the twentieth century, harkens back to the Old Scandinavian word. Such are the odds and ends of etymology. Some dictionaries devote separate entries to the adjective odd and the plural noun odds, but there is no need to do so. The singular — the odd — occurs in whist and golf; since the meaning of the odd is “handicap,” it resembles the plural in the common phrase odds-on. Odd is an ideal playing ground for puns. Is odd couple “an extra pair” or “two people who don’t match”? An odd trick in whist is not a peculiar trick but the seventh, the first the winners count toward the score (incidentally, the terminology of games is not the same in Great Britain and the United States).

Oddi was frequent in Scandinavian local names, and it was on a farm called Oddi that Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) grew up. Here a modern picture of Oddi is reproduced. This photo, along with geysers, volcanoes, mountains (in which only ghosts live), and Þingvellir (the place of the most ancient European parliament), is one of the best-known sights used in advertising trips to Iceland (þ = th in Engl. thin). Snorri was a great historian, poet, and politician. He wrote a book known today as The Prose Edda, or The Younger Edda, a manual of Old Scandinavian poetics and myths, as they were remembered in the thirteenth century. He also wrote a history of the kings of Norway (Heimskringla; the book still reads like a thriller — it exists in two excellent English translations) and possibly one the best sagas (The Saga of Egill; in English translations, usually one l is retained: Egil). He was killed by his enemies, and never has a more tragic event happened in the history of Icelandic literature. The origin of the name Edda is a mystery (though the conjectures by etymologists are many), and attempts have been made to connect Edda and Oddi, but the connection is, almost certainly, due to chance and is not more convincing than the one between Boston and best. It is for the sake of Snorri, if for nothing else, that the etymology of odd deserves our attention.

In Icelandic oddr, dd goes back to rd, and with ord we immediately find ourselves on familiar ground. Old Engl. ord meant “point, spot, place.” Its German cognate Ort still means “place,” though a few idioms have retained older senses. Above, I said that the demise of the original form of odd is surprising, and so it is. Old Engl. ord meant the same as Old Scandinavian odd, so why did people substitute a borrowing for the native word? But such events are common. If even they, them, and though were allowed to replace their native rivals, odd had to live up to its capricious meaning. Not only can we trace the paths of odd as it moved from language to language; we even know where the ancient form ord- came from. In Old Germanic, the consonant z became r. Consequently, when we come across an Old Germanic word with r, we have to decide whether it traces back to r or to z. For example, in the verb rear the first r is old, while the second began its life as z. The change of z to r is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho, and we can affirm with certainty (a rare case in etymological studies) that r in ord is rhotacized z. The information comes from names.

Both Ort- and Odd- were common elements in Germanic personal names like Oddgeirr (spear-spear, a tautological compound: both elements mean the same, because geirr means spear, as its English cognate still does in Engl. garfish and garlic, let alone the common favorite Garfield; clearly, the boy was expected to grow up a great warrior; I once devoted a post to such compounds), Oddleifr (a much sadder name, for it refers to what has been left of spear play: presumably, the enemies’ corpses were meant), Oddrún (a female name: “spear’s counselor”), Þoroddr (Þórr was one of the great gods of the ancient Scandinavians), and so forth. In some cases, people may have no longer been aware of the inner form of the most popular names, such as -rún and -leifr, but no one would have missed the message of Oddgeirr. In continental Germanic, we find Ortger, a twin of Oddgeirr, Ortwin, Ortlieb, and other devotees of the spear. Against this background, the name Usdibadus, recorded in Greek letters, comes in most useful. Usdibadus was a Gepid (an East Germanic tribe closely related to the Goths), and his name followed the familiar pattern: usdi + badus, that is, “spear” + “battle.” Usdi- is an obvious cognate of ord, with s, pronounces as z before d, not rhotacized (East Germanic lacked rhotacism: either this change happened later than the fourth century, when the Gothic Bible was translated from the Greek, or it simply never had it). I think his mother called him Uzdi. So this is then the beginning of ord- ~ odd: it was uzd-, from usdo- “spear (point),”perhaps from uz + do, approximately “up” + “put,” an object pointing toward its target. Quite appropriately its Lithuanian cognate means “thistle.” Such is the long history of our word, from Indo-European or at least Germanic warfare to modern golf and whist. If I had a taste for coy titles (and I once professed my dislike of them), I would have called this essay “From Sword to Ploughshare, from Spear to Niblick, Or an Episode in the History of Indo-European Disarmament.”

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 question about the origin of gay “homosexual” has been asked and answered many times (and always correctly), so that we needn’t expect sensational discoveries in this area. The adjective gay, first attested in Middle English, is of French descent; in the fourteenth century it meant both “joyous” and “bright; showy.” The OED gives no attestations of gay “immoral” before 1637. Yet it is not improbable that this sense is much older but that it remained part of low slang, unfamiliar to the majority of English speakers, even such as were sensitive to street usage. Dickens began writing Dombey and Son in 1846 and gave the family name Gay to Walter, the future husband of Florence, the sweet and suffering character (one can even say the protagonist) of his novel. The combination Mrs. Walter Gay (or Florence Gay) did not shock or amuse his contemporaries, though gay woman “prostitute” had already made it even into printed books (the earliest citation in the OED goes back to 1825). Gay “homosexual” dates to the 1930’s, but it could hardly have been the product of slow semantic development from “depraved” and “perverse.” While “unnatural attraction,” to use the euphemism of the past epoch, was looked upon as a deviation and a vice, gay “male prostitute,” along with “whore,” would suggested itself to many. In the sixties of the twentieth century, homosexual men accepted gay as a neutral term, and that is the end of the story. A slight touch of novelty in my summary is that I don’t believe in “merry, joyous” acquiring negative connotations gradually and suspect that they have been present since the middle period but were suppressed or even tabooed; see also below. The sense “male prostitute,” perhaps especially with reference to a passive homosexual, may be old too. Thus, if I am right, the history of gay did not run parallel to that of faggot: in fag ~ faggot, reference to homosexuals indeed appeared only in the twentieth century.

The main mystery is the origin of the French word, the etymon of Engl. gay. The first edition of the OED offered no solution; the OED online expanded considerably the etymological part of the entry but refrained from taking sides and only listed a few proposals. This is natural: the history of gay is obscure and will, most likely, remain a matter of controversy in the future. Before I say what little I can on this subject, a short introduction is needed. It is well-known that words like warranty and guarantee, warden and guardian, William and Guillaume, among many others, are etymological doublets pairwise. The French for war is guerre, that is, the doublet of guerre serves also as its English gloss. We have here Old Germanic words with initial w-. When Central Old French borrowed them, w-, a sound alien to Romance, was replaced with gu- (first only before the vowel a); with time, w after g was lost. Later such words often migrated to English, where the spelling gu- bears witness to their stay “abroad.” But in Northern and Anglo- French, the dialects of greater importance to the history of English than the French of Paris, initial w- survived. Consequently, both warden and guardian are ultimately of Germanic origin, but guardian was taken over from Central French, whereas warden is a guest from Northern French, so that w- makes the word look as though it had never left it Germanic home.

The main old hypotheses concerning gay were based on the idea that it had come to French from some Germanic language: central (Franconian) or southern (Gothic). Therefore, scholars looked for appropriate adjectives beginning with g or w. The main candidates were Old High German gahi “quick, precipitous, daring” and wahi “shining, beautiful” (both with long a). Those adjectives have been recorded with several more senses, but we do not need full lists. Romance etymological dictionaries (at gai and so forth) usually defend wahi or more rarely gahi (look up jäh, the reflex of gahi, in German dictionaries if you are interested in more information). Both etymologies encounter considerable difficulties, because the path from either “precipitous” or “shining” to “merry” is hard to reconstruct. The second variant is preferable on account of Engl. gay “showy,” but, in English, “showy” seems to be a figurative meaning, while in French gai this sense does not exist at all.

To be sure, the sought-for etymon did not have to be Germanic: it might as well be a Romance word, and here our story again branches off into two. Latin gaudium “joy” has been suggested as the source of the adjective (do many people still remember the “hymn”: “Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus”? “Let us therefore rejoice while we are young”). The other guess connected gay and jay (the bird name). The interplay of initial g- and j- in French deserves a long essay, but we’ll let it be, because the idea that French gai meant “merry as a jay” (or that the jay got its name because it was “a merry bird”) has been refuted quite efficiently. The derivation from gaudium still has distinguished supporters. A stray publication once defended German geil “lecherous, randy, horny” as the etymon of gai. This idea lacks value. I am now coming to the climax of my etymological thriller.

The regular readers of this blog know that I am a great admirer of Frank Chance, whose piercing judgment and etymological acumen (when I am agitated, I begin to speak like Anthony Trollope or like Kipling’s bicolored python—sorry) was equal to Skeat’s and James A. H. Murray’s. Oxford University Press would do the world a great favor if it reprinted ALL his contributions in a cheap slim volume with an index. In 1861 he published in Notes and Queries a short article (“note”), which I’ll reproduce with numerous abridgments:

“Gaîne. –The etymology of this Fr. word signifying sheath seems to me instructive. It comes…from the Lat. vagina…. The g in gaîne, therefore, really corresponds to the v in vagina…. In a similar way, I think, our adj. gay might be readily deduced from the Lat. vagus, or perhaps rather from the corresponding Ital. vago, which means both wandering, roaming, and pleasant, agreeable, the connexion apparently being the freedom from restraint implied by both classes of words.”

Some time ago, I devoted a post to the origin of the word bigot. Its etymology was discovered in a short review that no one seems to have read. Before that I told a similar story about conundrum. Quite naturally, French, Spanish, and German scholars have never heard of Frank Chance, for he published his letters only in Notes and Queries and occasionally in The Academy. But Skeat and Murray read this periodical and regularly contributed to it, so that it is incomprehensible why they missed Chance’s conjecture.

A hundred and thirty years later the noted German historical linguist Harri Meier offered exactly the same etymology and even referred to vagina as a piece of corroborating evidence. He cited not only Latin vagus “wandering, rambling; inconstant” (compare Engl. vague, vagrant, vagabond, extravagant, vagary, and others with the same root) but also (and this is especially important) the senses current in the living Romance languages and such derivatives as Italian svagarsi “divert one’s mind “and “enjoy oneself,” svago “relaxation, diversion, amusement,” and a few French verbs of the same type. Incidentally, Old French gai already meant “high-spirited; frivolous, fickle; libertine,” while Latin poets called a flighty girl vaga puella and vaga juventa (quite possibly, such maidens were not just flighty). It appears that Latin vagus ~ vaga indeed continued into the Romance languages with the sense “free from restraint” and underwent what is called an amelioration of meaning (from “libertine; frivolous” to “merry, vivacious”). For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip the question of whether gai had anything to do with its partial synonym gaillard. Middle English gay must have inherited both senses, but one became “standard,” whereas the other (because of its negative connotations) led an undignified life as part of low slang, until it came to the surface and ousted the idea of merriment. A gay man can now be full of pep or depressed and sad. We no longer hear either the tautology or the oxymoron. Thus, gay ends up as a Romance word without Germanic ancestors.

I believe that Chance’s etymology, rediscovered by Meier, who was unaware of a talented predecessor, is the best we have, but I am not a Romance scholar and will let specialists resolve the dispute. Regardless of their reaction, one thing is clear. Etymologists constantly force open doors. They lack solid bibliographies and rediscover old solutions or wander in the dark. I said this in my posts on conundrum and bigot. I’ll say it again now.

This is a portrait of John Gay (1685-1732), the author of The Beggar’s Opera. Of those who have borne this name, he may be the most famous representative.

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 Infamous C-Word

1. In Sackcloth and Ashes. In the post on the C-word, I made two mistakes, for both of which I am sorry, though neither was due to chance. In Middle High German, the word kotze “vagina” existed, and I was going to write that, given such a noun, the verb kotzen “copulate” can also be reconstructed. Instead, I wrote that Modern German kotzen has such a meaning, though I knew only too well that kotzen means “puke, barf.” The modern verb seems to have a different origin; however, the available information is meager and not fully convincing. I also misspelled the name of the author in the picture. The illustration at the bottom of this post will reveal the full depth of my contrition.

2. Use and origin. One of our correspondents was told that in British English the C-word does not necessarily have offensive connotations when applied to women. This will be news to most of us. Perhaps the source of the information was the OED. In the past, c**t could indeed be used more freely. The same holds for the F-word (compare windfucker), but no conclusions follow for the present, as explained (quite correctly, to my mind) in a comment by another correspondent. The word was unprintable for a long time, and even now people usually avoid it. As for its origin, final -th in the protoform is impossible, for it would either have been preserved as -th or become d. Also, if the word had ended in -nth, the modern vowel would have been long, as in uncouth or in south. Like one of our correspondents, I also think that fuzzy-muzzy was coined on the analogy of fuzzy-wuzzy, alluding to pubic hair. Finally, beware of knowing little or no Italian. When English speakers, ignorant of the language, come to Italy and see some drink called caldo, they are surprised to get hot tea or hot coffee. I thought of this dilemma, while leafing through the old issues of the Italian journal Filologia antica e moderna in search of publications for my database. The title “Anatomia dell’eros ne Lo cunto de li cunti di Giambattista Basile” caught my fancy. The book by Basile is the famous Pentamerone, an early collection of Neapolitan fairy tales. It is known in English as The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones. Cunto (compare Modern Italian racconto and French conte) means “tale” in Basile’s seventeenth-century dialect. Quite a different word is the noun cunta “delay,” from Latin cuncta. Those who have read the history of the Second Punic War will remember Fabius Maximus, the cunctator (“delayer”). English dictionaries give the noun cunctation “delay,” a nice word to use in casual conversation. So much for cunto, cunta, and their English look-alike.

Engl. critter ~ Norwegian (Nynorsk) krøter. Mr. Jade Sandstedt pointed out this correspondence to me and asked how the two are connected. His question may affect the way the entry critter will be treated in our etymological dictionaries, assuming that they will ever deign to include such a word. One can sometimes read that critter is an Americanism traceable to creature. This is wrong on both counts, for the word is widespread in British dialects, but there it seems to be only or mainly a derogatory term for a worthless man, while in American English critters are first and foremost animals. In regional Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, the word has numerous variants: kryter, krætur, kriter, and so forth. It occurs in Faroese; kritter and kretter were also attested in Old Danish. In Scandinavian, the prevailing meaning is the same as in American English. The ultimate etymon of critter and its variants is, of course, Latin creatura, but the situation in English deserves more attention. Dictionaries say that critter is an alteration (according to the unfortunate formulation of The Century Dictionary, a vulgar corruption) of creature (but at that time vulgar might mean “popular, related or pertaining to vulgus”). In light of the forms cited above, this conclusion should be modified. Critter is, more probably, a borrowing from Scandinavian, even though we have no textual evidence to support this claim from Middle English.

Ache and Its Remote Past. The question was why I did not make use of Raimo Anttila’s root *ag-. That I have read and used Anttila’s article is obvious, for how else would I have known the Finnish words cited in the post? The root Anttila reconstructed is not original, but more important is that I in general treat Indo-European roots and extensions, which so many researchers take for granted, with great caution. As follows from my post, I doubt that ache had an Indo-European ancestor in the sense in which father or one had them. Some migratory word (Wanderwort) or its sound symbolic analog may have existed, but its history is obscure. Even Holthausen, who slavishly followed Walde-Pokorny in his Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, did without such a root. I am not a fan of his dictionaries, but in this case he seems to have acted wisely.

Diametrically opposed. Is this phrase legitimate, when used about opinions? If usage justifies “correctness,” it is, for diametrically with the sense of “entirely” has been around for centuries. However, this adverb does not add anything to the meaning of the statement; it only makes it more emphatic. Many adverbs are equally redundant. He actually missed the train, and that’s why he is late. I definitely oppose your plan, and the like. Actually has become an invasive species: people use it much too often (a mere buzzword).

The Verb would and the Sequence of Tenses. The rule of the sequence of tenses has broken down not only in English but also in the Scandinavian languages and to some extent in German. It is instructive to look at some examples. “Evans said he hopes the crew will begin unloading the fuel by Sunday.” The old rule that after a verb in the past the verb in the subordinate clause should also be in the past (“Evans said he hoped the crew would begin unloading the fuel on Sunday”) appears to be dead. The fate of would is particularly interesting. “The Obama administration is relying on a secret channel of communication to warn Iran’s supreme leader… that closing the Strait of Hormuz is a ‘red line’ that would provide an American response, according to US government officials.” The writers (two of them from The New York Times) must have had a vague recollection that would is sometimes needed in subordinate clauses but did not know why and when. From the same article “Senior Obama administration officials have said publicly that Iran would cross a line if it made good on recent threats to close the strait….” Sometimes it seems that all is not lost. Compare: “Majority House Republicans said that they would (bravo!) hold a vote next week on a resolution of disapproval.” Alas, the next sentence returns us to the starting point: “But such a resolution would not clear the Democratic-led Senate, and the White House says Obama would veto an objection to avoid default” (The Associated Press). Even in the following example, in which would is roughly equivalent to could and seems to mark the subjunctive, it was probably uses automatically, instead of will: “It is implausible that this would happen to such prestigious sites as ….” I am afraid that people no longer know why sometimes will is required and in other cases would. The future of the abused verb may be in their hands.

My Favorite Plural. “A child’s expression of their religious identity in school isn’t banned, just as a soldier’s expression of their queer identity shouldn’t be.” I agree. A child know how to address their God, and a soldier know how to deal with their sexuality.

An Especially Elegant Split Infinitive. “It has prompted the Northern League partly to at times call the north to secede….”

Lexicographers should be encouraged. Dr. Fitzedward Hall (born in America , but his adopted country was England), whom I have quoted in the past and whose belligerent style is moderately funny, said the following about dictionaries: “Most people…, after they have learned to spell, keep books of this class mainly for show, the end they best fulfill. Lexicographers apart, it is only a curious inquirer, here and there, that appreciates intelligently their deplorable vanity and delusiveness” (Modern English, 1873, p. 135). Vanity and delusiveness…

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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There’s a new breed of dictionary, untouched by human hands. The New York Times reports that teams of programmers have developed software that automates the making of dictionaries, eliminating the need for human lexicographers, who may favor some words and neglect others. These new dictionary droids comb the web, selecting words in context, defining them automatically based on that surrounding context, and tabulating the definitions and citations for subscribers to consult online. And they do it all faster than you can say Google.

The web has made possible a democratizing of the dictionary. There are no editors with their annoying biases to stand in the way, so with just a couple of clicks users can see words in their natural habitat and choose exactly which one best suits their purpose. To paraphrase the old New Yorker cartoon, on the internet, everybody’s a lexicographer.

No human dictionarian sifts through the massive online corpus to figure out the various senses and connotations of each word, its history, etymology, or pronunciation. This leaves users free to do the job of lexicography themselves. They can even assign a word to any part of speech they want, or make up a new part of speech entirely if they like. There are no usage labels warning that a particular word might not be national, current, or reputable, or that some readers might find it stuffy or offensive. And there’s no grammar nazi shaking a minatory finger and muttering, “dictionary droid ain’t a word.” I just used dictionary droid online. It will soon be collected by a dictionary droid. Ergo, dictionary droid is a word. And if you don’t know what dictionarian or minatory mean, you can find them in the OED, a dictionary compiled by all-too-fallible humans.

What would the old lexicographers think about the web’s new dictionary droids? Back in the eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson’s ’net was “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” That definition sounds like it was created by a droid, and if Johnson actually had to define internet today, he’d probably come up with something equally convoluted.

The nineteenth-century lexicographer Noah Webster had his own word quirks. Webster preferred bridegoom to bridegroom because it comes from the Old English word guma, meaning ‘man,’ not groom, which refers to ‘someone charged with caring for horses,’ and he wanted to respell deaf as deef, to reflect how it was pronounced by his fellow New Englanders. So I imagine Webster would have changed lots of the spellings he found online and taken out all the dirty words, which is what he did when he translated the Bible after he finished making dictionaries. Finally, James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, would probably give up the 3×5 slips on which he wrote each word, together with a context illustrating it, and make a PowerPoint stack for every word instead.

Above: Dr. Johnson’s definition of network, from his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Below: Noah Webster’s definition of bridegoom, from An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). In 1833 Webster published his translation of the Bible, which used euphemisms instead of dirty words, “language which cannot be uttered in company without a violation of decorum,” so that women and children could read the scriptures without blushing.

New technologies give rise to the fear that they’ll render human workers obsolete. Computer-driven robots build our cars, and the ranks of autoworkers have diminished. But we still need people to figure out how to make the kinds of cars that drivers will want to buy. Newspapers downsize as readers get their news online. But just because someone uploads an eyewitness video from their phone doesn’t mean we don’t need professional journalists to gather facts, conduct interviews, and actually report a breaking story or interpret its events in retrospect. So it is with dictionaries.

Lexicographers today benefit greatly from the massive databases of words-in-context that the web provides, and all the major dictionary makers, along with other language researchers, are hard at work figuring out how the web can help them better understand the history and current state of language.

Computers can sift and sort all this word data in nanoseconds. They can pull out of an online corpus, for example, every use of the word the, together with the words that surround it, plus metadata about the source text (magazine, novel, television show, website, Tweet, phone call; when and where it was published or uttered; who might have written or said it, and to whom). But while they’re great at pattern recognition, computers don’t deal well with lexical nuance. We still need human lexicographers to evaluate the data gathered by the dictionary droids and interpret it for dictionary users, amateurs who appreciate the convenience of clicking on a word for its meaning, but don’t want to assume the role of professional word nerd for themselves.

The web is full of the kind of linguistic data that makes real lexicographers drool, so crunching all those online words in the service of dictionary-making is a worthy task. And most dictionarians recognize the importance of publishing their dictionaries on the web, because online is now where readers go to look up words. But although writing algorithms to automate the process of defining words, creating entire dictionaries untouched by human hands, might save on labor costs, it’s not likely to give dictionary users the word histories, the accurate definitions, or the other kinds of lexical guidance that they really need. Of course the real downside to online dictionaries, both those generated by web-crawling software and those created by professional lexicographers, is that you can’t use them to press flowers or have them double as booster seats when small children come to dine.

James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, shown here in his study at Hogwarts. Were Murray making dictionaries today, he would probably give up the 3×5 slips on which he wrote each word, together with a context illustrating it, and make a PowerPoint stack for every word instead.

This article originally appeared on The Web of Language.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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Belinda Webb’s futuristic, dystopian novel, A Clockwork Apple (2008), follows Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) closely in many details: the first-person narrator’s name is Alex; the male Alex in A Clockwork Orange has “droogs” named George, Pete, and Dim (‘Dim being really dim’), while Webb’s female Alex has “grrrlz” named Georgia, Petra, and Mid (‘Mid being really mid’ — that is, middle class or brow, part of what Alex later calls the ‘unheard herd’). And so it goes, a Mancunian homage, but with an unexpected feminist agenda.

Webb could easily appropriate much of Burgess’ story, but not Nadsat, the infamous argot Burgess invented for Alex and his droogs, fashioned from Russian loanwords and various elements of English slang: ‘He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us, coming up so quiet and polite and smiling, but he said: “Yes? What is it?” in a very loud teacher-type goloss, as if he was trying to show us he wasn’t poogly.’ It is inimitable language, and beyond replacing Orange Alex’s characteristic ‘O my brothers’ with Apple Alex’s ‘sistaz’, Webb needed a new linguistic modus operandi.

In order to establish a distinctive voice for Apple Alex, Webb mashes up language of ‘the Street’, grrrl-powered slang, Joycean wordplay, and erudite vocabulary. So, ‘Petra is flicking paint from a thick brush against a wall. It is, however, a wall set aside for such endeavours. It means nish. It gets white-washed every evening. This feeble, fucking futile attempt at a pocket of self-expression. Widdershins and mumpsimus, my dear sistaz, sheer widdershins and mumpsimus’. Or, ‘She stares at her, trying to determine whether this ex-Blyton is capable of being a tregateur. Theyz don’t want to believe it, you see, not of Mid! … They also don’t see that there is another part of her that will never forgive her own for the dissing of her illusionment upon which she had been brought up before Moss-side’. Or, ‘Muvva is sat in the kitchen, twiddlin’ her grey hair. The box is left to blair, on and on, anon. The might of King Anon. An on an’ on an’ on’. Webb indulges the High Vernacular, in other words, complete with anachronistic puns.

Webb’s Alex fights against anything ‘mid’, anything ‘Blyton’ (the putative false consciousness of  Enid Blyton’s Sunny Days), especially against ‘impression management’ as practiced in polite conversation or the tabloids, different though these may seem to some. She and her grrrlz fight

with graceful ballet moves and,

more importantly,

with

WORDS.

Boustrophedon. Yep, both ways.

To write is to fight.

In Alex’s style, the learned weaves seamlessly with the lewd: boustrophedon ‘writing left to right, then right to left’, tregateur ‘trickster’, abnormis ‘irregular, unconventional’, and especially phrontistery ‘thinking place’, the seat of empowerment for one intent on locating the H.P. ‘higher power’ in herself. Alex knows these words because she is a reader, though reading and knowing make her a delinquent in the ‘PAFFETIK’ future world of ‘Madchester’. At home, she pulls ‘the canvas rug up off the floor and then prise up one of the old rotten floorboards and there, my dear sistaz, is my stash of mind power — that is, Books! I is in the fullness of haecceity now, my dear sistaz’. If your Latin fails you, look it up in the Dictionary.

In Webb’s novel, we are, significantly, on Alex’s side. This is a sharp turn from A Clockwork Orange. As Burgess wrote in The Listener (17 February 1972), ‘My hero or anti-hero, Alex, is very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: it is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished’. No morally well-adjusted person can be on Orange Alex’s side.

Apple Alex is violent. She even kills representatives of the system. But she is a rebel, not a predator, delinquent, not evil. She rightly resists the world of Blytons and everything mid. As she puts it, ‘Belligerancy is Queen!’ And, ‘despite having spent some of our Grrrl power from the land of Angria, there is still plenty in the bank, so to speak — everything to fight against’. A properly run society ought to be run according to Alex’s values, not for the comfort of Blytons. If she goes too far to preserve her freedom, she is certainly misguided, but evil? As she switches styles from Street to Dictionary, she is a canny narrator, engaged, like any narrator, in a sort of impression management — but is she evil?

Apple Alex’s argot is no mere decoration but the full expression of her character, its private and public parts. And, as Burgess insisted in The Listener, Nadsat ‘is no mere decoration’ either. ‘It was meant to turn A Clockwork Orange into, among other things, a brainwashing primer. You read the book or see the film, and at the end you should find yourself in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary — without effort, with surprise. This is the way brainwashing works’. Apple Alex’s style forces us to think like her, in all of her haecceity. While we resist such narrative coercion, our resistance merely recapitulates hers, rousing our sympathy, perhaps even our approval, much of the time.

Nadsat is shiny language that distracts us from Orange Alex’s horrible crimes. Readers need the distraction and they also need to confront the moral consequences of that distraction, their tenuous grasp of moral priorities. Orange Alex needs the distraction, too — the language show he puts on is a form of dissociation. In the end, though, it exposes not only a moral but a linguistic vacuum. This is the fundamental difference between Nadsat and Apple Alex’s style: Nadsat is thematically significant, but its relationship to the theme is oblique and (if the reader is not completely brainwashed) profoundly ironic. In contrast, Apple Alex’s language is motivated immediately by the novel’s feminist themes and expresses them directly, with an (albeit unacknowledged) earnestness inconceivable in Nadsat and opposed to its value in Burgess’ novel.

Brandon Robshaw’s review of A Clockwork Apple in The Independent (13 April 2008) begins with a two paragraph pastiche of the novel’s challenging style and ends swiftly with the judgement, ‘Are you tiring of this? Me too’. It illustrates the problem of what the linguist Michael Halliday calls anti-language, from teenage slang to the literary idiosyncrasy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — it could be that the invented language is tiring, that the author has erred in the saying, but it might just as easily be a case of bad listening, as when adults can’t hear the slang teens speak all around them, and the teens quite accurately complain that the adults aren’t listening to them — they refuse to listen on the terms set by teens as surely as teens refuse to conform to adult expectations. But, after all, do the teens really want the adults to listen? When the style of A Clockwork Apple rubs us the wrong way, when we reject its terms, we re-enact a fundamental sort of linguistic disconnection, after which we may find an occasional connection.

Michael P. Adams is Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Indiana University. He currently edits quarterly journal American Speech and is President Elect of the Dictionary Society of North America. His published work includes Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (2003) and Slang: The People’s Poetry (2009). His most recent book, From Elvish to Klingon, published in November 2011. You can read more by Michael Adams on OUPblog here.

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To an etymologist ache is one of the most enigmatic words. Although it has been attested in Old English, its unquestionable cognates in other languages are few. Low (that is, northern) German dialects have äken “hurt, fester,” ake “finger inflammation; whitlow; secretion from the eye,” and the like. Bavarian acken “hurt” is isolated in the south, and its status in relation to Engl. ache is unclear. It has been suggested that Finnish äkä “hatred” is a borrowing from German. May Finnish linguists discuss this idea. We will content ourselves with saying that the “Germans” who colonized Britain brought the noun ak- and the verb aka- to their new home and preserved it.

This is what people failed to discover about the origin of ache: (1) Does the English-Low German word have congeners outside its restricted area? and (2) Did its meaning (today it is “dull, steady pain”) develop from an abstract notion referring to discomfort, or was its starting point the name of some painful symptom, as suggested by “fester” and “inflammation”? Etymological dictionaries either present dogmatic answers, without pointing out that the truth is hidden, or drown their ignorance (of which they need not be ashamed) in extraneous information. Following the OED, they often explain in excessive detail that ache, verb, and ache, noun, had different forms in Old English, that the noun was indeed pronounced with ch, that the immensely influential lexicographer Samuel Johnson was unaware of the true state of affairs, and that this is mainly the reason we have the preposterous spelling still used. But the OED does not have to offer etymologies when those are unknown, while special dictionaries are expected to say something definite on the subject, a temptation to which they often yield, though keeping silent is preferable to misleading or hoodwinking readers. Some dictionaries send us away with the verdict “origin uncertain,” which is correct but uninspiring. It seems that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. My task is easier: I will describe the situation and leave it at that.

The earliest English etymologists, from the seventeenth century on, believed that ache had been derived from Greek ákhos “grief, pain.” Today we know that English was not “derived” from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Gothic, or German, but even juxtaposing ache and ákhos is hard, because Greek kh does not match Engl. k. Yet a bond between the two nouns can be imagined if we assume that both go back to some interjection like German ach! (that is, akh!). Although Old English ak ended in k rather than kh, interjections need not follow rigid phonetic rules. This etymology has been proposed by such different people as Hensleigh Wedgwood, a scholar who attempted to trace too many English words to sound imitation, and (tentatively) by Ferdinand Holthausen, a cautious researcher who never allowed fantasies to run away with him. All things considered, an exclamation is an unlikely source of ache, though akh!, okh!, ukh! can serve as the foundation of words for moaning, groaning, and the like. (Gothic auhjan “make a noise,” if pronounced as ohjan, is perhaps one of them.)

Since, outside Germanic, Engl. k corresponds to g, etymologists exploring the origin of ache looked for Indo-European words beginning with ag-. Greek had ágos “a great sin incurring a curse.” The Old Engl. for ache was æce (æ, as a in Modern Engl. man) ~ ece, and ágos is a tolerably good match for it, except that one expects Proto-Germanic ákis, not ákos (only i in the second syllable would have caused the change of a to e). This etymology occasionally turns up in modern dictionaries, though with some hedging. More about ákhos and ágos will be said below. Some of our most authoritative sources state that ache is related to Latin agere “drive,” with an unexplained change of meaning (via “impel, force”). The frequentative form of agere is agitare “agitate,” which seems to provide a link between “drive” and “pain”; a few moderately convincing Scandinavian and Finnish parallels of a similar semantic shift have been cited. Despite the near consensus on the agere-ache etymology among many distinguished scholars (note that the OED offers no proposal on the origin of ache!), I would risk a minority opinion. With respect to physical pain, and that is what ache seems to be about, we may remember the questions doctors ask when they want to find out what is wrong with us: “Will you describe your pain as burning, piercing, stabbing, or throbbing?” Some concrete notion like “burn” or “throb” would be a more acceptable basis for “ache” than “drive.”

Two circumstances may be relevant to our search. In the Germanic languages, we find a group of similar-sounding words referring to unpleasant sensations. Such are German Ekel “nausea; disgust,” which at one time competed with a synonym having r in the middle (erken ~ erkeln “to abhor, loathe”), Dutch akel “grief” (the common word is the adjective akelig “dismal; nasty”), German heikel “tricky, delicate” (said about a situation; known only since the sixteenth century), Old Icelandic eikinn “raving mad,” corresponding to Old Engl. acol (with long a) “frightened,” and ekla “lack.” Also, there is no shortage of analogous ag- words: for instance, Gothic aglo “anguish; affliction” (its English cognate is ail) and agis “fear” (here the English cognate is awe). Old Engl. ag-læc ~ ag-lac (both vowels were long) meant “grief, distress”; aglæca “monster” is familiar to the readers of Beowulf in the original. With other vowels we find Old Icelandic uggr “fear” (the root of Engl. ugly); in Norwegian and Swedish agg “anger” corresponds to it. In Icelandic, agg means “squabble, quarrel,” and one can easily imagine the character of the Icelander who once had the nickname Aggi. Incidentally, the Indo-European root ak- meant “sharp,” and its reflexes are many, for example, Latin acutus “acute” (from which English has, via French, ague). It is as though all over Europe, from Greece to Scandinavia, ag- ~ ug- and ak - ~ aik- ~ eik ~ ek- ~ (?) heik were at one time the favorite syllables for designating things causing pain, arousing fear, loathsome, and “icky,” those about which we say yuck.

The second consideration is this. In Indo-European, the vowel a occurs with some regularity in words denoting lack and physical defects. This has been noticed by Ferdinand de Saussure, a great language historian and one of the founders of structuralism, though most of his examples are not from Germanic. Such observations are too general to furnish a clue to individual solutions, but it is characteristic that hardly any word mentioned above has an established etymology. The same can be said about words for “illness,” including smart, sick, and especially ill (Engl. ill is a borrowing from Scandinavian). In this area, taboo must have been rampant: don’t call an ailment by its name, and the spirit controlling it will be kept at bay.

So what is the conclusion? Ache is of course a word “of uncertain etymology,” and such it will remain for all times. It might be a symbolic coinage of sorts, with the vowel a playing some role in its early history, and it might be part of a sizable group of words beginning with ag-, ak-, -aik, all of them referring to guilt, fear, suffering, and disgust. If so, Greek ákhos and ágos belong with it in a loose way, but neither can be called its cognate. (A conclusion along these lines must have appealed even to such a serious scholar as Jan de Vries, who compared Old Icelandic ögurr, allegedly “pain,” and Greek ákhos.) I would dissociate ache from Latin agere ~ agitare and advise lexicographers not to give this etymology as proven. Other than that, ache is ache.

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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On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a national holiday in the U.S., we commemorate the birthday of the eponymous leader and activist, and reflect on his significant contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. King’s legacy, while forged in the midst of a tumultuous time in U.S. history, transcends categorical boundaries of race, class, and nationality. Each year on the third Monday of January, we’re reminded of the practice of civil disobedience, of overcoming (and sometimes succumbing to) overwhelming adversities over which we have but marginal control, and of the power that language has to effect change in the world.

Coming to you live from the Soapbox Memorial

The first image that comes to mind when I think of Dr. King is of him standing behind a podium. Behind him sits a statue of Abraham Lincoln. A crowd of thousands listens in earnest as he delivers one of the most memorable, and memorizable, speeches in history. Last October, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial dedication broadcast live from Washington, D.C., and I watched as the ceremony closed out with footage of the famous “I Have A Dream” speech given at the 1963 March On Washington. Thanks to many a U.S. history lesson, cultural osmosis, and the distinctive cadence and prosody of his delivery, I found myself reciting entire segments along with Dr. King on the television, vicariously inhabiting his role as orator for civil rights.

Oratory, the art of public speaking, is a formal practice of eloquent speechmaking that utilizes elements of language to influence an audience. In short, it is rhetoric on a public stage. Dr. King, an impassioned orator, made use of a wealth of rhetorical techniques in order to communicate the messages of equality, justice, and peace during the divisive and violent civil rights era.

Building up to a dream

Rhetorical devices are abundant in the “I Have A Dream” speech. Most noticeable, and frequently used, is anaphora, which our dictionary defines as “the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses”:

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Metaphors are also spread throughout the speech—sometimes in short bursts of “quicksands” and “solid rock”, and at other points extended to create an even fuller image:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check…It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

Allusion helps Dr. King to hone his argument that Americans share a collective national ancestry:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Hyperbole is balanced by simplicity and frankness:

I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight…

is preceded by a more moderate, but equally compelling:

I have a dream that one day…right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Authority, Passion, Rationality

Greek philosopher Aristotle categorized three styles of appeal in persuasion: Ethos, asserting the credibility of the speaker; Pathos, appealing to the emotions of the audience; and Logos, persuasion through reasoning. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forty-nine years ago, Dr. King weaved these rhetorical appeals into almost every segment of his “Dream” speech. He was a Baptist minister whose ethos was a claim of faith, both religious and secular. He made pathetic appeals to his audience’s nationalist sense of pride in America in a way that also reminded them of what their nation stood for and the principles it fought for. He knew when to sacrifice this balance and let one persuasive appeal dominate an argument. He was a remarkable orator, and his words helped change the world.

Allison Wright is an Editor for US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. The first chapter book she can remember reading was a children’s biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like all word columnists, I keep receiving the same questions again and again.  Approximately once a month someone asks me about the origin of the F-word, the C-word, and gay.  Well, the C-word has been investigated in great detail, and a few conjectures are not so bad.  By way of introduction, I should note that, judging by the examples in the OED, the English C-word was not offensive or at least not always offensive in Middle English.  No combination of sounds appeals to our prurient instincts because of their intrinsic qualities.  To shock or make us blush, they need a certain attitude on our part.  Hoochie-coochie may be funny or indecent, but by itself it is neither “good” nor “bad.”  In such matters, everything is a matter of agreement.  “I am a woman of an unspotted reputation,” protests Clelia, featured in Spectator No. 276, “and know nothing I have ever done which should encourage such insolence; but here was one, the other day,—and he was dressed like a gentleman, too—who took the liberty to name the words lusty fellow in my presence” (quoted by Fitzedward Hall in his book Recent Exemplifications of False Philology. New York, 1872).  The protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando fainted at seeing a woman’s ankle.  Keep reading and don’t faint.

Words for the genitals and sexual activities have always been tabooed, but not necessarily out of prudery.  Throughout history people have believed that pronouncing the name of a thing aloud can have practical consequences; hence universal belief in curses and charms.  Therefore, for example, the Germanic word for “bear” (= “a brown one”) is the product of taboo.  If you disguise the animal’s real name, the brute, which, of course, knows what it is called (the name was taken for an integral, natural part of everybody and everything that exists), may not come.  All kinds of prohibitions connected with sex are of the same nature: being too open with words may have deleterious effects on health, sexual power, and childbearing.  People would intentionally garble words (transpose sounds in them, coin a rhyming synonym, and so forth; compare gosh, golly, and other euphemisms for god).  Perhaps also thanks to taboo, the same word may designate the buttocks and the vagina (there is less fear to offend the backside than the genitals), though other reasons are not unthinkable: both the anus and the vagina are hollows; compare the much-discussed history of fanny.  In addition, contiguous organs and body parts are sometimes called the same.  For instance, Latin vulva meant both “vagina” and “womb.”  To complicate matters even more, words in question are often borrowed from other languages.  For instance, the origin of poontang is debatable, but it is almost certainly a “loan” from abroad. All this makes an etymologist’s task hard, sometimes even hopeless.

Finally, there are innumerable descriptive and playful names for the genitals.  Is our C**t one of them?  I have looked at Classical Greek, Elizabethan, Modern German, and American students’ names for “vagina, vulva” and compared them with a list collected from the Samoyeds, a Ural-Altaic people inhabiting the tundra lands of the north, and another list from Italian dialects, that is, words used by people having minimal contact with book culture.  The repertory is rich but similar the world over.  The vagina can be “a hole” (with positive or depreciating epithets), any type of orifice, “a slit,” “a crack,” “a sack,”, “a hill” (alluding to the mons Veneris), “a house,” “a vessel” (numerous varieties, including “cup”), “a stove” (a veritable Freudian feast), “a berry,” “a hair house” (hence hairy Mary, bush, and beaver hunting), and “a penis” (with or without reference to the clitoris).  However, having the same metaphor or even the same word for both “penis” and “vagina” is not typical.  I have excluded from my survey such descriptive terms as rosebud and love box and silly formations like fuzzy-muzzy.  Whether all of them have been invented by men is a moot question. It has been observed that the words for “vagina” hardly ever refer to what comes out of it, but only to what enters it; the thought process is directed toward coitus, not procreation.

The most common words for “vagina” in the Germanic languages sound approximately like put, fut, and kut ~ kunt (u frequently alternates with o in them).  An unsolved question is whether they are in any way connected, that is, whether we are dealing with some sort of rhyming slang, taboo, or even variants of fuzzy-muzzy.  As a rule, they are looked upon as three independent words, each of which needs an etymology.  A related question is whether n in kunt belongs to the original root.  Numerous words in Germanic have so-called nasalized variants, that is, n is secondary in them.  Dutch kont (which, incidentally, means both “buttocks” and, in dialects, “vagina”) has a synonym kut.  Engl. cut, now obsolete or dialectal (mainly northern), was defined in the OED as an opprobrious term for women (its synonym is cutty).  This cut ended up as one of the senses of the noun cut “something cut (off),” but it is almost certainly a different word.  The path from cut ~ kut to kunt ~ kont is easier to imagine than from kunt ~ kont to cut ~ kut.  If n is secondary, comparison with Latin cunnus “vulva” (known to English speakers from cunnilingus) becomes impossible.  Also, double n in cunnus needs an explanation.  It has been suggested, on the strength of Greek and Lithuanian cognates, that cunnus goes back to kus-nus. Regardless of the origin of -nn-, Latin k- should have corresponded to English h-. However, this may not be an insurmountable obstacle in dealing with kunt, because if the protoform began with sk-, the k ~ k correspondence is possible, on condition that both Latin and Germanic or one of them lost s- along the way.  Initial s- is unstable in Indo-European, and there is even a special term for it, namely s mobile (movable s).  With so many undocumented steps, an ancient tie between the Germanic and the Latin noun begins to look rather improbable.

The Old English for kin was cynn, with y from u by umlaut (some related words are kind “variety,” kind “generous, warmhearted,” kindred, and German Kind “child”).  Kunt can be related to cynn, only if its -t is a suffix, and Lithuanian gimtis “sex” gives some support to this reconstruction, but there are hardly any examples of a word for “sex” or “birth” yielding the name for “vagina.”  Besides this, it seems preferable not to separate the kut ~ kot group from kunt, thus taking -t for part of the root.  Most likely, the initial form of the word we are exploring was kut- or kot-.  Dutch kut ~ Engl. cut, as noted, mean the same or practically the same as the C-word.  Therefore, I gravitate toward the conclusion that Germanic kunt is indeed a nasalized variant of kut (because of taboo or for expressive purposes).  Given this etymology, kin, along with Latin cunnus, fades out of the picture.  The origin of cut ~ kut may not be too obscure.  It is probably related to Engl. cot (cottage is the same word with a French suffix added).  Dutch kot means “sheep pen; dog kennel; pigsty,” and the English dovecote (which should not be fluttered) belongs with them.  Obviously, we have here the name of an animal house, an enclosure or some elevation above the ground.  If so, our word may once have meant “hole” or “little house,” both being among the most common designations for “vagina” in various languages.  The distant origin of the root need not bother us here.  Dutch kuit “fish roe, spawn,” presumably from “soft mass,” should also stay outside our picture.  The history of Germanic fut ~ fot and put ~ pot is a special story.

My initial idea was to call this post Vagina’s Monologues, but good journalism prohibits using other people’s successful titles like Great Expectations or A Room with a View.  So I confined myself to reproducing a picture of Eve Ensler, a modest tribute to the author of this award winning play.

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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On January 3, America’s quadrennial race for the White House began in earnest with the Iowa caucuses. If you find yourself wondering precisely what a caucus is, you’re not alone. The Byzantine process by which the US political parties choose their presidential nominees has a jargon all its own. Below is a brief guide to some of the terminology you can expect to see and hear in the coming months as the Republican Party chooses its presidential nominee (the Democratic nominee will be the incumbent, Barack Obama).

caucus: A caucus is a local meeting at which party members express their preference for the party’s presidential nominee. Unlike a primary election, a caucus is run by the party itself, not the state or local government. The most famous caucus is Iowa’s, which is the first major electoral event of the nominating process. Other early states which use a caucus system are Nevada, Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota.

primary: The majority of states hold a primary instead of a caucus. Whereas caucuses are private events, primary elections are operated by state and local governments using the same equipment as a general election. The primaries of 2012 will be spread over more than six months, starting with New Hampshire’s on January 10, and ending with Utah’s on June 26.

beauty contest: In some cases, a state holds a nonbinding primary in addition to its caucuses. That vote is known as a beauty contest. In 2012, Missouri will hold a beauty contest primary on February 7, prior to its binding caucuses on March 17 .

open primaries and closed primaries: An open primary is one in which any voter may participate, even if he or she is not a registered member of the party. A closed primary is open only to registered party members.

Super Tuesday: Tuesday is the traditional day for elections in the United States, and during the presidential nominating process, the Tuesday on which the largest number of states hold their primaries is known as Super Tuesday. This year, Super Tuesday is March 6, when 10 states will hold their primaries, choosing a total of 526 delegates (almost half of the 1212 delegates needed for a Republican candidate to win the nomination).

delegate: Technically, most caucuses and primaries are indirect elections, at which voters choose delegates to their party’s nominating conventions, rather than directly voting for the candidates themselves. The degree to which the voters’ choice binds these delegates varies by party and state.

convention: By the time the primaries and caucuses are finished, the parties’ choice of nominee is known, but it doesn’t become official until the national convention at which party delegates cast their votes. In 2012, the Republican Convention will be held in Tampa, Florida in August, while the Democratic Convention will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina in September.

unpledged delegate: Most of the members of state delegations to the national conventions are pledged, meaning that they are expected to vote in accordance with the rules of their state party. However, each state also has unpledged delegates (sometimes also called superdelegates), usually party officials and officeholders, who are free to vote for whomever they please.

GOP: GOP, an initialism for Grand Old Party, is just a nickname for the Republican Party. According to the OED, the term has been in use since the nineteenth century.

Katherine Connor Martin is a lexicographer based in OUP’s New York office . This post first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

As promised, the first of the fifty-two posts due to appear in 2012 will be devoted to the verb begin, whose siblings have been attested in all the West Germanic languages (English is one of them) and Gothic. Surprisingly, they did not turn up in Old Scandinavian, except for Danish (under the influence of German?).  Old Icelandic for “begin” was byrja, and its cognates continued into Norwegian and Swedish, let alone Modern Icelandic and Faroese.  The etymology of begin has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction, but such is the history of most etymological flesh.

Begin is a combination of the prefix be- and the root -gin, and the verb’s cognates never occurred without a prefix, though the prefixes varied widely: we find -gin with du-, on-, ont-, in-, be-, bi-, and a- (the latter designated long a, as in Engl. father).  Usually, when prefixes are appended to a root so freely, the root is transparent.  Today, we may not understand how get is connected with forget or how German entsprechen “correspond” is related to sprechen “speak,” but it would be no less odd to have forget and entsprechen without get and sprechen than to have defrost without frost.  What then was gin, a root that could not stand on its own?  To make things even worse, begin tended to have an irregular preterit; the irregularity, which seems to be old, suggests that the verb is also very old.  Some scholars think that the mysterious gin came from a substrate, an early unrecorded indigenous European language, and was later combined with multiple prefixes only in Germanic.  Such a hypothesis would carry more conviction if we were dealing with a plant or an animal name or a term of material culture, but why should a word like begin have ousted its native synonym?  Wherever the speakers of the Germanic languages may have come from, they surely had some word for “begin.”  Anyway, such a hypothesis makes further thoughts on the problem unnecessary, because nothing is known about that substrate, and the question about the inability of gin to function without prefixes remains.

Etymologists in search of a solution routinely do several things.  They collect all the recorded forms of the word.  With regard to begin, this has been done.  After that they comb through the closely related languages in the hope that the cognates may match phonetically but have somewhat divergent senses and therefore furnish a clue to the word’s original meaning.  The Germanic cognates of begin (with some prefix) are in plain view, and all of them mean the same.   This procedure is followed by a hunt for cognates outside the main group.  We will soon see that though the hunters were many, the game escaped.  Finally, as many synonyms as possible are netted, and the question is asked: “What is the ‘motivation’ for calling a spade a spade?” (In our case: “From what less abstract concepts does the sense ‘begin’ usually develop?’”).

Let us first look at the synonyms.  The earliest meaning of Engl. start was “jump, leap,” as in to start at the sound of a shot.  Start “set out for a journey” and “begin” developed later.  Commence, ultimately from Latin, goes back to some form like comminitiare, and initiare “initiate” is a derivative of init-, from in and ire “go,” so that the foundation of commence is “go into,” a good basis for “begin.”  Icelandic byrja is obscure, and we will not yield to the temptation of explaining one opaque word by referring to another equally opaque one (nothing good ever comes from this procedure).  German, in addition to beginnen, has anfangen and anheben (both mean the same; however, the use of anheben “begin” is restricted).  Fangen means “catch,” and heben means “raise,” while an- corresponds to Engl. on.  The path from “catch” and “raise” to “begin” must have been fairly straightforward.  One can continue stringing such synonyms for a long time, and I’ll cite only one more word.  The stem of origin, from Latin origo, is oriri “arise.”  It now becomes clear why etymologists wander among the Indo-European words meaning “catch,” “rise,” and “go,” expecting to find a solid match for -gin.

However, Germanic itself has a few forms that resemble the root of begin.  The Old Icelandic prefix gin- meant “great, vast,” presumably, from “wide open”; its cognate was Old Engl. ginn “spacious.” Ginnungagap is the vast void of the Scandinavian creation myth (gap is related to Engl. gape).  If begin and Icelandic gin- are indeed related, begin must have first meant “open widely,” and its root is akin to Engl. yawn.  We obtain “begin” = “open.” (To this day, we can “open” a meeting, that is, begin it.)  The way the verb is used in the Old Germanic languages, especially in Gothic and German (I will skip the details), confirms this reconstruction.  However, like all the other etymologies, it fails to explain why begin and its congeners needed a prefix.  Icelandic has ginna “to fool, dupe,” apparently, from “entice; bewitch”; this sense seems to have been the product of religious usage.

Several non-Germanic roots have been compared with -gin.  One can be seen in Latin pre-hendere “seize” (compare Engl. comprehend and prehensile).  Prehendere is a perfect match for German anfangen, but neither has anything to do with “open wide.”  The same holds for Slavic kon-, which, as mentioned in the post on end, occurs in words meaning both “begin and “end” and is very possibly related to Latin recens “fresh” (the ultimate source of Engl. recent; re- is a prefix).   An unsolved question is whether the putative cognates of begin should have initial g- or k-.  In the scholarly literature on the etymology of this verb, a few other possibilities have been weighed and many words from Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Irish, Welsh, and Albanian have been mentioned. But the problem is clear, and there is no need to multiply forms from all over the world.  If we stick to the “open wide” idea and choose g- cognates (with g- from Proto-Indo-European gh-), we should look for them among words like Latin hiare “gape” (compare Engl. hiatus), related to yawn, German gähnen (the same meaning). Icelandic gin-, and so forth.  Of the imperfect solutions known to me this one is perhaps the best.

No “images” of the ginnungagap I have been able to find look frightening enough to me.  So I have chosen a picture by the great Lithuanian painter Mikalojus K. Čiurlionis.  The medieval Scandinavians would have probably liked it: a strange creature watching the still uninhabited world.

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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Last Wednesday, in anticipation of the inevitable calendar leap, I discussed the origin of the word end.  The end has come.  This post happens to be the last in 2011 — not really a rite of passage, for a week from now another Wednesday will bring the world another post, dated January 4, 2012.  As announced, it will be devoted to the verb begin.  One should not take December or oneself too seriously, but I am pleased to say that this blog is read and quoted by many and that I continue to receive letters and comments from all over the world.  I have noted in the past that the best way to learn whether one has a readership is to make a mistake or to say something that needs clarification.  Not long ago, I mentioned a strange inconsistency, namely that we say go to college (no article) but go to the university (with the definite article).  I should have said not “we” but “in American English,” and several people immediately corrected me.  Since in my childhood and youth I identified English with its British variety, I knew that in England people go to university, but I forgot or did not know that the same article-less usage prevails in Scotland, Australia, and Canada.

MI was also pleased to hear from Heiner Gillmeister, who discovered my old posts on golf and tennis and referred me to his publications I had missed.  Mr. Gillmeister is an eminent specialist in the history of sport, and my suggestions on the etymology of both golf and tennis were heavily dependent on his results. (I may repeat my usual request to everybody: inform me of your works on etymology: this is the most precious grist that comes to my bibliographical mill.)  Perhaps my survey of the literature on Rotten Row will elicit more comments and even a new hypothesis on the origin of this place name.  So far I have received only two (positive) responses, and I may add another old suggestion to those I discussed in the essay: an nineteenth-century author traced Rotten to rowan (not to be taken seriously).

In February 2012 the world will celebrate the bicentennial (bicentenary) of Charles Dickens’s birth.  Somebody quipped that, according to the famous Russian literary scholar Yuri Tynianov, the main event in modern Russian history was Pushkin’s birth. Tynianov (stress on a) may have been right.   In similar fashion, I believe that few dates in recent European history can eclipse February 7, 1812.  Also in 1812, the first edition of the Grimms’ tales was published.  Dickens’s novels and the Grimms’ tales defined European culture like few other literary works.  To be sure, in 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia.  And where is he?  In history books.  But Dickens and the tales are locked forever in our hearts.  I cannot promise that I will be able to write a post about Dickens or even about the brothers.  Dickens, unlike the Grimms, was not an etymologist, though thanks to him, a time-honored phenomenon received the name wellerism, and linguists still argue over the accuracy of his rendition of the Yorkshire dialect (in Nicholas Nickleby) and cockney.  Walter Skeat had full confidence in Dickens’s power of observation as regards London speech, and he knew what he was saying.  Even if I don’t devote a post to Dickens, my conscience will be clear, for Oxford University Press asked me to write a holiday essay about some of its classics, and I wrote a comparison of David Copperfield and Thackeray’ Pendennis, both of which appeared in 1850*.  Incidentally, Skeat died in 1912, and there will certainly be a post about that centennial (centenary).

One of our correspondents wrote that his firm frowns on the use of the word Christmas and advises the coworkers to replace it with winter festival.  He wanted to know the origin of the phrase winter festival and the word winter.  I cannot tell who coined the collocations season’s greetings and winter festival, but the latter was easy to come by.  For example, some old dictionaries defined Yule as “Christmas festival,” and any period appointed for celebration or commemoration is called festival.  Likewise, folklorists and ethnographers describe agrarian festivals.  The origin of winter is debatable.  The answer depends on where the earliest speakers of the Germanic language spent their winters.  Did they see snow in their winter?  Was it a cold or a mild season?  Several etymons (sources) of the word winter have been proposed, wind, wet, and a Germanic cognate of Old Celtic windo- “white,” among others.  Gothic, an old Germanic language recorded in the fourth century CE, had wintrus, practically the same word we know from English.   In the previous “gleanings,” I touched on the difference between ecology and ecosystem. The comment that -ology need not designate the name of a scholarly discipline is correct, and I am well aware of this fact, for I constantly speak about etymology as a science and the etymology (= origin) of a word.  But this development is unpredictable: it occurred in some words but not in others.

Category and talent.  Why have these words changed their meaning so drastically, and how common are such changes?  Greek categoria meant “accusation, charge,” literally, “statement made in the assembly” (agora “market place, assembly”).  Its fortunes in the European languages were defined by Aristotle, who used the word in his logic.  There it refers to the highest notion, especially one derived from the logical analysis of the forms of proposition.  From Greek, via late Latin, the word made its way into French and from French into English.  Also the history of talent was determined by a chance event.  Its Greek etymon designated “scale (balance); a particular weight, especially of gold.”  But the word’s modern sense “marked aptitude”   goes back to the phrase in Matt. XXV, 15.  Words do sometimes modify their meaning under the influence of famous books (in English one can cite examples from the history of Shakespeare’s vocabulary), but this situation is relatively rare.

I am including the next question in the hope that somebody versed in Semitic etymology will be able to answer it.  Our correspondent writes: “I have found significant overlap between the words and related words for “myrtle” (hadas) and “betrothal” (eirusin) and their possible connection to Eros.”  He wonders what I think about the possibility of this relationship.  In the letter, the forms were reproduced, not only transliterated.  At first glance, the words in question are hardly related.  The origin of the Greek name is unknown;  its connection with a Sanskrit word meaning “”filled with desire” has been suggested.

A few parting shots

Who/whom.  The confusion is so well known that it is silly to feel amused.  Yet some people distinguish the forms.  Even undergraduates sometimes do.  From a letter to a student newspaper: “About a month ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a guy who she thought I would be great for.”  The “guy” lived up to the girls’ expectations but was less active than expected.  Perhaps he was intimidated by his date’s flawless grammar: in such and all other circumstances, he probably says whom she thought.  A writer for the Associated Press knew that there was danger here but could not recognize it.  Hence the following passage: “He purged or banished senior officials who he considered power-hungry.”

Generic plural

I think the reason I detest sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait is that the antecedent of they/them has the indefinite article.  And this is probably why the plural after somebody, anybody, and even someone does not sound offensive.  “A student” cannot be “they.”  “…a manager cannot have such a relationship with someone they oversee.”  I agree, but I also believe that a manager cannot be “they.”  “…each writer clearly, succinctly and intelligently stated their cases.”  More of the same?  Not quite, for both writers were men; yet the letter writers (two signatures) used the only pronoun they were taught to use in such constructions.  I once overheard (and even quoted) the following snippet of conversation.  “I met John at a party and liked him a lot.  We exchanged telephone numbers.”  “And did they call back?”  There are no limits to people’s stultification.

A Happy New Year to timorous and temerarious lovers of men, women, and words, to all those who already love us, and to those who will discover us in 2012!

And here is a picture of my colleagues, the gleaners.

The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) by Jean-François Millet (1857)

* NB. This post will appear tomorrow.

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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Tebow is one of the most successful words of 2011, referring mainly to the post-touchdown pose of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow: just as people plank, they Tebow too. However, the verbing of Tebow’s name is just one example of the popular sport of eponymization. Sports fans love turning athletes into eponyms: words derived from names, like boycott and shrapnel.

A few of the best sports eponyms have debuted on comedy shows. On a recent episode of The League, Pete was dismayed that his friend Kevin bought a gun, fearing his buddy would Plaxidentally shoot himself, in the style of self-shooting doofus Plaxico Burress. Earlier this year on Curb Your Enthusiasm, when a ball went through the legs of Larry David, his exasperated pitcher said, “You Bucknered it!” Thankfully, later in the episode, Bill Buckner himself redeemed his 1986 World Series performance by failing to Buckner a falling baby. But like so much raw language, most would-be eponyms appear on Twitter, where people get Tebowed, Sterned, Favred, and LeBroned. Sports are an eponym magnet.

For example, when Albert Pujols left the St. Louis Cardinals for the Los Angeles Angels, many folks said something along the lines of “Pujols just totally LeBroned the Cardinals, and yes I did just use a name as a verb.”

Of course, this references LeBron James’ famous departure from Cleveland in 2010, which made him a national pariah and a Cleveland anti-Christ. Player movement seems to bring out the creativity in fans. When NBA commissioner David Stern vetoed a trade that would have sent Chris Paul to the Lakers, one writer asked, “When a trade is vetoed, can we call it being ‘Sterned’?” Another took the topic in a more romantic direction: “If a guy gets denied by a girl, it will be forever known as getting David Sterned”

For some reason, Tebow seems to be the Michael Jordan of eponyms, not only spawning eponyms of his own but allowing others to be eponymized. After the Broncos’ December 11^th defeat of the Bears, many could not resist giving others the Tebow treatment. One disgusted tweeter wrote, “Hey @ESPN, the Bears were not ‘Tebowed.’ They were ‘Marion Barbered,’ in which Barber disregards one of the simplest rules in football.”  Another commented on Broncos legend and current executive John Elway, who is known to have less than perfect faith in Tebow’s unusual quarterbacking style: “We all know what Tebowing is. Elwaying is: ‘giving high-fives without joy.’” Later in the week, when Bear Sam Hurd was busted with enough drugs to kill a real bear, jokes like this begin to appear: “Droppin to one knee and praying in random places = Tebowing. Droppin $25k a key to get the whole city of Chicago high = Hurding”.

Politicians also inspire a dictionary-load of eponyms. Dan Savage’s unprintable staining of Rick Santorum’s name is the ultimate example, but just about every candidate or office-holder gets smeared in some way, especially after a gaffe. For example, after his memorable Oops-gate, many verbed Rick Perry: “Oh crap, I Rick Perry’d my dad’s birthday… He is gonna be pissed.” Dictators are fair game too. In Visual Thesaurus, Ben Zimmer discussed Mubaraktic: a perfect adjective for someone who clings to power, even as everyone and their mother want them out.

Entertainment is another eponym-palooza. Why get drunk and wasted when you can get Lohaned and Winehoused? In honor of Kim Kardashian’s obscenely hyped and preposterously short marriage, Weird Al Yankovic tweeted, “72 Days is now an official unit of time known as a Kardash.” Alec Baldwin’s eviction from a flight—for refusing to stop playing Words with Friends—led to many comments like this: “Lady almost got Alec Baldwined off my flight over urgent phone calls regarding the location of a blue cable knit sweater.” One of the most successful such eponyms in recent years was Kanye: a verb meaning to steal someone’s thunder, possibly by grabbing their mic, like what Kanye West did to Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards. This seems to have staying power, as people use it during online commentary of virtually any awards show. It doesn’t hurt that West continues to be an obnoxious jerk.

In fact, punishing jerks is one of the main motivations for eponymizing, which explains why eponyms are big in the sports world. To many, jock is just another work for a bully, and plenty of athletes, coaches, announcers, and owners sure look like bona fide jerks. Others get treated like jerks for failing on the field (like Buckner), failing to play the way people want them to play (like Tebow), or just being rich guys who play with balls for a living. Justified or not, vengeance-seeking fans probably feel much better after making Brett Favre’s name a synonym for being indecisive or texting your junk.

Sadly, there’s little justice to be found in enduring eponyms. The word tawdry is derived from the presumably un-tawdry St. Audrey (the name evolved from St. Audrey laces, which were shoddily made). Orwellian language is the type of doublespeak Orwell opposed. Language change comes from the unpredictable hive mind, not the will of a single author or a handful of word-makers. Most new eponyms fade as quickly as the news they inspired them, but the word-coining urge endures. We can’t help trying to make our own mark on the language, while attempting to immortalize the foibles of the Plaxicos and Tebows among us.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

The year 2011 is coming to an end.  Strange that we say “come to an end,” even though a year, unlike a rope, a street, and even life, in which it is hard to make ends (or both ends) meet, can have only one end, but such are the caprices of usage.  In any case, the end of the year is close at hand.  Those interested in such tricks may recollect that year sometimes needs neither the definite nor the indefinite article when we speak about this time of year, and so it has been for centuries.  Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 opens with the line: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold…”  Likewise, end feels quite comfortable without an article in the phrase stand on end.  Next Wednesday will be devoted to December’s “gleanings,” but to celebrate the season, today I am offering a short essay about the word end; by contrast, January will start with the verb begin.

“End” is a more abstract concept than, for example, “edge” or “border,” and, although it is not an immutable law, in language abstract notions tend to develop from concrete ones.  The first recorded sense of Old Engl. ende “end” was “extremity, final limit,” but there must have been other senses.   In Gothic, a Germanic language known from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament (the language has been dead for a long time), andeis, a cognate of end, glossed Greek telos “termination, completion; result,” and exactly the same meaning of end surfaced in thirteenth-century English.  Possibly, it existed earlier but found no reflection in texts or at least in extant texts.  Telos also referred to many more things that happen “in the end”: “final solution; tax; prize” and, especially important, “aim, goal” (hence English learned words like teleology and pseudo-Greek coinages like telegraph, telephone, and television, from tele-“at a distance far off”).  In English, end “purpose” surfaced only in the fourteenth century, and again we may suppose that this late attestation is an accident of transmission rather than of semantic history.  We still say to that end and the end justifies the means.  The sense “remnant” has been preserved mainly in the idiom odds and ends and  in candle end.  Yet looking through books reveals a few curious idioms.   There is fiddlestick’s end (preceded by fig’s end) “rubbish, nonsense,” and pack up one’s ends and awls (with a pun on awl ~ all) means “pack up all one’s belongings.”  Perhaps in fiddlestick’s end, end should be glossed as “tip,” for to have something at one’s fingers’ tips had (or has?) a variant to have something at one’s fingers’ end.  As the OED and other dictionaries tell us, in East End, West End, and the ends of the earth we have a survival of the sense “quarter, region.”

The word end, most obligingly, allows historical linguists to trace its development.  English does not provide enough material, but related languages do.  Old High German had andi and endi (those were two variants of the same noun), which correspond to Old Icelandic enne (nn in it is from nd).  All of them meant “forehead.”  In Icelandic, ende “end” also existed, so that ende and enne were etymological doublets, the result of a split.  Engl. forehead, which in the pronunciation of most speakers of American English does not rhyme with horrid (as happens in the poem about a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead) gives away its origin at once: fore-head is the front part of the head, its “end.”  Latin antiae “forelock” is close enough.  The Lithuanian cognate of ende means “breast,” that is, “the front of the body,” while Latin ante “before” corresponds to Greek anti “opposite” (not everybody agrees that ante- ~ anti-belong here; however,  they probably do).  The picture could not be clearer: from forehead (concrete) to end (abstract).  But “beginning” and “end” are relative concepts, and poets have been forever exploring the ambiguity their relation entails.  Indeed, what is the end of a street for one is its beginning for another.  Even the ends of the earth are its ends only if we look at them from the center (where we are at the moment).  Once we address the inhabitants of those quarters, they will respond that we, not they, occupy the earth’s “end.”

Language sometimes reflects this state of affairs, and here Slavic offers a particularly good example.  Russian konets (stress on the second syllable) “end” has the root kon- (-ets is a suffix), and the verb nachat’ “to begin” (also stressed on the second syllable) has the prefix na- and the root -cha- (-t’ is the marker of the infinitive).  Both words have numerous cognates.  I will not go into detail and only state what can be accepted as fact: from an etymological point of view, -kon- and -cha- (ch goes back to k, and there once was an n after the vowel) are forms of the same root.  Thus, we end where we begin.  In some authoritative dictionaries, Slavic lob- “forehead” was compared with a Greek word for “the nape of the head.”  The comparison is dubious, but the idea is sound: the back and the front are also interchangeable concepts.

Since I began this essay with Gothic, I will also end with it.  The Gothic historian Jordanes (unfortunately, he wrote his book in Latin) mentioned Gothiscandza, the name of a stretch of shore on the Baltic Sea where the Goths once landed.  For a long time it was believed that Gothiscandza stood for  Gutisk-andeis, that is, Gothic “end” (or peninsula), a place name like Ostende (Dutch Oostende, a town in West Flanders).  But it may have been a folk etymological alternation of Gutisk-Skandia “Gothic Scandinavia, Götland.”  Although history finds the Goths on the shores of the Black Sea, their homeland may have been in Scandinavia.  Such is all philological speculation.  It either leads to a dead end produces worthy results.  Andilaus is Gothic for endless, and the Greek word is aperantos (stress again falls on the second syllable), obviously a piece of valuable information to store up and use in the year to come.

Land’s End, Cornwall,  the extreme westerly part of England’s mainland.

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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‘Cripes! What bally tomfoolery are those diabolical cads in the media coming up with now?’ I asked my betrothed, when confronted with a spate of recent news reports. ‘Verily, I must quash this balderdash forthwith.’

Had I perhaps been hit on the head with the King James Bible or been immersed for a year in the collected works of P. G. Wodehouse? No, these were a few of the beloved English words that apparently were threatened by imminent extinction. The cause? Well, texting and tweeting, naturally! According to the Daily Mail, a survey carried out for a book tie-in to the BBC2 TV programme Planet Word showed that nearly 75% of the 2,000 people polled believed that ‘longer words have become outdated since text messages and social networking websites gained popularity.’

Then the actor Ralph Fiennes joined the fray, blaming Twitter and other social networking sites for the fact that some of today’s drama students are finding polysyllabic and Shakespearian words too demanding to understand or use.

The topic of the ‘deterioration’ of our hallowed English language because of various factors (texting, TV, poor education, the influence of US English, little green men from Mars, you name it…) crops up regularly, and never fails to generate many comments of the ‘tut tut’ and ‘harrumph’ variety on newspaper websites. Most comments rail about how today’s youth ‘don’t speak proper like what we did’, and claim that the impoverishment of English is indicative of the Decline of Civilization as We Know It.

Has ‘malaise’ been tweeted out of existence?

As stated in the media, those surveyed for the Planet Word survey:

- believed that longer English words are falling out of fashion because of the technical limits put on communicating by text or Twitter (messages are around 140 characters)

- reported various levels of familiarity with a range of selected English words (not all of which were lengthy or rare ones) – for example, 50% had encountered neither knackered nor cad.

Based on the media reports, here’s an analysis of the words featured in the survey. Firstly, I delved into the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), Oxford’s two-billion-word database of 21^st-century English, to find the number of times each term occurs there. I then checked the Oxford Dictionaries site to see how the words are described in terms of currency (dated, archaic, etc.), register (e.g. formal, informal), and regional variety (e.g. British, US).  If the words have no description, they are regarded as part of standard English.

What spiffing news!

Far from being on the verge of extinction, most of the words mentioned are all part of 21^st-century English, with quash leading the pack in terms of number of occurrences on the OEC, probably by virtue of it being much used in reports of legal proceedings. In spite of its meaning, malaise is also pretty healthy in terms of examples of use on the OEC.

It is not clear how and why these particular words were selected for the survey. While some of the words have very few examples, these tend to be old-fashioned and informal terms such as bally and spiffing, which were never particularly common, and have been described as ‘dated’ in our dictionaries well before the advent of texting. Other archaic and dated words are pretty well represented in current English, so not quite ready to turn up their toes just yet.

Verily sir, you are a cad!

While verily is indeed archaic and again, was classed as such long before the appearance of tweeting, it turns up in many Biblical quotations, and writers also use it ironically in allusion to Biblical parlance, as the following example from a computing blog shows:

Type in “bible club” and verily, those who are seeking out the word of God shall be rewarded with a link to Baroda Bible Club…

Cad is a particular favourite of mine – it may be dated but it succinctly describes a certain type of roguish man. The evidence on the OEC shows that it’s popular in today’s US English (with twice as many instances than in British English) and often appears in reviews of plays and movies, as in this comment on the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice:

…Wickham will always be a cad, Mr Collins will always be hilarious, and Lizzie Bennet will always be perfect.

Reports of an English polysyllabic malaise are greatly exaggerated

So our evidence shows that some older words aren’t yet extinct, but language change being what it is, a few terms which always had limited currency (British informal words such as bally and cripes or rather formal ones such as felicitations) are becoming outdated or not increasing in frequency at present – no real shock.

The fact is that English, like any other living language, is constantly changing, with new words being coined and other words falling out of use: this process has been happening since language began and it’s inevitable. Nowadays, texting and Twitter may be part of what drives that change, but they are not the main or sole reason for it.

As for longer words being driven out by shorter textspeak ones, I’ll leave that misconception to be elegantly squashed by Language Log’s Mark Liberman. It appears from his researches that words used in tweets are longer in terms of characters than those found in Hamlet and P.G. Wodehouse’s novels.  In fact, ‘tweetspeak’ contains fewer ‘non-information’ short words such as ‘the’, ‘a’, etc., because twitterers tend to use longer ‘information’ words that do have meaning so as to get their message across succinctly.

Moving on from bally cads and the like, if you’re interested in extremely rare, weird, and wonderful terms, the compendious Oxford English Dictionary should be your first port of call. While researching this article I discovered a whole raft of little-used and obsolete words that perhaps deserve to see the linguistic light of day. In these turbulent times, should we not promote antipelargy (a child’s loving care for a parent in their old age) or even the gentle rural activity of acorning (gathering acorns)? I’m eagerly anticipating the first tweets to bring these and other arcane words back into circulation….let’s start a trend!

Catherine Soanes is a cynicocratical freelance writer who may be in need of a panchymagogue. This post first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Some time ago, a colleague asked me what materials I have on the place name Rotten Row; she was going to write an article on this subject.  But her plans changed, and the article did not appear.  My folders contain a sizable batch of letters to Notes and Queries and essays from other popular sources dealing with Rotten Row.  I am not a specialist in onomastics, and, if I am not mistaken, the question about the etymology of Rotten Row has never been answered to everybody’s satisfaction.  Still a survey, however incomplete, may be of some interest to our readers, and perhaps somebody has new ideas on the derivation of this place name and will share them with us.

In a way, the etymological chase being offered below looks like an exercise in futility, for Rotten Row perhaps means what it says, that is, “rotten row,” but there is no certainty; besides, most etymological investigations look like rivers that fail to reach the sea.  As noted, I am mainly indebted for my information to Notes and Queries, this “unique meeting place of British ignorance and scholarship,” as John A. Walz, a Harvard professor of German, called it in 1913, Chambers’s Magazine, and dictionaries.  The main difficulty in a search for the origin of Rotten Row is that streets bearing this name are numerous in the north of England and in Scotland.  Rotten Row in Hyde Park goes back to the end of the eighteenth century, while the place name, distinct from the street name, occurs as early as 1561, and the variants of Rotten Row in Glasgow were known a hundred years earlier; thus, the fashionable bridle path in the capital could not be the model other towns emulated.  The borrowing went in the opposite direction.

Here are some of the derivations of Rotten Row I happened to come across. 1. From Latin Ratumena Porta, allegedly called this in memory of some Ratumena, a charioteer who died at that gate in Ancient Rome.  The accident was sad, but, as far as we are concerned, can be dismissed without much regret.  2. From Latin rota “wheel” (compare Engl. rotate) and “chariot.”  This guess has no advantage over the previous one.  Latin place names are numerous in Britain, but they are old, while no record of Rotten Row has been traced to the Anglo-Saxon times.  In Medieval Latin, rota also meant “road,” but why should an undistinguished road have been given a bookish foreign name?  3. From the woolen stuff called rateen.  The etymon of the English word is French, and in English rateen turned up too late to be of use in the present context, but a Rateenrow seems to have been mentioned in 1437 in Bury St. Edmund’s, which was the great cloth mart of the northeastern parts of the kingdom.  4. From the Old Germanic word rot “a file of soldiers” (compare German Rotte; many meanings, including “pack; herd,” otherwise, a common military term).  Although Engl. rat “a file of soldiers” occurred regularly in the seventeenth century, it hardly has anything to do with Rotten Row.  A similar derivation connects Rotten Row with the verb rottaran “to muster.”  I am not sure in which language this verb has been attested, but the famous William Camden, the author of this etymology, could not have invented it.

5. A folk etymological “corruption” of French Route du Rois “King’s Way” (an explanation one can read in numerous editions of Baedeker’s guide to London); a similar Irish Gaelic etymon, with the transliteration Rathad’n Righ, has also been proposed.  The streets called Rotten Row were, most certainly, not meant for royalty, while London’s Rotten Row is relatively recent (see above).  6. From Rother Row, rother being an old word for “cattle”; Shakespeare still used it.  No historical evidence shows that cows and oxen were driven along any Rotten Row.  Rother Street in Stratford-upon-Avon must be familiar to many, and there is a family name Rother (the meaning is no longer understood, which is a blessing in disguise: compare the family name Heifer).  One can see that Rother Street has not become Rotten Street. 7. From Old Icelandic ruddr, the past participle of a verb meaning “make a clearing” (its English cognate is rid in get rid of).  Allegedly, ruddr vegr meant “a smoothed, paved way.”  The chance of any Rotten Row having once been a paved way, an analogue of the Anglo-Saxon via strata, is as small as the chance of medieval “neat” running along it.  8. From the name of someone who had a business in that area; the name was said to contain a German cognate of Engl. red.  This eponymous ancestor of Rotten Row, supposedly a purveyor of red herrings (!), is no more probable than the Roman charioteer.  9. From Old Engl. rot (with a long vowel) “glad; bright; noble.”  Was Rotten Row named for its splendor?  10. From Engl. rattin “undressed timber.”  This is a ghost word (it never existed).  11. From Routine Row, on account of the processions of the church passing in that direction.  As Longfellow said in his anthologized lyric: “I shot an arrow into the air./ It fell to earth, I knew not where.”

A knowledgeable author summarized the case in 1867 so: “[these derivations] are all destitute of any substruction of historical evidence, and are all purely speculative or fanciful” (I wish I had his vocabulary).  Before I mention the only hypotheses that, in my opinion, deserve consideration, the following may perhaps be stated with some confidence.  The Middle English name seems to have originated in the north.  Alliteration and a shocking, “in-your-face” meaning contributed to its popularity.  The vogue for Rotten Row makes it unnecessary to reconstruct the circumstances that led to the naming of each street called this.  Rotten Row does not owe its origin to a local personal name or a local event.  Two etymologies sound more or less realistic.  Streets were often infested with rats.  In Scots and northern English dialects, rattan and rottan mean “rat.” Rotten Row emerges as Rat Row.  Conversely, many streets, regardless of the presence of rats, were indeed rotten, with decayed houses on both sides (for instance, a place called Rotten Spot, near Sheffield,  probably had some “rotten” structures in it), though the epithet rotten may at one time have referred to the surface good for the hooves.  If that putative meaning had any currency in eighteenth-century London, Rotten Row in Hyde Park was a playful adoption of the widespread name, with reference to the quality of the road.  Route du Rois would not have degenerated into Rotten Row so quickly under the influence of folk etymology.

It would be a good thing to discover the first Rotten Row.  We can imagine etymologists’ delight if that street turned out to be lined with dilapidated houses on both sides and serving as a habitat of rapacious rats. A historical linguist would feel like the Pied Piper of Hamelin or Dick Whittington, but carrying an etymological dictionary instead of a pipe or a cat.

Modern Rother Street. China.

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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It’s tea now.  Once again I have little to add to what anyone can find in the OED and other easily available sources, though it will be a pleasure to continue singing praises to Hobson Jobson, and there is a redeeming quality to this post: at the end I’ll say something about tea caddy.  But first here are three quotations.  “That excellent and by all physicians approved China drink called by the Chineans Tcha, and by other nations tay, alias tee, is sold at the Sultana Head Coffee House, London.” (Mercurius Politicus, Sept. 30, 1658; The Century Dictionary).  “I remember well how in 1681 I for the first time in my life drank thee at the house of an Indian chaplain, and how I could not understand how sensible men could think it a treat to drink what tasted no better than hay-water” (1726), and finally, “There is among our people, and particularly among the womankind a great abuse of Thee, not only that too much is drunk…but this is also an evil custom to drink it with a full stomach; it is better and more wholesome to make use of it when the process of digestion is pretty well finished…. It is also a great folly to use sugar candy with Thee” (1672; the last two quotations are from Hobson Jobson).  In 1545 Chiai was said “to remove fever, headache, stomach-ache, pain in the side or joints,” and many other ailments, including gout.  I remember reading similar nineteenth-century ads, except that they recommended cigars for alleviating pain and clearing the lungs.

It will be seen that the main question about tea is the same as about coffee, namely: How did the form tea conquer its numerous rivals?  And the rivals were indeed many, though they can be divided into two groups: those beginning with ch- and sounding cha, chai, and the like, and those beginning with t- and spelled tee, tea, thee, etc.  Both variants are still known in the European languages: for example, English has tea (like Malay te), while Russian has chai (like Chinese Mandarin chha, according to one system of transliteration), homophonous with the first syllable of the word China.  In this case, the Malay may have been an intermediary between China and the rest of the world, but the word’s source is Chinese, for, as Hobson Jobson explains, “te [is] the utterance attached to the character in the Fuh-kien dialect.”  Knowing nothing about Chinese, I can only repeat what specialists say, and they seem to be unanimous in explaining the origin of the two variants.

The numerous forms of coffee (see them in the post for November 23) show that there was no progression in the development of the English name of this beverage.  We only witnessed different episodes in the history of its adaptation—a usual process in the fortunes of exotic articles of trade, plant and animal names, and so forth.  The same holds for tea.  Different forms coexisted, were affected by the pronunciation and spelling of the word in other languages (in English, Dutch and French influence has to be reckoned with), and at long last one such form became standard.  The state of “peaceful coexistence” is testified to by the first of the three quotations given at the beginning of this post and by an almost identical ad in The Gazette, which, also in 1658, advertised a China drink, “called by the Chinese Toha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee.”  Apparently, the norm had not yet solidified.  In 1711 Alexander Pope rhymed tea with obey.  In 1720 the rhyme tea / pay occurred.  In 1770 Samuel Johnson extemporized the verses in which tea was coupled in rhyme with me.  The spelling the (with an h) seems to be a borrowing from French, and it is amazing that English, despite its penchant for redundant letters, did not cling to the less rational variant.  Although mentioned by some Europeans considerably earlier, in England no citations of tea predate 1598.  In the seventeenth century, the product and the word gained in popularity, and the OED, like Hobson Jobson after it, gives multiple examples.  English has been spared the cacophony hidden in a phrase like “hot tea in a china cup,” but, if the Fuh-kien “utterance” had survived, the clash of two ch-words would have been obvious.

The history of caddy (originally, a box containing a certain weight), as in tea caddy, cannot be called dramatic. Authorities trace caddy to a Malay form, which is catty.  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology calls the substitution of -d- for -t- an unexplained alteration.  The first edition of the OED spoke of an apparent corruption of catty.  In those days, corruption was a common term in etymological studies.  Skeat went so far as to say: “Better spelled catty.”  I am not sure what would have been gained if a word universally pronounced caddy were spelled catty, but I would like to suggest that nothing has been corrupted or even altered in it.  Is it possible that the Englishman who transmitted catty as caddy was a speaker of a dialect in which t between vowels had become d?

The voicing of intervocalic t in American English is an open secret: matter and madder, latter and ladder, seated and seeded, tutor and Tudor, sweetish and Swedish, futile and feudal, Plato and play dough, and many others like them are homophones pairwise (textbooks usually cite writer and rider).  However, the Americans did not invent this pronunciation.  It has been attested almost all over the British north (I think it also occurs in Irish English), and the earliest example in a text goes back to the first half of the sixteenth century.  At least one word has even made its way into the Standard: French potage became poddidge and later porridge; the same happened to porringer.  (The change of a weakly articulated d to r is a process known from many modern Germanic dialects.  Incidentally, a change of some consonant to r is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho.)  Assuming that our merchant or traveler was from Lancashire or from any part of England in which matter merged with madder, the origin of the present day form caddy will stop being a riddle.  Unfortunately, there is no way to raise the spirit of that adventurous man.

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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There are roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the globe today. Five hundred years ago there were twice as many, but the rate of language death is accelerating. With languages disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks, in ninety years half of today’s languages will be gone.

Mostly it’s the little languages, those with very few speakers, that are dying out, but language death can hit big languages as well as little and mid-sized ones. And it can hit those big languages pretty hard. Sure, languages like Degere and Vuna are disappearing in Kenya, Jeju in Korea, Manchu in China. And sure, Nigerians complain that Yoruba is fast giving way to English. But language-watchers warn that English itself may have entered a steep and potentially irreversible decline in both its native and its adoptive country.

English, having spread as a global language during the 20th century, has now become so thin on the ground back home that it’s in danger of disappearing. That’s the conclusion of a new report which sees both competition from other languages and the increased ineptitude of English speakers combining to produce a catastrophic decline in the number of English speakers in England, the language’s ancestral home, as well as in the United States, where English speakers fled in search of religious liberty and alternate side of the street parking.

The report of the Center for the Study of English in the Public Interest, or ČEPI, available on that organization’s website, warns that the language could disappear in less than three generations, or perhaps they meant to say fewer? “Why should little languages like Frisian, Kashubian, and Han get all the attention?” the report asks. “Don’t the bleeding-heart anthropologists bent on preventing the inevitable realize that people stop speaking those doomed languages because other languages do the job better?” it adds. The report calls on those intent on saving endangered languages to switch their attentions to English, a language that might actually benefit from their efforts.

There’s good reason to preserve English rather than let it die. According to ČEPI director Bill Caxton, “When the last speakers go, they take with them their history and culture too.” Granted, Eskimo may not have twenty-three words for snow, as the popular myth would have it, but Eskimos do have a special relationship with snow, as evidenced by Eskimo idioms for ’snow clumped in the paws of sled dogs’ and ’snow outside the igloo that turns yellow when Morris is around.’ When Eskimo dies out, as it eventually must, that special relationship will be lost forever, and the Eskimos and the rest of the world will be left with the terms snow, slush, sleet, and snow covered with a crust of blackened automobile exhaust, hardly a vocabulary of nuance and poetry.

With the death of English, the ČEPI report notes, we’ll lose its prolific set of terms for burgers: in addition to hamburger, there’s cheeseburger, bacon burger, bacon cheeseburger, bleu cheese burger (also, blue cheese burger), quarter pounder, quarter pounder with cheese, swissburger, curry burger, tuna burger, turkey burger, chiliburger, soyburger, tofu burger, and black bean burger. And don’t forget hamburger not cooked long enough to eliminate e. coli. The wholesale loss of these terms testifying to English speakers’ preoccupation with chopped meat, and chopped meat substitutes, would be tragic.

When languages die, we also lose their secret herbal remedies and medicinal cures that could revolutionize modern medicine, their old family recipes that could turn the Food Channel on its ear. An English speaker discovered penicillin from traditional English bread mold (or mould), not to mention the extensive research by English speakers into the curative powers of herb-inflected brownies. And then there’s culture: the death of English means the death of rap and musical comedy, though it’s clear that musical comedy died long ago, and the novel, which has died several times already but keeps popping back.

So what’s the evidence that English is dying? After all, it’s still spoken by several hundred million people living in anglophone homelands. “Well, we know,” claims ČEPI’s Caxton, “that if English wasn’t dying, then why are there so many statutes trying to prop it up by making English the official language of states, businesses, and schools? Why would so many people insist that English needs protection from other languages? Why are the directions for assembling furniture and toys always in pictures, not in English?”

“Why, also, would there be so many groups focused on correcting and improving English, purifying it, making sure that it’s protected from native English speakers as well as from foreigners?” Caxton added.

According to the ČEPI report, what’s happening to English now is exactly what happened to Latin 1500 years ago: Latin spread around the world as the language of law, religion, and scholarship, while at home the Romans couldn’t wait to switch to Italian. In much the same way, English has become the international language of business, science, and rock ’n’ roll, while at home it’s fragmenting into incoherent tweets, text messages, and self-help books, while rapidly losing ground to a medley of Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin.

Asked how English might be saved, ČEPI recommends a multi-pronged approach of strict laws and aversion therapy. “Anyone who makes an error in English or slips into a language other than English, no matter how fleetingly, needs to put a quarter in the coffee can,” said Caxton. “If that doesn’t work, there’s always sound-activated electronic collars that can deliver a measured charge directly to the vocal cords,” he continued.

In the meantime, teams of anthropological linguists are fanning out to collect samples of English for cryo-preservation in case the inevitable happens, on the off-chance that at some point in the future someone might care enough about the once-powerful tongue to revive it. ČEPI itself has sent a team of researchers to a remote valley in Appalachia where the pure, untainted English of Shakespeare is thought to be preserved, or maybe it’s the language of the Earl of Oxford.

According to Ethnologue, a count in 2004 showed that there were only 20 speakers of Ho-Chunk, the language of a Native American tribe living in Nebraska (that’s down from 230 in 1997). When asked what Ho-Chunk speakers thought about intensifying American efforts to preserve English, the official language of the state of Nebraska since 1920, a spokesperson for the Ho-Chunk or Hocák Nation, also known as the Winnebago, said, “Let’s be realistic here. Maybe it’s time for the remaining English speakers to cut their losses, pull the plug, and let the language die.”

Acknowledging that the death of English is at hand, all the Republican presidential hopefuls support English-only legislation. For example, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who thinks government should not tell Americans what to do, wants state and federal laws requiring everyone to speak English, and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann co-sponsors—along with Ron Paul—H.R. 997, a bill to make English the official language of the United States. English is not the official language of Minnesota, nor is it the official language of Texas. Calls to Bachmann and Perry for a response to the recommendation to let English die were not immediately returned.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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Spelling and its implications

It was good to hear from Masha Bell, an ally in the losing battle for reformed spelling.  Her remarks can be found at the end of the previous post (it was about su- in sure and sugar), and here I’ll comment briefly only on her questions.  Is there a connection between erratic, partly unpredictable English spelling and 1) the number of etymologists and 2) the spread of dyslexia in the English speaking world?  I have often heard the second question and can repeat my usual answer.  Dyslexia does not seem to depend on the complexity of spelling in cultures in which a match between the sound and the letter is the basis of reading and writing, while researchers studying dyslexia in China and Japan, where hieroglyphs are used, are not unanimous in their conclusions.  As to the proliferation of etymologists, it certainly does not depend on the vagaries of spelling.  Even when there is a perfect match between a word’s phonetic shape and its written image, as in Finnish and Estonian, the origin of words remains a puzzle to speakers.  The number of etymologists reflects the nation’s interest in the history of its language and the priorities of linguistics as a science (for example, in the nineteenth century, etymology was “the cutting edge” of linguistics, whereas today it is a subject exciting only historical linguists and, fortunately, the public).  In English, man, put, and of give an accurate idea of how they sounded long ago, but their etymology is still hidden from our contemporaries, partly even from professional etymologists.

River and its kin.  Middle English rivere goes back to the Old French word that meant both “river” and “river bank.”  It is usually traced to the unattested Vulgar Latin feminine form riparia, from Latin riparius “of, pertaining to a bank” (Latin ripa “bank”).  Indo-European dictionaries, which revel in roots and extensions, reconstruct the root rei- “scratch, tear, cut” with the extension -p.   Reip- (the etymon of ripa) ended up meaning “that which is cut out by a river.”  The English verb rive (from Scandinavian) may be a cognate.

Sate versus satiated.  Both are bookish; sate even more so than satiate.  The origin of sate is not quite clear, but it can be a shortened form of satiate (this is not the prevailing opinion).  Today sate is rarely used except in its participial form (sated).  There is hardly any difference in the meaning of the two verbs.

Greek khrónos versus kairós.  Our correspondent asks whether Greek khrónos was regularly opposed to kairós as “natural time” to “mechanical time.”  The word khrónos, well-known to English speakers from chronic, chronology, and chronometer, meant “time as such” (so indeed “natural time”), while kairós referred to due time, proper moment, and the like (so not quite “mechanical time”).  Its main meaning was “measure.”

Davenport.  Why is its etymology often called unknown?  A davenport, it will be remembered, is a small cabinet, with a hinged flap made to open and serve as a writing desk.  The word is usually believed to be the name of the original maker, but obscurity envelops the life of this gentleman; hence lexicographic despair.  Mr. Davenport is perhaps more real than many other imaginary inventors of objects around us (beware of Tom Blanket and his cohorts), but not much more so.

Do we know what biweekly means?  No, unfortunately, we don’t.  Among the bi-words, referring to time, only biannual and biennial are unambiguous, because they are pronounced and spelled differently.  In other cases we depend on extralinguistic information.  Thus, no one doubts what bisexual and biped mean.  But biweekly payments may mean fortnightly payments (fortnight is not a word current in American English) or payments made twice a week (a rather unlikely situatioin).  If you are hired with a promise of bimonthly checks (cheques), “feel free” to ask for details.

In hospital versus in the hospital.  This is the most often cited example of differences between American and British usage.  In North America, people stay in the hospital.  In Britain, in hospital needs no article.  But all over the English speaking world people go to bed, to school and to college, though, to prove how unpredictable the norm is, they go to the university.  It is enough to say go to the bed, to realize the difference between to the bed and to bed.  Likewise, we sit at table or at the table, go to camp or to the camp, and so forth, depending on the measure of abstraction implied.

Ecology versus ecosystem.  Many people use these words as interchangeable synonyms (for examples, this is bad for the ecology), but the two nouns are supposed to mean different things. Ecology, as follows from its suffix, is a branch of biology studying ecosystems.  We don’t say:” This action is bad for the zoology of the Jungle.”  But every case is special.

The pronunciation of assume and related matters.  Of course, I know that Americans say asoom, for I hear the word almost every day.  My point was that the variants ashoom, shoot (the latter for suit), and the like did not stay even in the speech of those who occasionally pronounce kiss you as kish you.  Nor did I imply that everybody pronounces what you as watch you, but many people do.

Amusing typos.

In my previous post, I quoted the following: “…the child, whose parents say was snatched….”  There was a comment that this is acceptable grammar.  I am afraid the comment missed the point.  The sentence was made incomprehensible by the omission of the comma after say!  It should have been: “…the child, whose parents say, (!) was snatched….”   I have recently run into another enjoyable typo: “…if the duties are too high, they lesson the consumption…”  With regard to spelling, if not to etymology, we surely live in Wonderland.  The “lessoning” of the consumption reminded me that also a few days ago I had read about the consumption of the marriage, but it would be unfair to taunt the author, who happens to be a foreigner, though the editor of the conference papers (a native speaker) could have read what she was publishing.  But this is perhaps too much to expect.

Many thanks to Dr. Schumann for an interesting example of antiquarian Germanic zeal.  Next time the gleanings will appear shortly before the New Year.  It would be good if our correspondents, while sending us questions related to etymology, spelling, and usage, could think of some “seasonal” queries.

“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice….  “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle; “nine the next and so on.”  “What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.  “That is the reason they are called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked, “because they lessen from day to day.”  This was quite a new idea to Alice.

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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Psst, wanna buy a hot slogan?

“Occupy Wall Street,” the protest that put “occupy” on track to become one of the 2011 words of the year, could be derailed by a Long Island couple seeking to trademark the movement’s name.

The rapidly-spreading Occupy Wall Street protests target the huge gap between rich and poor in America and elsewhere, so on Oct. 18, Robert and Diane Maresca tried to erase their own personal income gap by filing trademark application 85449710 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office so they could start selling Occupy Wall St.™ T-shirts, bumper stickers, and totebags, as well as various other tchotchkes bearing the protest name (the Marescas’ application is for “Occupy Wall St.,” using the abbreviated form of street–they haven’t expressed an interest in owning “Occupy Wall Street” as well).

The Trademark Commission will have to decide whether anyone can own the rights to the phrase “Occupy Wall Street,” which seems to have captured the public’s imagination and entered the public domain in record time–in fact, faster than you can say “Tea Party.” If so, the Commission must then consider whether the Marescas have any right to the phrase. They didn’t join the OWS protests and they may have never even been to Wall St. (according to their application, the Marescas live in West Islip, about 50 miles from the main protest site). Plus, so far as anyone can tell, they’ve never manufactured T-shirts, bags, or stickers with “Occupy Wall St.” or any other logo or design.

The Marescas are not the only ones trying to capitalize on the anticapitalist protests. There’s an episode of an MTV reality show, complete with commercial sponsors. There’s a book. There’s an Android app. And a company called Condomania is selling Occupy condoms (free samples available to the protestors). There are over 3,000 items of Occupy merchandise for sale on the ’net. A local pizza shop sells Occupy Meat, Occupy Veggie, and Occupy Vegan pizzas to the protestors at a discounted price of $15 a pie. There’s even an Occupy Wall Street iPhone™ app that looks like a combo of Tetris and Angry Birds ($4.99 at the iTunes™ App Store™).

The Occupy movement itself is trying to buy TV time to air a commercial that it made—though unlike the competition, the original OWS remains not-for-profit. But it’s not even clear that Occupy Wall Street could trademark its own name, or that, despite its new-found popularity, the word occupy could qualify as Word of the Year, since it’s not really a new word, and its use in the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” doesn’t represent a new meaning of an old word. Occupy has meant ‘take possession of something, especially by force,’ since the 14th century. The Oxford English Dictionary citations for occupy include John Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of the Bible, “Comeþ down in to aȝen-metyng of Madyan & occupieþ þe wateris vn to Bethhara & Jordan” (Judges vii. 24, emphasis added), and, from Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), “They occupied the Citie, Lands, Goods, and Wiues, of those, whom they had murdered.”

Even the newer sense, ‘to occupy as a protest rather than an outright property seizure,’ is almost a century old: the OED cites a 1920 story in the Times about an Italian worker protest, “The men have occupied the works in those cases where the masters have declined to run the works at a loss,” along with a 1968 Newsweek account of a building take-over at Columbia University: “The university’s Hamilton Hall was the first successful target of the revolutionaries, and it was seized and occupied Tuesday.” For a time, occupy even meant ‘to have sexual intercourse,’ as in this Dutch-English dictionary from 1648: “Genooten, to Lie with, or to Occupie a woman.” That sense seems to have died out by the mid-17th century, though the manufacturer of the Occupy condom would probably like to revive it.

Occupy Wall Street has been compared to the Tea Party, another grass-roots protest movement, though the Tea Party’s goal is not to even out the distribution of wealth, but to elect politicians who don’t believe in government. The Patent and Trademark Office reports over twenty applications for trademarks on various phrases involving Tea Party, including Tea Party Patriot, Tea Party of America, and Tea Party Tees. One application, for Traveling Tea Party, referred not to the Tea Party movement, but to a business, also known as the Traveling Cupcake, that made baked goods for actual tea parties. So far, though, no one has tried to trademark the phrase Tea Party itself. If the Marescas are unsuccessful in their “Occupy Wall St.” claim, the Tea Party seems up for grabs.

In the end, even if occupy continues to make news and achieves Word of the Year status, trying to own the rights to a disorganized, grass-roots movement like Occupy Wall Street may prove as futile as Facebook^® trying to own the rights to the word face, Apple^® trying to put a lock on pod, or, in the 1960s, CompuServe^® trying to trademark Email. There are already lots of vendors selling “Occupy Wall Street” T-shirts. Instead of coming late to the party, the Marescas might have more luck trying to corner the market on Greek Debt Crisis™ tees.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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All sources inform us about the Arabic-Turkish home of the word coffee, though in the European languages some forms were taken over directly from Arabic, so that the etymological part of the relevant entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias needs modification.  There is a possibility of coffee being connected with the name of the kingdom of Kaffa, but this question need not bother us at the moment.  The main puzzle is the development of the form coffee rather than its distant origin.  The OED is, as always, helpful, but particularly instructive is the array of variants found in a book with the funny title Hobson-Jobson.  Far from being a book of humor, it is a wonderful dictionary of Anglo-Indian words.  In its pages we find recollections about a very good drink called Chaube (1573), Caova (1580), cohoo (1609) and, surprisingly for such an early date, coffee (also 1609), cahue (1615), coho, and copha (1628).  The route to Europe is supposed to be from Arabic quahwa via Turkish kahveh.  Later coffee became the standard form in English.  But, as we can see, there was no real progression: in 1609 some people said cohoo, while others already knew coffee.  The cause may be that the Arabic and the Persian pronunciations competed, one being prevalent on the coast of Arabia, the other in the mercantile towns.  The writers quoted above were mainly English, Dutch, French, and Italian.  All of them recorded the foreign word according to their speech habits, though some may have repeated what they had heard from their countrymen.  (Incidentally, the transliteration of the Turkish word as kahveh and the Arabic as qahwah may not be quite right, for the so-called round gaf of the Turkish word, as this consonant is known among the Anglo-Indians, sounds very much like Arabic q.  I would be grateful to specialists for either corroborating or refuting this statement.  Perhaps there are dialectal differences of which I am unaware.)

Several researchers wondered how hw could become f.  This, I think, is less of an enigma than many people think.  The opposite change of f to hv (with a guttural h, that is, kh, approximately as in German ach and Dutch Schipol) often occurs in non-standard Russian.  At one time, the consonant f was alien to it, and names like Filip (stress on the second syllable) turned into Khvilip.  The same substitution still happens in Russian dialects.  To produce the consonant f, one needs a passage of air (otherwise, the result will be p) and active lips (or at least an active lower lip).  The group hv satisfies both conditions, except that breath and the lips participate in its production consecutively instead of concurrently, as happens in f.  Since, as a general rule, seventeenth-century Europeans could not pronounce hw or hv, they combined both elements of articulation in one sound and ended up with f.  Its voiced partner v fits the situation even better, and we should applaud the man who wrote caova.  Chaube (that is, khaube) is a close relative of caova, because b is also a labial sound. Some speakers were lazy and left out w altogether; hence cohoo and its likes.  For comparison, one may cite Finnish kahvi and Polish kawa.

The vowels give us grief too.  Both Arabic and Turkish have a in the first syllable, while the English word has o.  The Dutch for coffee is also koffie, as opposed, for instance, to German Kaffee.  These differences have never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction, but the suggestions known to me make sense.  The vowel a is extremely tricky.  It can be pronounced in the front part of the mouth, as in French papa, more or less in the middle of the mouth cavity, as in Engl. cuff, or far back, as in Engl. spa.  It seems that as late as the middle of the nineteenth century u in Engl. cuff was rather close to what one today hears in American Engl. curry.  In any case, Russian speakers did not identify it with their a, as they do now.  Likewise, o varies greatly from language to language and from dialect to dialect.  Although hot is spelled alike in British and American English, it is pronounced so differently in the two countries (especially when America is represented by the Midwest) that foreigners have trouble distinguishing between hot and what they believe should be hut.  Russian immigrants pronounce the first syllable of Boston like Italian basta and listen in disbelief when someone tries to convince them that dot.com is not dut.come.  Those who learned English in its British r-less variety are apt to take even Bob for Barb.  The assumption that the Europeans confused a and o in the native (Arabic or Turkish) name of the drink looks plausible.

Finally, we notice that Engl. coffee has stress on the first syllable, while some other languages accent the end and that the word’s second vowel is sometimes a and sometimes e.  The plural of Arabic kahwe is kahawi.  Both the Turkish form and the European forms with -e seem to go back to the Arabic plural.  Polish kawa and Czech kava adapted themselves to the Slavic system of declension and do not reflect an ancient ending.  Stress on the second syllable is clearly more “genuine,” but one should always reckon with the possibility that it was borrowed from French.  In similar fashion, those languages that have initial accent may have been influenced by English.  It appears that there are at least as many variants of the word coffee as there are varieties of the product.  This is nice, for diversity is supposed to make us happy.

Now a few words about the promised kingdom of Kaffa in modern Ethiopia (formerly in Abyssinia).  Coffee trees do flourish there, and coffee is the main article of export from that part of the world.  Disclaimers to the effect that we lack sufficient evidence connecting coffee with Kaffa do not go far, because no competing (preferably Arabic) etymology of coffee has been offered.  I was pleased to discover that Paul Kretschmer, an extremely cautious etymologist, saw no objection to the derivation of coffee from Kaffa.

John Jourdain, a Dorsetshire seaman, wrote in his diary (1609) that the group “rested in the plaine fields untill [sic] three the next daie, neer unto a cohoo howse in the desert.”  Lloyd’s “cohoo howse,” the oldest establishment of this type in London, was certainly not opened in a desert.  While reading this blog (the first thing to do early in the morning every Wednesday, wherever you live), enjoy your cup of coffee and forget about many wars that were fought against this beverage in the past.  The coffee haters are now forgotten; the drink has won (as expected).

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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With the arrival of the new Muppet movie, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Beaker, and our other felt friends are everywhere. There’s no escaping Jim Henson’s creations, and few of us would want to (unless the movie happens to suck, which is doubtful, given the stewardship of Jason Segel, who showed major Muppet mojo in the heartbreaking and spit-taking Forgetting Sarah Marshall). It’s a good time to look at the history of the word Muppet, which has some meanings that would make the Swedish Chef bork with outrage.

Thanks to interviews with Muppet creator Jim Henson, we know Muppet is not a blend of marionette and puppet, though that theory has been appearing since 1959, just four years after Henson invented the crew, who appeared in pre-Sesame Street and Muppet Show fare such as commercials for Wilkins coffee. I love this part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of Muppet: “Any of a number of humorously grotesque glove puppets.” That phrasing seems humorously grotesque itself, but if it helps a Martian understand a Muppet, I guess it’s worthwhile.

In the eighties, the word took on several meanings. Since 1983, a muppet has been “A lure made to resemble a young squid.” I don’t want to give my enemies (arch or mortal) any ideas, but since calamari is squid, I’m pretty sure this kind of muppet could lure me anywhere. In British prison slang, a muppet is “A prisoner with psychiatric problems; a vulnerable inmate liable to be bullied or harassed by others.” As this 1998 use shows, Muppets aren’t the only Henson creation to carry this meaning: “Their favourite targets are the fraggles, the nonces and the muppets. But anyone showing tell-tale signs of fear is a target for Britain’s jail bullies.”

A muppet can also be an idiot, though I have no idea why, since the Muppets are among the least idiotic members of the puppet community (Elmo excluded). However, this part of the OED’s definition sort of rings true: “someone enthusiastic but inept; a person prone to mishaps through naivety.” With the exception of curmudgeons (RIP Andy Rooney) such as Oscar, Statler, and Waldorf, the Muppets are brimming with optimism from their pieholes to their puppetholes. Green’s Dictionary of Slang also has examples of muppet meaning a child or a cop.

These Muppet meanderings are similar to the meanings smurf has taken on over the years. While most know Smurfs as blue elves with a disturbingly low female population, other smurfs or smurfers make smurf dope: blue crystal meth. A smurf is also “an inexperienced or short prison officer,” as Green’s puts it, and a gay man who’s youngish and blonde. Plus, smurf is one of the most awesome euphemisms for the f-word in the known universe, as seen in words like clustersmurf, mothersmurfer, ratsmurf, and fan-smurfing-tastic. If I didn’t know better, I’d think smurf has an acronymic origin, like fubar and milf. Despite the PG origin, something about smurf feels blue in the naughty sense.

When a word is as fun to say as Smurf or Muppet, there’s no stopping how people will use it. Now that the Muppets are back, who knows what this mega-appealing word will soon describe? I have no idea, but let me suggest a meaning, Urban Dictionary-style, that I’ve used and suspect others use: “A harmless, lovable person.” I used this sense when I called my friend Neil a Muppet a few years ago, as Neil was stuck giving a presentation that typically made students reach for pitchforks and torches. This pernicious presentation made presenters long for a force field, or at least student-proof chicken wire. In calling Neil a Muppet, I meant to say he’s too friendly and non-threatening to get the Frankenstein’s monster treatment. It would be like lynching Kermit.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

The spelling of those two words does not bother us only because both are so common and learned early in life.  Yet why not shure and shugar?  There is a parallel case, and it too leaves us indifferent, though for a different reason.  Consider su in pressure, measure, pleasure, leisure, and the like.  We do not question the occurrence of su in the middle of a Romance word, with its phonetic value of sh (as in cushion) or ge (as in genre and rouge) and pay no attention to azure, in which the same sound is designated by a more natural group zu.  The French origin of pressure, azure, measure, and their ilk, let alone genre and rouge, is so obvious that perhaps even those who have never studied French are dimly aware of it.  By contrast, sure and sugar are fully domesticated (only etymologists know all the details of their descent), and, even more important, su in them occurs word initially.  It is their position at the beginning rather than in the middle of the word that causes surprise.  However, both sure and sugar also came to English from French and in this respect have common cause with pressure and measure.

From a historical point of view, the story is simple.  Consider the names of the letters U and Q, that is (in phonetic terms), yu and kyu.  Before y, t becomes ch, s turns into sh, and z yields the voiced partner of sh.  Listen to how you say what you…; it is probably indistinguishable from watch you.  Many (most?) people pronounce unless you as unlesh you, and I have seldom heard anyone pronounce the title of Shakespeare’s play As You Like It with z before you: it is usually the same sound as in Measure for Measure.  In the middle of the word, rather than at word boundaries, an analogous assimilation happened several centuries ago, and that is why nature and vision sound as though they were spelled nachure and vizion.  This brings us to sugar and sure.

The vowel occurring in French sure was alien to most Middle English dialects, including the dialect of London, and, as the name of the modern English letter U shows, yu replaced French u in borrowed words.  We can observe this substitution even in such a recent loanword as menu (and compare nubile and other nu- words).  Once sure appeared in English, it turned into syure, and a similar change happened in sugar (syugar).  Later, syu- developed into sh- (compare bless you, session, and Asia, regardless of whether you have a voiced or a voiceless middle in the last of them, for the voicing is secondary).  As noted above, sure and sugar are such conspicuous monsters because word initially su- designates sh only in those two words.  (Actually, the plant name sumach also has a variant with shu-, but it is known too little.  Sumach makes a good riddle: “There are three English words in which initial su- has the value of shu-.  The first two are sure and sugar.  What is the third?”  This is a much better riddle than the famous teaser: “Three common English words end in -ry.  The first two are angry and hungry.  What is the third?”  Answer: “Such a common word does not exist.”)

Although the picture has now been clarified, it is curious to observe the twists in the history of sounds.  Today no one (except perhaps in some dialects), I believe, pronounces sh- in sue and suit.  Most probably, both succumbed to the tyranny of their written images and retained s-.  American English has taken a radical step and eliminated y in sue and suit altogether: they became soo and soot respectively, but, naturally, with a long vowel.  Therefore, Americans travel with “sootcases” and wear “soots.”  In British English such variants also existed and were criticized in the 1826 book Vulgarities of Speech Corrected.  On the other hand, some people whose pretentiousness made them finickin (finicky, if you prefer) in all matters, including their speech, enunciated every sound with excessive care and pronounced siu instead of syu.  The same book called such variants “pedantic vulgar-genteel” and recommended a pronunciation “with an easy flow, and not with a stiff and formal mouthing of a letter.”

Nowadays, censure and pressure have sh in the middle, rather than its voiced partner occurring in measure, pleasure, and usual.  Yet assume seems to be assyume everywhere.  (Compare presume with a voiced consonant!)  Ensure and insure do not differ from sure in this respect: not unexpectedly, with sure as their root, they followed suit (as it were).  But in the 18^th century, suit, as well as assume, consume, pursue, ensue, and even supreme and superb, were often pronounced with shoo-.  The spelling scheurley “surely” turned up as early as 1538, and at the end of the 16^th century we find sheute “suit” and shewtar “suitor.”  It is customary to think of language history as a straight line: allegedly, some features disappear, while others take over.  Facts are at variance with such a simplistic model.  Dialects have always fought one another for ascendancy, “educators” and vulgar-genteel pedants have always tried to impose conservative variants (and occasionally succeed in their endeavors), popular authors breed imitators, and book printing resulted in the development of what we now call Standard English (the same is, of course, true of other languages).  As a result, we witness many seemingly established later forms ousted (beaten back) the more conservative ones, even when other new, “vulgar” forms break through and find acceptance by the cultured class.

The history of sugar, which can be traced in some detail thanks to the recommendations of old grammarians, is a case in point.  A teacher who was active in 1676 warned his pupils against the pronunciation shoogar.  Another author called sh in sure and sugar barbarous (1685).  In 1695, the pronunciation with initial sh- was castigated as being “after the West-country-Dialect.”  In court records, the personal name Suger occurred alongside Shuger.  What was vulgar, barbarous, or ludicrously local in the days of Daniel Defoe and even Henry Fielding is the only acceptable pronunciation to us.  It is hard to believe that as late as 1791 the elegant, perhaps even the received, pronunciation of suicide was shuicide.  As always, puns tell their own story.  In Shakespeare’s days, suitor and shooter were, or at least could be, homophones.  “There was a Lady in Spaine, who after the decease of hir [her] Father hadde three sutors, and yet neer [never] a good archer.”  A sizable part of Act IV, Scene 1 of Loves’s Labour’s Lost turns around the suitor/shooter pun.  (“Who is the suitor, who is the suitor?”… “Well then, I am the shooter,” etc.)  A colleague of mine once quipped that a person who has read the works of the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure would never be so sure of anything.  Sorry for highlighting the relevant elements.  Some people despise puns, don’t hear or laugh at them.  They call every pun feeble and punning the lowest form of wit.  Rest assured: they act out of envy.

From shoo to shoe

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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In July 1917, after three years of bloody war, anti-German feeling in Britain was reaching a feverish peak. Xenophobic mutterings about the suitability of having a German on the throne had been heard since 1914. The fact that the Royal family shared part of its name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with the Gotha bombers responsible for the devastating recent raids on London turned these whispers into open cries.

In response, King George V – resenting any aspersions on his patriotism – changed the name of the British Royal family to the impeccably English-sounding Windsor. This act signalled the power of names in a society heavy with newly coined, derogatory labels for the enemy: from Jerry to Fritz, through the Krauts, the Boche, and the Hun, you needed to know who you were fighting, and why, it was felt.

But jingoism was not the only source of linguistic creativity in the period. The circumstances of the First World War were so horrific, so extraordinary, and involving so many millions of people that a new language was almost essential. Many words which emerged at the time have clear associations with the conflict, such as camouflage, blimp, aerobatics, demob, and shell shock. Others have a more complex history, emerging from soldiers’ slang; itself a product of the increased cosmopolitanism ushered in by the war.

Take me back to dear old Blighty

Before the war, many of the young Tommies (a term deriving from ‘Thomas Atkins’, which was used on specimen army documents from 1815 as the name of a typical private soldier) who were shipped abroad to fight had probably never ventured far beyond the villages in which they were born. Suddenly immersed in exotic, unfamiliar cultures, both their longing for home and their assimilation of their new surroundings are summed up in one word: Blighty.

Meaning Britain or England, but especially ‘home’, Blighty originated in the Indian army, as an anglicization of the Hindustani bilāyatī, wilāyatī meaning ‘foreign, European’. First recorded in print in 1915, Blighty was an ideal place of comfort, love, and security, sharply contrasting with the hideous discomfort, harsh discipline, and constant danger of the front, and remains a popular term amongst Brits for their homeland to this day. Less familiar is the word’s extended use, which popped up on the television programme Downton Abbey recently, when the conniving footman Thomas Barrow deliberately injures his hand in order to escape the trenches. In the programme, this war wound is referred to as a ‘Blighty’ – a popular term at the time for any injury serious enough to get its victim sent back home, hopefully for good.

Less extreme than a Blighty was a cushy wound – one which was not serious enough to get you sent home permanently, but which would usually buy some time away from the trenches. Deriving from the Hindu for ‘pleasure’, ḵushī, the word’s more familiar sense of ‘undemanding, easy, or secure’ developed at the same time. This has stuck in the language to this day, with ‘cushy job’ a particularly popular phrase in the Oxford English Corpus. In North America cushy is now also used to refer to a particularly comfy sofa or other piece of furniture – far removed, one might think, from its starting point in the mud and gore of battle.

From the trenches to the street

British soldiers adopted the language of their enemies just as keenly as they adapted that of their foreign allies, as is shown by the origins of the verb strafe. The German phrase Gott strafe England (‘God punish England’) was a common greeting in Germany from 1914 on – ‘the recognised toast throughout Hunland’, as one contemporary colourfully put it. Refusing to be daunted by the threat, the term was hijacked by British soldiers, who began to use ‘strafe’ as a comic word to refer to any harsh punishment or attack, whether targeting the enemy (‘strafing the Fritzes’) or doled out by the British brass hats (high-ranking officers).

The word reached the streets of Britain remarkably quickly, with the Daily Mail commenting in 1916 that ‘strafe is now almost universally used’, adding that ‘the present writer heard a working-class woman shout to one of her offspring ‘Wait till I git ’old of yer: I’ll strafe yer, I will!’ This should come as no surprise: life during the war was so closely tied to the army that many elements of soldiers’ slang (such as scrounge, kip, tart, chow, and go west) quickly passed into general use, and continue to have a lasting impact on the way we speak today.

The First World War may be famed for poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden (most of whom were officers), but the rank and file also made their own vigorous contribution to the English language. Remembrance, after all, isn’t just in the two minute silence. It’s in the talk that follows; the memories of those who gave their lives woven into the very words we use every day.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From For The Fallen by Laurence Binyon

Charlotte Buxton is a Project Editor for Oxford Dictionaries, and is wearing her poppy with pride. This post first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Last week I answered only the questions that needed relatively detailed answers.  Today’s “issue” will be devoted to shorter queries.

Riparian. Some letters we receive are so brief that I am not sure whether my explanations satisfy the writers.  For example, a recent query contained only one word, namely RIPARIAN.  It will be remembered that the protagonist of one of H. K. Andersen’s tales, a merchant’s son who played ducks and drakes with his inheritance (in the direct sense of the word: he loved to toss golden coins into water, to watch the rings), one day, when his prospects had become truly grim, received a gift from an old friend, a coffer to which the shortest note possible was pinned: “Pack up.”   This was easy, for the only thing the man still possessed was his old dressing gown.  He put it on, got into the coffer, and the coffer flew up into the air.  What happened to the merchant’s son after he landed in Turkey is irrelevant to my story, but I wish to ask our correspondents to give more details when they ask questions.  However, since the email had the subject ETYMOLOGY REQUEST, I assume that I am expected to discuss the origin of the word riparian.  This adjective usually means “pertaining to or situated on the banks of a river,” for it goes back to Latin ripuarius, from ripa “bank.”   The medical term riparian “pertaining to a ripa of the brain; marginal, as a part of the brain” (it is used in anatomy) is an extension of the same sense.  I may add that ripa is not related to Engl. rib and that river, a Romance cognate of ripa, is not related to rivulet.

Tell, its senses, tally, and the noun till.  Both senses of the verb tell—“count” and “narrate”—were already present in Old English.  Since tell was derived from a noun and this noun (Old Engl. talu, cognate with Old High German zala and Old Icelandic tala “tale”) also meant “reckoning” and “talk,” it is hard to disentangle the meanings, but, most probably, the semantic kernel was “ordered, or numerical, sequence,” from which “things told in order, a connected narrative” developed.  Therefore, from a historical point of view, “number” (as in German Zahl) seems to have preceded “speech” (as in Dutch taal).  In English, the sense “count” has been almost ousted by “narrate, recount” (compare count and recount!)  But the biblical usage, retained in he telleth the number of the stars and so forth, the phrases tell one’s beads, all told, and untold riches (wealth), as well as in the noun teller, remind us of tell “count.”  Talk has the root tal-, followed by the suffix -k, but tally traces to a Latin etymon (talea “cutting, rod, stick”; tailor, from French, literally “cutter,” as is still seen in Italian tagliatore, is its cognate).  Keeping count by notches on a stick was a universal procedure in the past.  Since Latin t does not correspond to Germanic t (either Germanic th- or non-Germanic d- is needed), tally cannot be a cognate of talea, but it is not absolutely improbable that the Latin word was very early borrowed into Germanic (in such cases one expects identities rather than correspondences).  The origin of talu ~ tala remains, to a certain extent, unknown.  Although its Latin provenance is possible, tale may be a native Germanic word related to Latin dolo (dolare) “to chop,” and, if so, we return to the idea of notches.  Be that as it may, in the history of tale and tell, the idea of counting must have preceded the idea of narrating.  A teller tells money and stands at the till; yet till is not related to tell.  Although its origin is obscure, no path leads from till to tell.

German Gau “region” and its putative English cognate.  Dr. Keith Briggs has read my old blog on the origin of yeoman and sent me his paper “Early English Region-Names with the Suffix -ia.”  Since the time I posted that blog, my article on yeoman has appeared in the McConchie Festschrift, and, if required, I will gladly reciprocate the gift and send the paper to the address given in the email.  The reason the two of us partly studied the same material is the disputable etymology of yeoman.  It has been suggested that the word means something like “region man” (Gaumann, as it were), which is wrong on all counts.  An English cognate of Gau has not been found.  Attempts to detect it in the place name Ely also failed.  Dr. Briggs’s paper explores numerous forms that were tangential to my interests.  As for yeoman, it probably first meant “an ‘additional’ man.”

Deceive ~ deception, receive ~ reception, interceive ~ interception? Why doesn’t the verb given above in bold exist?  Receive and reception were borrowed as individual “items” from Old French.  The same holds for deceive and deception, as well as for deceit and receipt (note the irritating difference in spelling!).  Recipe also came to English independently of receive and reception.  Intercept goes back to the past participle of Latin intercipire “seize; steal.”  Later the noun interception was coined, so that the verb suggested by the proportion receive/deceive ~ reception/deception ~?/interception never existed.  If someone invents it and other people agree to use it, it will appear in English, but it will be a brand-new word.

Does skedaddle have a Greek etymon? The Greek idea has occurred to many.  No, this Americanism can be traced to a British regional verb meaning “to spill, scatter.”  It would be odd if a verb current among the soldiers during the Civil War had a learned, bookish source.  In case our correspondent is seriously interested in the history of skedaddle, it can be found in my etymological dictionary; the entry lists numerous hypotheses on the word’s origin and traces its progress in 19^th-century American English.

Repertory and find.  Are they connected?  Yes, in a way.  Repertory, from late Latin repertorium (dictionaries of Classical Latin do not list it) first meant “index; storehouse” (among other things).  Its root reperire means “find.”

Fizzgig. The word does not seem to pose any problems: fizz refers to something inconstant, and gig makes us think of quick movement.  Perhaps an association with giggle was in play when the word emerged.

Dead as a doornail.  I am sorry to report that the origin of this idiom has been explored high and low and roundabout, that the results are uninspiring, and that everybody says the same.  If our correspondent searches for the phrase in the Internet, he will find what little is known about the phrase and the two current explanations of why the doornail is dead and why it is the doornail that shows no signs of life, rather than herring, mutton, and quite a few others that occur in the idiom dead as—.

GLEANING FOR DEAD EARS ON ONE’S OWN FIELD

Newspapers produce crops throughout the year.  I read them avidly, just as I gladly go to conferences, because linguists are never bored.  If a talk is vapid, they can follow the accent, and if a publication is inane, they can enjoy the felicities of style.

David Brooks of NYT meets an impressionable woman. He writes: “Let’s imagine that someone from 1970 miraculously traveled forward in time and space.  You could show her one of the iPhones that Steve Jobs helped create, and she’d be thunderstruck.”  I am sure she would.  “There are more ways than one to turn a girl’s head” (G.B. Shaw).

The man whom wrote this report’s competency is in doubt. “A federal judge gave prison officials four more months to try to restore the competency of the accused gunman ***, whom a psychologist said has shown remorse for killing six people and wounded 13….”

Let I quote a letter to the editor. “If President Obama had the courage, he… would be saying, in effect, ‘Mr. Cain, you aren’t crazy, and you have some good ideas.  Let’s you and I frame the discussion, and try to leave politics out of it.”  (This ludicrous usage has several variants.  For example, one often runs into sentences like “He greeted my wife and I.”)

Was the parents snatched too? “Investigators have no suspects and few solid leads despite an intensive search for ***, whose parents—*** and***—say was snatched from her crib Monday night or early Tuesday in ***.”

No doubt, this well-plowed field will never leave us without a good harvest.  All the best till next Wednesday.

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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