By Anatoly Liberman

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

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

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

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

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

By Anatoly Liberman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Anatoly Liberman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Anatoly Liberman

The British journals of the Victorian era are an inexhaustible source of elegant phrases, which arouse in me sometimes envy and sometimes amused wonderment. Therefore, while remaining true to that style, I will say that I follow the comments sent to this blog “with appreciative interest, leavened in some cases by knowledge” (a gem from an 1889 article).

Three linguists called geniuses. My innocent conclusion to the post on the origin of the words sea and ocean called forth a few humorous remarks. I said that, in my opinion, Jacob Grimm (1785-1853) was a genius, one of three linguists who deserved such an honor. So who are the other two? It is like the famous question about three common English words ending in -ry: the first two are angry and hungry—what’s the third? (Answer: The third does not exist; the question is a hoax.) But I really meant three. After Grimm came the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who, at the age of 21 (at this age, our undergraduates still need a spellchecker to tell them how to write a lot: one word or two?), offered a reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system that changed Indo-European studies forever. Later he gave a series of lectures on general linguistics at the University of Geneva. After his death, his students, who had made copious notes (as students should), brought them out in book form. Since their publication, general linguistics and, to a certain extent, all the humanities have never been the same. Finally, N.S. Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), a Russian émigré, who taught most of the time he spent in the West at Vienna University, founded a branch of linguistics called phonology. His achievement influenced the development of 20th-century humanities almost as strongly as de Saussure’s. Close to those three are the German Eduard Sievers (1850-1932) and Trubetzkoy’s friend and collaborator Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Jakobson also emigrated from Russia after the 1917 revolution, and following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, where he lived, fled to Sweden and a short time later to the United States. This is my ranking of the greatest greats. I left out Jean F. Champollion (1790-1832), who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was certainly a genius, but not exactly a linguist in the modern sense of the word. Neither among the dead nor among the living can I find anyone approaching those three or five, but as I said in the post, linguistics is unlike music or mathematics, and the contours of genius there are blurry. Other nominations to this Hall (Club) of Fame are welcome.

No questions left behind? It depends. A journalism student sent me a series of questions (eight, to be precise) about the power of words, their change, and so on. She also explained that the answers were needed for a paper (she is not generic: there was a signature). I am accosted along these lines all the time, and I am sorry to inform the questioners that I refuse to write papers for students. I believe they should do their research themselves, and also I am afraid of disgracing myself. Rachmaninoff helped his niece (I think it was a niece) to harmonize a short piece for her studies at the Conservatory. The assignment received a C, the only time Rachmaninoff got a grade below an A or A+. He was tickled to death by the result, but I am touchy and do not want to get either the poor girl or myself into trouble.

Generic they/their. No one has asked me anything about this pronoun in recent weeks, but I have two examples in my archive that I find particularly silly. I think I have once quoted the first of them; however, a good joke bears repetition. “As someone who has been pro-life all their life, I believe life begins at the point of conception…” In principle, their with someone is fine, but the syntax is muddled, and the writer (this time a male) seems to have been stultified to the point at which “they” don’t dare use even the pronoun his and my about “themselves.” The second quotation stresses the importance of knowing everything about one’s bedfellows: “If your friend told you they were going to have sex with someone they ‘knew pretty well,’ you’d probably tell them to be careful.” Very reasonable. Always make it clear to those you sleep with on any occasion how wide-awake you are. The advice comes from the student paper of my university, which is predominantly interested in peace, sports, diversity, and condoms.

The change of er to ar in English and French. The change of er to ar in early Modern English is well-known, and I have touched on it in the past while answering a question from one of our correspondents. The anthologized examples are person ~ parson, university ~ varsity, clerk ~ Clark, Derby ~ Darby, and their likes. I even proposed a tentative explanation of the change. During the time Engl. er, ir, and ur merged into the vowel we now hear in fern, fir, and fur, in some words the group er, as I suggested, escaped the merger by going over to ar (hence parson, and so forth). Such movements regularly occur in phonetic systems. But the weak point of such explanations is that identical changes have been recorded in dissimilar languages. The question from our correspondent concerned the French family name Vardun. Assuming that it goes back to the place name Verdun (and there can probably be no doubt about it), are we justified in reconstructing the change of er to ar in French? The answer is yes. As early as the 13th century, rhymes of the sarge (the name of the fabric serge)/ large type and spellings like sarpent (= serpent) occur. Villon (the middle of the 15th century) rhymed terme and arme, among others. French historical linguists tend to account for the broadening of er to ar by the altered articulation of r. If they are right, an explanation of the same type may perhaps be sought for the change er to ar in English, but little is known about the pronunciation of Engl. r half a millennium ago, though its modern realizations, both southern British and American, are not ancient.

WORD ORIGINS
Cobbler and clobber. I received two comments on clobber, for which I am grateful. Here I would like to add something to what I said in my post. Skeat has a note on clopping, which I have known for a long time but did not include in the original discussion. Clop, a phonetic variant of clap, meant and still means (in dialects) “to adhere, cling to.” On the other hand, clop ~ klop is a sound imitative verb (to go clop-clop), related to Dutch kloppen and German klopfen “to knock.” Clob and clop may be variants of the same word, as are cob and cop in some of their meanings, while clobber “a black paste used by cobblers to fill up and conceal cracks in the leather of boots and shoes” seems to have something to do with “adhering.” If there were homonyms clop ~ clob meaning “adhere, stick to” and “knock,” they were probably often confused, and then clobber becomes rather transparent. Perhaps (if we accept the idea of metathesis, that is, a transposition of sounds in lob ~ obl) those words throw a sidelight on cobbler (the designation of someone who knocks on nails and makes parts of leather adhere to one another) and cobble.

Cockney. I will reproduce the question. “At the Greenhill Oak pub, Cuckney, Nottinghamshire, amongst other historical claims, notices state that in the reign of Edward III, the duke of Portland had incompetent men looking after the King’s horses (palfreys). They regularly shoed them badly, and the Duke was obliged to supply others costing 4 marks each. So Cuckney became used as a term for idiot, and changed to Cockney. Local tradition or just whimsy?” (I knew only shod as the past tense of the verb shoe, but the OED reassured me that shoed, though rare, also exists. This, however, is beside the point.) The story looks as though it were cut out of the whole cloth. The initial meaning of cockney was “pampered child, weakling,” not “simpleton, fool.” The Greenhill pub anecdote has no currency outside its walls, and if there were a grain of truth in it, etymologists would have investigated it long ago. Besides, cockney never had u in the first syllable. In my etymological dictionary, a long entry is devoted to the origin of this difficult word. It did indeed surface in the reign of Edward III and may have been borrowed from French. Its native homonym meant “cock’s egg” (that is, “a bad egg”).

Mirror. Is it connected with German Meer “sea”? No, it is not. Its root also occurs in admire and miracle, which means “to look.”

Opaque names. “Do we know when English people stopped recognizing the etymology of given names, that is, when did the English no longer recognize Edward, Edith, etc, as meaning ‘Wealth Guard,’ ‘War Wealth’, etc.?” The problem with such names is the same as with all so-called disguised compounds. As time goes on, their elements change phonetically and/or alter their meanings, so that their initial signification can no longer be recognized. Sometimes the change is slight. Those who rhyme Sunday with Grundy are one step away from sun + day. Monday is worse, because mon- is far removed from the modern pronunciation of moon. Cupboard is still worse, and if it were spelled cubbard (like Hubbard), no one would be able to guess its origin. Bon- in bonfire is a shortened form of bone, but who will believe it without consulting a dictionary? In Edward, -ward still resembles ward(en)/guard(ian), but ed- goes back to ead “property.” Since the word has not continued into Modern English, the sum has become obscure. Edith contains two lost words: ead, as in Edward, and guth “war, battle” (does the whole mean “war wealth”?). English is full of disguised compounds, including such short words as barn (originally “barley house”) and bridal, which at one time was not an adjective but a noun meaning “ale drunk at a wedding.” Names do not have to change so radically (compare Wolfgang), but they most often do.

I will answer some of the questions “left behind” on the last Wednesday (Othin’s/Odin’s day) of November, in the next set of “gleanings.”

By Anatoly Liberman

It has been established long since that to know the origin of a word, one must know the properties of the object the word designates. This idea, sometimes neglected today (to the detriment of those who neglect it), dominated medieval etymologizing. For example, since God was universally understood to be good, people took it for granted that god and good are—must be—related (in fact, they are not).  Conversely, for the statement that god, when read backwards, yields dog, witty heretics were burned. Apparently, certain principles were at stake. Modern historians and archeologists often turn to etymologists for assistance and occasionally get some advice from them, but in principle, it is word historians who need help. Consider the word thimble. There can be no doubt about the relatedness of thimble to thumb. Etymology, it appears, has the means to prove that thimbles were at one time meant for the thumb. However, this supposition should be modified. Etymology can only ask why a small cuplike guard used in sewing is called a thimble, though it is put on the third finger. Before our permissive epoch set in, female teachers in girls’ schools used the thimble (invariably worn on the index finger) to inflict painful blows on their charges’ heads. Therefore, it is a relief to discover that the older thimble, called “finger stall” or “finger bell,” indeed protected the thumb of those who pushed the needle through leather and other hard materials. Anyone interested in the history of thimbles will find a remarkable collection in the Fingerhut Museum (Kreglingen, Germany; Fingerhut, literally “finger cap”) and will understand how the thimble got its name. It follows, as predicted, that we need a look at the artifact to justify the etymology.

Everything is now clear, except for the spelling of thumb. No one has ever pronounced b in it, and it is absent from the word’s Old English form and from its cognates, such as Dutch duim and German Daumen. Since there is no museum of etymology or even a center for it and since dictionaries rarely dwell on such details, a post to explain the situation is needed. The irresponsible ancestors of modern English-speakers had the habit of inserting b between m and l. Bramble, grumble, mumble, nimble, scramble, shambles, number, humble, slumber, gambler, and quite a few others have the same parasitic (excrescent) b one hears in thimble (and in embers, b sprang up without l after b, probably in the group br). Unlike thimble, the words thumb, numb, and dumb have unetymological mb in spelling, though they do not end in l. Why do they? In principle, the story begins in late Middle English. At that time, consonantal groups were often simplified. Solemn and column are now pronounced without n. In the speech of some people kiln is homophonous with kill, g is always mute in diaphragm, phlegm, and so forth (the lost sounds have been preserved only when a syllable boundary separates them from their neighbors, as in solem-nity and phleg-matic). Because of the simplification, lamb was fleeced of its historical final b; today b is retained in spelling but not in pronunciation. The same happened to jamb, plumb, and tomb (borrowed words), along with womb (Old Engl. wamba “belly”; compare Wamba, the name of Cedric’s “fool” in Ivanhoe) and climb (Old Engl. climban). But timber already had parasitic b in Old English. French also sometimes has excrescent b in similar positions: so in chambre “room” and trembler “tremble” (from Latin camera and tremulare, evidently pronounced without the vowels given here in bold).

As long as the simplification of consonantal groups remained an active force, literate people felt uncertain when to write m, as opposed to mb, and began to add b to m gratuitously, a mistake (here, reverse spelling) called hypercorrection. This accounts for the modern forms limb (limber has excrescent b, regardless of whether it means “shaft,” “holes in timber,” or “pliable”; none of them is related to limb) and crumb. To be sure, it would have been more reasonable to abolish b where it was not pronounced, and this is what the related languages did (cf. German Lamm/Dutch lam and German dumm/Dutch dom for Engl. lamb and dumb), but English hates letting go of its orthographic relics. An 1819 dictionary still allowed its users to choose among jamb, jaumb, and jam. However, Samuel Johnson’s jamb won the day. It is hard to imagine that anyone even in the 15th century (which is indeed late Middle English) realized that numb and nimble contain the same root. Old Engl. niman “to take” had been superseded by Scandinavian take, and even if that had not happened, it would have been difficult to guess that numb originally meant “taken” (hence “insensible”), while nimble “quick and light in movement” went back to Middle Engl. nemel “able to take, grasp, seize.” Nimble was perhaps easier to identify than numb, for the verb nim had some currency until the 16th century. Later it degraded into a word of thieving cant (“steal”). Shakespeare knew it; otherwise, he would not have introduced Corporal Nym in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Thumb and thimble are probably still felt to belong together. If we ever reform English spelling, it may perhaps be reasonable to retain the spelling thumb, though I have great doubts about numb. But dumb is just dumb.

The change of ml to mbl is natural and common (the French parallel need not come as a surprise). Reverse spelling (crumb for crum, a word in which b has no justification) is also a trivial mistake. But everything is not so simple. From time to time we run into old words that have “organic,” etymological mb. Timber has been mentioned above. Another such word is comb. The sound b occurs after m in the Old English form and in all its Germanic and more distant cognates. However, not inconceivably, it was “parasitic” even 3000 years ago. The story of comb would not be worthy of mention, but for a closely related word no one today associates with it. The word is oakum. Old Engl. acumbe (with several recorded variants) has the same structure as Old High German achambi, and its etymology poses no problems: oakum, that is, loose hemp (earlier also tow, loose flax), fiber obtained by picking old rope, means “off-combings, what has been combed out”; a in acumbe was a prefix. We should be grateful to the phonetic change that treated acumbe so mercilessly. Otherwise, we would have ended up with oakumb. In dealing with the tomb of English spelling, one learns to appreciate every crumb of common sense.

By Anatoly Liberman

Of all the ethnic slurs invented for a Jew, Kike is the best-known (a dubious distinction) and the most widely used. Dictionaries prefer to say that its origin is unknown, which is right but uninspiring. By contrast, the Internet and books on ethnic conflict and on American English offer such detailed summaries of opinions that I have little to add, except for outlining the nature of the problem. Some general ideas on the subject can also be found in my earlier post on Sheeny. (Dictionaries usually print such words with low-case letters, but I prefer to capitalize them. Though abhorrent to all decent people, they are, unfortunately, the names of nationalities and should be treated accordingly. That capitalizing ethnic names, the names of the days of the week/ the months of the year, and notional words in titles is silly is another matter, “not germane to the subject,” as a retired colleague of mine used to put it.)

In dealing with Kike, Sheeny, and so forth, the question arises whether the word came into being among the Jews (one group of the Jews may have tried to denigrate another group, as, presumably, happened in the history of Sheeny) or among their persecutors. Nothing is easier than to turn a perfectly innocent word into a slur. Names are perhaps the best candidates for this kind of transformation. Dago has become a mocking term for Italians, Spaniards, and the Portuguese (because so many of them were supposedly called Diego), while Abram (stress on the second syllable) is a great favorite of Russian anti-Semites, partly because it is a prototypical Jewish name and partly because it contains r, a trill the Jews often pronounce with a gh-like sound (“burr”). Hence the conjectures that Kike and Smouch are alterations of Ike “Isaac” and Moshe “Moses” respectively. However, the etymology of a low word, even of a low word inspired by low feelings, has to be investigated according to the same rules that hold for the rest of the vocabulary: one expects a plausible explanation of the sounds and reference to the milieu in which the word under discussion is believed to have emerged. Since no one has accounted for the phonetic change from Ike to Kike and from Moshe to Smouch; both guesses should be rejected without regret.

Another derivation traces Kike to the name Hayyim, transcribed in German as Chaim. Kaim “Jew” was recorded in mid-18th-century German cant. Then, we are told, “since Jewish speakers took -im of Kaim as a plural ending in Hebrew, they created a new singular *kai [an asterisk designates reconstructed, as opposed to attested, forms], which by reduplication gave the form ki-ki,” later simplified to Kike. It is hard to understand why Jewish speakers mistook the last syllable of the name they must have known for centuries for a plural ending. Would any English-speaker identify the final -s of Rose with a plural ending? And how did the reduplication arise? I don’t think this etymology is any better than the previous two.

Two main hypotheses on the origin of Kike are often mentioned. According to the first (its author is J.H.A. Lacher, 1926), the suffix -sky in the Jewish family names of emigrants from Poland and Russia became a linguistic marker of their poor manners (compare the adjective buttinsky, with its implied reference to the behavior of pertinacious Jews). Allegedly, the word arose among the Jews “of German origin, who soon insisted that the business ethics and the standard of living and culture of these Russians were far lower than theirs.” According to J.H.A. Lacher, the snobbish “brethren” of emigrants from the Slavic countries (most of whom ended up as traveling salesmen) called the newcomers kikis. Lacher gives no reference to his sources, except the following: “When I heard the term kikis for the first time at Winona, Minnesota, about forty years ago, it was a Jewish salesman of German descent who used it and explained it to me, but in the course of a few years it disappeared, kike being used instead.” We can assume that i in both syllables of kikis was long (as in the word sky, for instance). How did it develop from the short i/y of -sky? Also, s, the initial consonant of the suffix was supposedly left out and the remaining stub (-ky) reduplicated (again reduplicated!) and pronounced with a long vowel. Given such freedom of phonetic change, almost any combination of sounds can be shown to become any other. (Incidentally, in Minnesota the first vowel of Winona is short; stress falls on the second syllable, which is long.)

The second hypothesis turns round the Yiddish word for “circle” and has two variants. According to the main of them, on Ellis Island those immigrating Jews who knew neither English nor the Roman script were asked to put an X near their names, but looked upon it as a picture of the cross, a symbol of their former persecution, and instead put a circle. One of the variants of the Yiddish word for “circle” can be transcribed as kaykl, and this is said to be the etymon of Kike. Could the English speaking officials on Ellis Island isolate one Yiddish word in the speech of the Jewish people they dealt with, use it mockingly, and make it famous? I am afraid that we have here an example of the rich Ellis Island folklore that produced a Jew Shaun Ferguson and a Chinese man Sam Ting.

In an article by David L. Gold I read a slightly different version of the kaykl etymology, which he endorses, though cautiously. He quotes a letter to the editor of The American Israelite: “It seems probable that drummers [that is, traveling salesmen] called the Russian Jew, who unable to sign his name in English made his handmark in the form of the traditional Kykala [a diminutive form of Kaykl], a Kyke. The term undoubtedly originated as drummer slang.” We will dispense with the adverb undoubtedly, for in etymological research doubts are unavoidable, but accept the propositions that Kike, a disparaging term of Yiddish origin, was coined by the Jews and that its etymon must have contained a long vowel. The letter, dated July 23, 1914, was written relatively soon after the word Kike spread in American English. The OED could not find any mention of it prior to 1904. The tradition ascribing the coining of Kike to Jewish traveling salesmen (hucksters, hawkers, badgers) may be trustworthy. Compare the etymology of the English word slang (it can be found in an earlier post and in my dictionary); it also seems to have been coined by traveling salesmen.

However, the connection between Kike and Kaykl is hard to demonstrate and possible associations are many (couldn’t the reference be to the special routes of the Russian immigrants of Jewish descent or to their circle of support, the in group?). Although we cannot be certain of the word’s origin, we can perhaps account for its popularity. Palindromes (words that remain the same if pronounced backward) often have an expressive character: consider tit, tat, poop, peep, kick, sis, boob, and the rest. Kike is offensive because its very form demeans its target. Peter Tamony, a famous student of American slang, wrote an article on keeks, Kikes, and kooks. He had no linguistic background and sometimes allowed suspicious ideas to run away with him (does anyone still use run away in this sense?). His etymology of Kike hardly merits the briefest mention, but his intuition did not betray him. In a way, Kike indeed belongs with keek and kook. Too bad this linguistic perfection serves such an ugly cause.

By Anatoly Liberman

Much to my embarrassment, I am using a title of the type I ridiculed not too long ago, but the temptation was too strong, and I yielded to it. The idea (of this post, not of the title) occurred to me when I was reading a book on the history and archeology of Ancient Greece. The ultimate source of ocean in the European languages is Greek, but where the Greeks got their word is not known. Etymological conjectures on this score have not been too numerous. Some scholars compared okeanos with a Sanskrit verb and its Greek cognate meaning “to surround” (may I mention in parentheses that surround has nothing to do with round but everything with Latin superundare “rise in waves,” whose root is unda “wave”?); however, nowadays hardly anyone has trust in this connection. A Hebrew root, also meaning “surround,” holds out even less promise. Most likely, the Greeks borrowed the word from the non-Indo-European speakers of their islands.

The image of a mighty sea or river encircling the world is common in the beliefs of many Eastern peoples (the Babylonians, for instance), and it also occurs in the mythology of the Indo-Europeans. According to the most archaic Greek beliefs, the Ocean was a river, but later authors identified it with the Black Sea, and its single island with the entrance to Hades, the kingdom of the dead. Homer placed this entrance on the shore of the Ocean.

The history of the Germanic word sea presents a striking parallel to what has been said above about ocean. Its early form, recorded in fourth-century Gothic, is saiws, and, as far as we can judge, it designated, at least originally, a body of stagnant water. We know one of the Indo-European words for “sea” from Latin mare (compare such English borrowings from the Romance languages as marina, marine, marital, maritime, and marinade) and its cognates. The German for “sea” is still Meer, a synonym of See, but Engl. mere has little currency. At one time it meant “sea,” whereas today, in the rare instances it is used, it means “lake.” This puzzling confusion of words for a body of salt and of stagnant water goes back to the beginning of recorded Germanic. Thus, Grendel, the monster Beowulf killed, lived in a mere, and a detailed description of his uninviting habitat points to a swamp, but when Beowulf returned to fight Grendel’s mother, he plunged to the bottom of the sea. Yet mother and son were said to live together.

From Gothic we have an incomplete text of the Bible. The translator of the New Testament into Gothic (Wulfila) needed words for Greek limne “lake; sea” and thalassa “sea” (someone may have come across the English noun limnology “study of lakes” and the adjective thalassic “pertaining to the sea”). In addition to marei (an obvious cognate of Latin mare) and saiws, he had at his disposal a curious tautological compound marisaiws, that is, “sea-sea” or “lake-sea,” which he used to render the same limne (those interested in tautological compounds will find a special post on the subject in this blog). According to some indications, the protoform from which saiws and its cognates were derived sounded approximately like saikwi- (with the hyphen for an ending). This fact militates against the tempting comparison between saiws and Latin saevus “raging”; -k- is the problem. Probably saikwi- and its Indo-European ancestor soigwi- designated a body of stagnant water not prone to rage.

None of the other attempts to find a convincing etymology for sea has found universal recognition, and many word historians (many, not all!) tend to think that the speakers of the Germanic languages borrowed it from the former inhabitants of their homeland in northern Europe. The similarity between the search for the roots of sea and ocean is instructive. The Greeks were very well aware of the great expanse of water around their archipelago; yet the word Okeanos may be part of the pre-Greek substrate (substrate refers to a language of the indigenous population submerged in the language of the new settlers). Likewise, the isolated fact that sea has no obvious Germanic origin would prove nothing about the closeness of the first speakers of Germanic to any coast. But saiws forms part of a sizable group of words pertaining to sea and seafaring that have no convincing Indo-European etymology (sail, boat, ebb, storm, and others—they are listed on p. 277 of my book Word Origins…and How We Know Them), and in their entirety they pose the question about the home of Germanic-speakers and their familiarity with the sea. However interesting this question may be, it need not delay us here.

The Greeks, as noted, associated the Ocean with the kingdom of the dead. Germanic speakers also believed that life ends in the sea. The legendary Scyld Scefing, a king described in the opening pages of Beowulf, departs after being given a ship burial. Another ship burial was that of the Scandinavian god Baldr, the hero of a famous myth. The Gothic for “soul” is saiwala, and its etymology has been contested as vigorously as the etymology of saiws. Jacob Grimm, the elder of the two brothers of fairy tale fame, believed that saiws and saiwala are related. He may have been right. Indirect proof of his hypothesis can be seen in the proposals to connect both saiws and saiwala with either Latin saevus “raging” or Greek aiolos “rapid,” the latter familiar to us from Aeolus, the ruler of the ever-changeable winds; whence Aeolian harp.

I will take the liberty to finish this post with a personal remark about Jacob Grimm. Linguistics, literature, and history are unlike mathematics, physics, or music. One should beware of calling a language historian a genius. Yet at least three language students deserve this appellation. One of them is Jacob Grimm. The public knows him only because of the fairytales, but he was the founder of comparative Germanic philology and of several other areas of study. More important is the fact how often, though armed only with his prodigious memory and unerring intuition, rather than our dictionaries, manuals, and computers, he offered correct solutions. Every time I have a bright idea about the origin of a word, an old custom, or belief, I look up the relevant passage in the volumes of Jacob Grimm’s works. In most cases, it turns out that he anticipated my guess by at least 150 years. So I think his view of the derivation of the word soul (saiwala) is right, and I find some confirmation of it in the Greeks’ treatment of the Ocean. No doubt, Grimm knew all of it long before I was born.

By Anatoly Liberman

As always, many thanks for comments, questions, additions, and corrections. I keep eating my way through a mountain of questions I have received since June, but something will be left over for October. My mail contains many traditional queries, that is, people ask the same questions over and over again. Let me refer our correspondents to this blog for some information on who versus whom, kitty/catty corner, and hunky-dory (separate posts were devoted to them). With regards to tomfoolery, see my book Word Origins…, in which the use of the proper name Tom is discussed at some length. However, I will return briefly to one old problem. Our correspondent writes that she hates hearing drive safe instead of drive safely. Some time in the past I wrote on “the death of the adverb,” and the essay provoked numerous comments, which I need not reproduce here. I only want to provide some comfort to the defenders of the beleaguered part of speech (and by the same token to myself, for I am one of them). My advice is to treat the change philosophically. The drive safe construction has been gaining ground for centuries, and in German it has won. For the benefit of English speakers here is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128. In this sonnet, the poet begrudges the luck the virginal of his beloved enjoys: the keys (“jacks”) of the musical instrument kiss her fingers, while his lips are not invited to do any work: “How oft…/ do I envy those jacks that nimble leap/ To kiss the tender inward of thy hand.…” Obviously, nimble here means nimbly, and what is good for Shakespeare is good enough for us. Right? No, but I promised to provide comfort, not a justification for safe driving under the influence (of the Bard).

Big questions. 1. How does one expand one’s vocabulary? The usual answer is: “By voracious reading.” The answer is correct but insufficient, especially if one wants to expand one’s active vocabulary. The only way to learn words is to learn them, that is, to treat one’s native language as one treats foreign languages. Read good books, write out the words new to you, look them up in a dictionary to make sure that you did not misunderstand their meaning, and learn them together with the context in which they occurred. One word a day will go a long way. 2. On several occasions I mentioned the fact that American English, being a colonial language, is more conservative than the language of the metropolis. How does this fact tally with the readiness of American English to adopt countless foreign words? Conservative refers to the phonetic and the grammatical structure of language. American English has retained the pronunciation and some forms that were current four and three centuries ago, while British English has often modified them.

Separate words. In (the) hospital. Why do British and American English differ in the use of the definite article? English-speakers who have not studied the history of their language (that is, 99, 999% of the population) believe that the use of articles is natural and stable. However, it is not and changes from century to century and from one part of the English speaking world to another. Note the vacillation even in Modern American English: in the future ~ in future (the second variant seems to be winning out; German has a similar alternation: in Zukunft ~ in der Zukunft). The definite article disappeared in such adverbial phrases as go to bed, at school, in prison, at work, and even in that time of year. In hospital marks the triumph of “adverbialization”; by contrast, in the hospital remains a free combination of a preposition and a noun. Aluminum versus aluminium. This pair is another famous example of the difference between American and British English, second perhaps only to fall ~ autumn, truck ~ lorry, and sidewalk ~ pavement. Sir Humphrey Davy called his invention (1812) aluminum, but in England i was later added to it on the analogy of chemical substances like sodium. American English preserves the earliest form. What is the origin of Sardoudledom? I am quoting from the OED, a most useful book for learning etymology: “[From] blend of the name Victorien Sardou (1831-1908). French dramatist + DOODLE + -DOM. A fanciful word used to describe well-wrought, but trivial or morally objectionable, plays considered collectively; the characteristic milieu in which such work is admired.”

Pleaded versus pled. Pled, which is being used more and more often, is an analogical form: plead ~ pled, as lead ~ led and read (infinitive) ~ read (preterit). How did savings end up being a singular form? I think most people avoid saying a savings of $20 (though a saving of $20 is not the most elegant phrase either), but his savings is will shock few. Words ending in -s, like digs, Boots (the name of a servant at a hotel), or Sniffers (the name of a guinea pig), often become singulars. We have means (a means to an end) and works “factory” (a chemical works is situated not far from where we live). In a relatively recent edition of Little Red Riding Hood, it is written that the girl lived near a woods. This usage seems odd to me (and to my spellchecker), but apparently, not to everybody. Thus, savings joined the words whose plural ending does not prevent them from being looked upon as singulars.

Sam Hill. My timid refusal to connect Hill with hell (unless it is a taboo form) impressed no one. I hasten to repeat that I have no clue to the origin of the idiom but would like to know where, regardless of Hill ~ hell, Sam came from. Hill, even if etymologized convincingly, is only half of the problem. Cottage cheese: Is it derived from ricotta? I am sure it is not. If it were, it would, most likely, not have been “folk etymologized” so drastically. Compare German Schmierkäse (literally “smear cheese”), which in American English became smear-case! (See it in the OED.) Cottage cheese is also an “Americanism” and seems to mean what it says. The name of this dairy product often consists of two words: a noun meaning “cheese” and some attribute (so, for instance, in French: fromage blanc or fromage frais). The similarity between cottage and ricotta is coincidental. Ricotta means “recooked” (tt in -cotta goes back to ct: the Latin root of this word can be seen in Engl. concoct); compare Italian biscotto “twice cooked,” that is biscuit. Cottage cheese is often called in unpredictable ways. Curds is a word of unknown origin despite the existence of look-alikes in Celtic. German Quark is a borrowing from Slavic, where it means “product,” while Scandinavian ost has a respectable Indo-European descent.

What is the preferred spelling of czar? It is czar, though tsar (not czar) reflects the pronunciation of the Russian word much better. “The spelling cz-, which is non-Slavonic, is due to Herberstein, ‘Rerum Muscovitarum Commentarii’ [A Commentary on the Deeds of the Muscovites], 1549, the chief early authority on Russia in Western Europe” (The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology). What happened to -ce- in Worcestershire? It was shed, and not only in this place name. Compare Leicestershire and Gloucestershire, pronounced Lester-, Gloster-. Place names drop middle syllables with dire regularity. Worcester goes back to Old Engl. Wigraceaster (the second element -ceaster, like -caster in Lancaster, is the Latin word for “camp”). In today’s pronunciation only Wuster is left, though the archaic spelling has preserved some traces of the original form. American speakers should be warned not to rhyme -shire, when it occurs as the second part of place names, with hire, mire, wire: it should be a homophone of sheer.

As noted, I still have some unanswered questions on file. I’ll take care of them on the last Wednesday of October.

By Anatoly Liberman

“Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe,/ Give it a stitch and that will do:/ Here’s a nail and there’s a prod,/ And now my shoe is well shod.” At first sight, all is clear in this nursery rhyme except how the cobbler, who, according to ancient advice, should stick to his last, got his name. Yet the first impression is false, and the beginning of the rhyme hints that the researcher’s paths won’t be straight. The instructions in the opening strophe are puzzling: “Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe,/ And get it done by half-past two:/ If half-past two can’t be done,/ Get it done by half-past one.” Really? My adventure began when somebody asked me about the etymology of clobber “to hit hard,” and it turned out that no one knows. Ever since, it has been a fixed idea with me that a mysterious tie exists between clobber and cobbler. It will be seen that my attempt to discover this tie has been at best moderately successful.

A cobbler is obviously someone who cobbles, whereas cobble looks like a frequentative or iterative verb derived from cob (such verbs—this follows from their name—designate repeated action). However, though cob “to beat, strike, thresh (seed)” has been recorded (mainly in dialects), nearly all its occurrences are late, and the meanings do not match too well, for a cobbler mends or makes shoes rather than beats or strikes. The other cobble “a rounded stone,” as in cobblestone, ends in a diminutive suffix (“a small cob”), but the etymology of cob “a round object” is also obscure and therefore sheds no light on its homonym (to) cob. Many words in the modern Germanic languages containing the syllables cob- and cop- refer to blows (“beat, thresh, hit”) and roundness (“head” and “clump,” among others), that is, a shape produced by continual striking.

Cobbler has been known from texts since the 14th century. By contrast, clobber surfaced in the middle of the 20th century and is believed to have originated in British air-force slang. From a chronological point of view they are incompatible; yet we do not know enough about the impulses that make people use certain sound groups to denote certain meanings. Numerous studies of sound symbolism attest to stable associations in this area, but they are not always able to account for the choice of the material. Even if we agree that cob- ~ cop- are sound symbolic formations, we will still be left wondering why they have been endowed with the meaning “beat, strike.” Nor do cob- and especially cop- reproduce the sound of collision accurately enough to be called echoic. However, we may recognize the connection even if we fail to explain its nature. Perhaps cobble/cobbler and clobber do go back to the same impulse.

The plot thickens in every sense of this word once we discover the existence of clobber “a black paste used by cobblers (!) to fill up and conceal cracks in the leather of shoes and boots,” first recorded in the 19th century. Predictably, its etymology is unknown. A typical feature of such formations is their ability to huddle into pseudo-families. Consider tit, tot, tat, and tad: they look alike and designate something small or insignificant, without being true cognates. In the present case, a search reveals Engl. clob “a lump of earth,” clog (originally) “a block; clump,” clod, and clot. Clout, cleat (from Old Engl. cleat “lump, wedge”), clutter, and cloud belong with clot. All those near synonyms begin with cl- but end in different consonants. Some of them turned up in texts late, the others are ancient. Their age, old or young, does not make their origin clearer. Supposedly, we are dealing with a root meaning “lump, clump” or “to stick together.”

In addition to clot-clog-clob, we should look at club. The connection between a club “cudgel” and beating, hitting, striking needs no proof. Unlike later dictionaries, the OED was cautious in tracing the English noun to Old Norse klubba, but even if club is native, it is related to klubba. An Old Norse synonym of klubba was klumba, a word always compared with Engl. clump (apparently, a borrowing from German). Skeat and others pass over the variation b ~ p (klumba ~ clump), and we can also disregard it here. More to the point is the circumstance that another Old Norse word for “club, cudgel” was kolfr, related to Old High German kolbo (Modern German Kolben). Everybody agrees, and with good reason, that kolfr ~ kolbo and klubba are cognates. Consequently, in such words l may precede or follow the vowel. Armed with this discovery, we return to cobble and clobber, the latter with both of its meanings: “lump of earth” and “hit hard.”

The verb cobble is probably what it appears to be, that is, a frequentative variant of cob “beat,” with the more specialized sense “to shape up, process (by beating)” or something similar; hence “mend.” When it arose, it began to resemble the noun clobber “paste,” which, I believe, is much older than our texts suggest. Originally, it may have had nothing to do with shoe making, but what would have been more natural than assigning it to a cobbler! It will be seen that the main difficulty in disentangling the cob-cobble-cobbler-clobber knot is chronological. The words came into existence in the depths of regional speech, whether in Common Germanic, Old English, or the 19th century, and all we know about them is that at their birth they may have been expressive, sound symbolic, or even sound imitative. The initial impulse is unclear, and recorded texts are a poor guide to their age.

Here then is the summary. Clubs exist for clobbering;-er in the verb is a suffix synonymous with -le, as in flicker, shatter, and so forth. The o ~ u variation is common in dialects. For example, slobber has the variant slubber; such pairs are rather numerous. A cobbler cobbles and a club clobbers. But in this etymological stew we find many other words, “obscurely related,” as old dictionaries liked to put it. This should not surprise us: some items of the vocabulary are aristocrats whose ancestors are millennia old, whereas others are plebeians reveling in their obscurity and incredibly vital. Clobber and cobbler do not pretend to be of noble descent.

By Anatoly Liberman

In the eighties of the 19th century, chestnut “a piece of trite information” took American newspapers by storm, but the origin of this strange application of the name of a nut to a “Joe Miller” was lost as soon as the word came up. In 1888, James Murray, while working on the letter C for the OED, wrote the following: “Chestnut. Many circumstantial stories purporting to give the origin of the slang use of this for ‘stale joke, story heard before,’ appeared in the American newspapers in 1886 and 1887. As these differed in toto from one another, they testified to the ingenuity of their inventors, but gave no help towards the actual origin. Are there any facts as to this known?” The bite of Murray’s language is typical. He always begged his correspondents not to indulge in etymological guesswork but to supply him only with evidence. His readers sympathized with this attitude but kept sending him their suggestions.

In the entry chestnut in the OED, we read: “Origin unknown: said to have arisen in U.S. The newspapers of 1886-7 contain numerous circumstantial explanations palpably invented for the purpose. A plausible account is given in the place cited in quot. 1888.” The whole of the relevant quotation will be reproduced below, but it would be of some interest to read those circumstantial explanations even if they testify only to the ingenuity of their inventors. I am greatly obliged to two bibliographers (both incomparably more experienced in such matters than I am)—Stephen Goranson and Dennis Lien—who supplied me with many useful excerpts, but even they were unable to find the conjectures about which Murray spoke with unconcealed contempt. I came across only one such, second-hand: it was quoted in Notes and Queries (July 29, 1889) with reference to the Louisville Western Recorder, but without specifying the issue or date. Allegedly, chestnut is “a corruption of the old saying just not.” If the other etymologies are of the same type, they need not bother us. Perhaps all of them have been preserved in the archives of the OED.

The American dictionaries published close to the eighties (The Century Dictionary and Funk and Wagnalls [FW], 1893, which copied from it) wrote: “In allusion to a stale or worm-eaten chestnut.” This explanation remained in FW until 1959. Related explanations are chestnut, because it is old enough to have a beard and others like it. Frank Chance, about whom I have spoken admiringly more than once in this blog, suggested that chestnut might be a translation of French marron “a kind of chestnut” and “a stencil plate by means of which any word or pattern may be reproduced indefinitely” (he also mentioned a few comparable attributive uses). Some figurative senses of marron refer to things unlicensed or irregular. As always in such cases, the most important thing is not to find a plausible etymon (an old, worm-eaten nut or a French noun/adjective), but to explain why this word attained celebrity exactly when it did. Celebrity is no exaggeration. The name became so popular that a chestnut bell was invented. It was a little nickel-plated gong “attached to the coat or vest of the thoughtless.” When the wearer wished to be offensive or funny, he made use of the bell. The phrases (or compounds) chestnut gong and chestnut protectors existed too. Listeners rang them to express their derision. The device was said to have been invented in New York.

Additionally, chestnut was referred to the family name Chestnut. One more etymology perhaps deserves mention. A correspondent wrote to Notes and Queries in 1923: “I was told [in Philadelphia a few years ago] that the principal—I think the only—theatre in that town stood in Chestnut Street, until a rival house was opened in Walnut Street, which continues the line of Chestnut Street. The partisans of the older theatre attended a performance in the new one as jealous and vociferous critics, and when they recognized any phrase they had heard or passage that they had witnessed in the Chestnut Street theatre, they shouted ‘Chestnut, chestnut!’ I am bound to say that this does not sound very convincing; but I give it as the legend current in Philadelphia.”

If we disregard references to nuts, English or French, family names, garbled phrases like just not, and so forth, we will find only one lead worth pursuing. Tradition, despite its conflicting variants, derives chestnut from theatrical slang. The tale quoted approvingly by Murray has been repeated in many popular books and given additional credence by the Supplement to the OED. But the OED had enough space for only a tiny piece of that tale (from Hatton’s Reminiscences of J.L. Toole). Here is all of it.

“‘There is a melodrama,’ says Mr. Jefferson,’ but little known to the present generation, written by William Dillon, and called the Broken Sword. There are two characters in it—one a Captain Xavier, and the other the comedy part of Pablo. The captain is a sort of baron Munchausen, and in telling his exploits says:—I entered the woods of Colloway, when suddenly from the thick boughs of a cork-tree—“—Pablo interrupts him with the words, “A chestnut, Captain; a chestnut.”—“Bah,” replies the Captain; “Booby, I say a cork-tree!”—“A chestnut,” reiterated Pablo. “I should know as well as you, having heard you tell the tale these twenty-seven times.”—William Warren, who had often played the part of Pablo, was at a stage-dinner a few years ago, when one of the gentlemen present told a story of doubtful age and originality.” A chestnut,” murmured Mr. Warren, quoting from the play, “I have heard you tell the tale these twenty-seven times.”—The application of the lines pleased the rest of the table, and when the party broke up, each helped to spread the story and Mr. Warren’s commentary. And that,’ says Mr. Jefferson, ‘is what I really believe to be the origin of the word ‘chestnut’.”

A few things puzzle me about this etymology, by now itself a venerable chestnut. In the Reminiscences the name of the author appears as Dillon, but it must be Dimond (correctly given in the OED). Likewise, the Captain’s name was Zavior, not Xavier, a circumstance that makes the narrator’s memory an unsafe source of reference (though, to be sure, Xavier and Zavior only look different but are pronounced the same). Dimond’s “melo-drama” was published in 1816 and, despite its apparent success, has never been reprinted. The first edition of Joseph Hatton’s Reminiscences of J.L. Toole came out in 1888, when the slang word chestnut had become widely known, so that it was easy to fabricate a tale for the purposes of folk etymology (compare the report of the war of the theaters in Philadelphia). As far as we can judge, the homeland of chestnut “an oft-repeated joke” is the United States. What made it so wildly popular in American newspapers? Was The Broken Sword performed evening after evening on American stage? (Hardly so: the play “was little known to the present generation”). Why didn’t this word circulate in England before it surfaced in America? We are told that Warren whispered his remark. How did it become the talk of the town? I have great difficulty connecting the dots.

Modern dictionaries behave ignominiously. Under chestnut, they list the sense “a stale joke” and offer no etymology (not even “origin unknown”), as though it is natural for chestnut to have such a meaning. The old verdict “the numerous accounts of the origin of this use… are mutually exclusive and all incapable of proof” seems to be correct. But attempts to trace chestnut to theatrical usage may bear fruit, and this fruit (let us hope) will be less stale and worm-eaten than a rotten chestnut. At the moment we are nowhere near that goal.