A dictionary dance around Hag

As usual, I’ll begin with a comment on the letters I have received. I never wrote that too few queries about words of unknown origin were coming my way: I complained that a stream of letters addressed to Oxford Etymologist had in principle become a trickle. Nor was this blog meant exclusively for words of unknown origin (of which there are thousands). It would be foolhardy to expect that I might be able to solve even some of the riddles. While looking for the themes of my essays, I only try to find interesting words of disputed origin. Whenever possible, I volunteer my opinion. Another letter indicated quite correctly that some dictionaries call the origin of witch uncertain, rather than unknown. Dictionaries have a rather impressive list of such euphemisms, but the situation is clear. About some words NOTHING is known (a lot of slang belongs here). More often some reasonable hypotheses exist and compete. This is when the ghost of “uncertain” is raised, but “uncertain” is not much more promising to the public than “unknown,” though from the scholarly point of view, a mirage of an oasis holds out greater promise than a desert. It is rather obvious that the ancient root of witch is either wit– or wik-, but we have no way of making the right choice, and we are not sure which women were millennia ago called witches. Hence “origin uncertain.”

And now back to hag and its environs. It is entertaining to see what words surround hag on a dictionary page. The most exotic of them is the dialectal (northern) noun haggaday “a latch to a door or a gate.” The original OED cited it but offered no etymology, Walter W. Skeat (1895) compared haggaday and work-aday “by day.” He explained the device as “a slight mode of fastening by day,” because “in the night one would bolt the door,” and suggested (rather warily for him) that hagg– was related to hook by ablaut (as in shake ~ shook). But one expects hag– to refer to something tangible, regardless of a possible vowel alternation. The OED online derives the word from the phrase have good day (sic). Latches do come in all kinds.

Next we find haggard. No one doubts that the word is of French origin. The earliest reference is to the look of an untamed hawk. The French word was also haggard. Most of us know only haggard “gaunt, emaciated.” The derivation of the French adjective from Germanic is rather certain (though often questioned), but the alleged Germanic source is hard to trace to its root. Any connections with hedges or hags? German hager “gaunt, thin,” rhyming with its synonym mager, is also opaque. “Of obscure etymology,” as dictionaries put it (alas).

Haggle gives us a short relief. It certainly contains a so-called frequentative suffix, a suffix that points to repetitive actions, as in mumble, tickle, scribble, and their likes. Haggle once meant “to mangle with cuts (now the sense is rather “to cut clumsily”), and today it more often refers to persistent wrangling in bargaining. If –le in haggle is a suffix, what is hag? It is an unmistakable Scandinavian relative of hew “to cut,” familiar to us from hedge.

Unexpectedly, haggis turned out to be one of the hardest Middle English words, as regards the etymology. The earliest citation goes back to the year 1400, but William Rothwell, a great expert in Anglo-French, assures us that already by the middle of the thirteenth century, “the English were eating haggis, crackling and suet.” Haggis has been derived from hog (this is one of Samuel Johnson’s improbable suggestions, but Johnson was not an etymologist and borrowed most of his ideas from Stephen Skinner’s 1671 dictionary). Yet Johnson also suggested hack as the etymon, and later researchers compared haggis and hag “cut, chop.” In 1896, Skeat derived haggis from French haut goût, literally, “high taste.” In the final edition of his dictionary, he returned to the verb hag.

A detailed investigation of the intractable word appeared in 1959. Its author was Charles H. Livingston (1884-1966), a noted Romance philologist. What follows has been derived from his publication, though I dispensed with quotes around my statements. Several different varieties of the dish named haggis existed. The present-day northern English and Scottish haggis represents only one of them. The cookery of the Middle English period and its language were very strongly influenced by French, but the French word hachis “hash,” as the original OED noted, was not known (that is, not recorded in texts) so early. Obviously, what does not exist cannot influence anything. Several good dictionaries follow Skeat and keep referring to the verb hag. But Livingston noted that he had not seen a single example of hag in any Middle English recipes of the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Recipes describe the process of preparing a dish, and a phrase like hag (= chop) the meat would have been natural in this context.

Livingston cited Ernest Weekley (“Apparently, by some strange metaphor from French agasse, agace ‘magpie’”) and disapproved of this vague reference. Though Weekley could not explain the connection, the OED online treats his idea with interest. (Do I remember correctly that in one of Beatrix Potter’s tales it is said that “a magpie is some kind of pie?”) Haggis has always been a dish of the commoners, and for that reason, the word did not turn up in the recipes meant for aristocratic guests, even if the English were indeed “consuming haggis” in the thirteenth century.

Livingston referred to the Old French verb haguier “to cut” as the root of haggis. He traced it to Middle Dutch hacken “to hack, cut up into pieces.” The verb is “amply attested” in the modern dialects of Normandy. An initial aspirate h is still (!) preserved there in words of Germanic origin. (This, I may add, is not an uncommon phenomenon: people will retain foreign sounds in their speech, to emphasize the words’ non-native origin.) The suffix is in haggis is also French. Thus, the name of the Scotch “native dish” turned out to be a culinary term of Norman or Anglo-Norman ancestry. This is a good explanation.

As far as I can judge, the OED online almost agrees with Livingston. But it mentions the possibility of another option (the derivation from English) and mentions the striking similarity between the names designating pies and magpies. Few things in etymology are carved in stone. Yet it appears that the origin of haggis is not “unknown.”

Yes Powers, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
Tha jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Gie her a haggis!

So Robert Burns.

(Skinking ware “thin stuff”; jaup “splash”; luggie “a small wooden dish with a handle.”)

On this joyful note, we’ll bid farewell to hags, haggards, hedges, and haggis.

_{Featured image: Cropped photo of Robert Burns statue by filippo_jean. CC-By-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}