Cheek by jow

English is a language of limitless opportunities: all kinds of weird things happen in it. Some words are spelled alike but pronounced differently: bow (as in the bow of a ship or he made a low bow) and bow (as in bowtie or bow and arrows), row (she kicked up a row) and row (as in the front row), sow “pig” and sow “spread seeds,” permit (the verb) and permit (the noun). When you read (are you sure you pronounced read correctly?) that someone walked into the hall when the violinists were bowing, you will never guess what is meant, and woe to you if you have only seen but never heard the word bowie knife. Words like bow/bow are called homographs. More often different spelling points to the same pronunciation. Write, wright (now surviving in a few compounds like playwright and in the given name Wright), right, and rite are nice quadruplets. Those are homophones. But most common in this world of make-believe are homonyms: words that have different meanings, though they are spelled and pronounced alike, as in “We eat what we can, and what we cannot eat, we can.”

Some homographs are quite imaginative. Compare “use the front entrance” and “she was entranced” (if I am not mistaken, speakers of British English are consistently entranced with things, whereas Americans tend to be entranced by them.) The noun and the verb have similar but not identical origins. The noun is a 16th-century borrowing of Old French entrance. In English, it underwent the familiar change of shifting stress to the first syllable. The verb also surfaced in our texts in the 16th century, but it was formed in English, rather than French, with the help of the prefix en-, as, in entrust, enlarge, and enfeeble (to give three random examples); hence the stress on the second syllable.

A partly similar pair is incense (as in incense and nonsense) and incense (as in incensed by his rudeness; here everybody says by!). Those two words are also from French. The root of the noun is cense, from ecclesiastical Latin incensum, the past participle (neuter) of incendere “set on fire” (cf. incendiary). Like entrance (the place for entering), the noun incense acquired initial stress in English. However, the phonetic history of incense “irritate” (earlier “inflame”) does not repeat that of the verb entrance. Its etymon (source) was Old French incenser. The stress was moved one syllable “to the left” and stayed there.

Then there is minute in wait a minute and minute associated with minutiae (as in the phrase in minute detail). Only the noun minute is from Old French; it joined hundreds of Romance words that are now pronounced with stress on the first syllable. By contrast, the adjective continues Latin minutus; the first u was long and stressed. (The minutes of a meeting got their name from the meaning “small” or “detailed,” but what exactly was small is unclear: perhaps the writing, as opposed to the engrossed copy. “Detailed” fits the sense better. In any case, the French reflex of the adjective minute is menu, and menu des repas “list of items of a meal” has become the international restaurant term menu.)

Homonyms are so numerous in Modern English that there are thick dictionaries of them. Many of them developed from the same source, but we no longer realize the connection: for instance, spring “jump,” spring “rivulet”, and spring “season”; or, when we do, we need an effort to restore their original union (years ago, in pursuit of linguistic mischief, I enjoyed baffling my interlocutors with the statement “I don’t contemplate your countenance,” as meaning “I don’t expect your support”). Others acquired identical pronunciations and spelling more or less by accident (“fry this fish” and “small fry”).

One of the most often etymological questions one hears is why the opening in the iris of the eye is called “pupil,” though it would be more to the point to ask why apprentices and students are called pupils. Latin for “boy” was pupus (a baby word, like Engl. poop), with the diminutive pupillus. The meaning “little boy” yielded “orphan, ward; charge,” and in the 14th century it reached English, via Old French (where it sounded pupille), with the same meaning. “Boy to be taught” is, consequently, a development of the more specialized meaning “orphan who is a minor and needs instruction.” Another Latin word was pupa “girl; doll” (cf. Engl. puppet, a later form of poppet, from French). Its diminutive was pupilla (OF pupille). A reflection of the face seen in another person’s eye is tiny, and this is why the eye’s orifice was called “little doll,” or “pupil.” (This meaning was already known in Latin, and a similar use of “little girl” occurred in Classical Greek.) For the same reason, the reflection (I should stress: a minute reflection) of oneself one sees in the pupil of another’s eye was at one time called “baby” in English, and the idiom look babies in one’s eyes, with regard to lovers feasting on each other’s face and entranced at the sight, was common in the literature of Shakespeare’s time.

The situation with temples is less clear. Temple “sacred edifice” is English from Latin (templum; this word was borrowed twice: first in Old English, then in Middle English, the second time from French, or at least influenced by the French form). The earliest meaning of the word was “broad open space; consecrated space, sanctuary,” ultimately from a word meaning “stretch.” All that can be said definitely about temple “part of the head” is that it entered English from French in the 14th century. The etymon of temple is tempora, the plural of Latin tempus “time” (!). This tempora changed unpredictably to tempula, whence temple. The plural makes sense: it is the dual, rather than the plural, for the head has two temples. But how could “times” become “flat part of the head between the forehead and either ear,” to quote a dictionary definition? The words used to designate body parts, even when they are transparent, have variable meanings: the same name may be used for the cheek and the jaw, for the breast and the stomach, etc. But temple has probably always meant what it does today.

In some languages, temples are named for the hair that covers them, in others for being part of the cheek on which we sleep, and in still others for their “thinness” (in comparison with the skull) and perhaps for their vulnerability. Could there be a reference to the parts of the head, “stretched” in such a way that they were particularly “seasonable” for a blow? This is the suggestion by Earnest Weekley, the author of many excellent books on the history of English words and of an etymological dictionary, published in 1923. Or should the solution be sought at the level of the ancient root temp– “stretch”? (German Stirn “forehead” goes back to a verb with such a meaning, and in Old German, tinna meant both “temple” and “forehead.”) This was the hypothesis of Hjalmar Falk and Alf Torp, two outstanding Norwegian scholars. But then where does “times” come in? The riddle remains unsolved. The OED and Skeat, our greatest authorities, venture no conjectures.

Fine, but why cheek by jowl in the title? Because jowl means “jaw,” and in Middle English it sometimes occurred with the sense “fat throat” (its Germanic cognates also mean “throat”), so that the situation illustrates nicely one of the points of this post, and because pupils, once they enter a temple, should stay cheek by jowl with those who took them there. They should also be filled with mutual love and “look gay babies” in one another’s eyes, as the playwright Fletcher could have put it. If my explanation has fallen flat, think of a better one, and I will celebrate it in my gleanings next week.

Featured Image Credit: Cheek by Jowl? ‘Smile, Mouth, Teeth’, Photo by Giuliamar, CC0 Public Domain, via pixabay.