In full swing

First, my thanks to those who commented on my previous post. One comment in the busy exchange was negative: the correspondent likes some of those turns of speech I dislike. That’s fine, but I want to defend myself against the reproach that my subject should be limited to etymology. I receive questions from all over the world about usage and occasionally answer them in this blog. The title “Oxford Etymologist” does not tie me exclusively to word origins.

I have no theory for why people say something like do it real quick and she sings beautiful. German or Yiddish, as the comment suggests? Or a product of natural development? German/Yiddish usage also needs an explanation. Finally, I congratulate our reader who keeps a dictionary of Wellerisms on his desk. Our culture of reading classical literature is dying (none of the hundreds of students I have taught has read The Pickwick Papers). Yet I believe that Dickens will be the last to go downhill.

And now back to my main theme. I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right. I discussed sw-words almost exactly a year ago (see the post for June 19, 2024) and will try to repeat myself as little as possible.

In 1992, I wrote a paper, titled “The Dregs of English Etymology.” Among other things, it contained a list of about a thousand words whose origin was said to be unknown in the 1985 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Compiling such a list proved to be a much less straightforward task than I had expected, because the text contains numerous phrases like of uncertain, doubtful, dubious, disputable origin, obscurely related, and so forth. Are they polite synonyms for “origin unknown”?

In any case, the many senses of swag have been traced quite well. Some occurred in the 14^th century, while others, like “booty,” turned up in texts almost the day before yesterday. There is no way of deciding whether we are witnessing a long continuous history of one word, or if the sound complex swag was like an empty box, ready to acquire almost any sense with which speakers chose to endow it. Norwegian svagga “to sway” is cited in some dictionaries, but it is a rare (dialectal?) verb, and nothing points to its being the source of English swag. Incidentally, sway also sounds very much like swag.

Swag has as many lookalikes as senses, and this is the main problem with it. Here are some sw-verbs from my list of words of unknown origin (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in texts): swank (20) “to behave ostentatiously” (apparently, little known in American English); swash (16) “to dash violently, etc.” (said to be sound-imitative like clash, dash, lash, and mash); another swash (17) “inclined obliquely to the axis of the work (in turning),” and swizzle ~ switchel (19) “an alcoholic drink.” The material at my disposal is richer, but going over lists of verbs (mainly verbs) is boring. Anyway, one looks at swing, switch, swipe, swither “to hesitate,” swoon, and quite a few other more or less similar words and gets the impression that all of them refer to some quick or erratic movement and are in some vague way related. There is a special term for groups like sw -, namely, phonestheme. The term was coined by John Rupert Firth, a renowned British scholar.

The presence of the phonestheme cannot be predicted, and the same sound group (here, sw) occurs in words in which it evokes no association with movement. Think of swamp, swan, swain, swear, sweat, sweet, and swine. But what about swap, sway, swim, swirl, and swoon? Sw- does suggest a swinging, swaying movement (hence swag and swagger). There is no law, but a tendency is apparent.

Some connections have to be restituted by historians. Thus, German schwach means “weak,” not “swinging,” but the verb sweken once meant both “to become weak” and “to swing.” Swinging, it appears, led to being weak. While German im Schwange sein “to be in vogue” obviously refers to swinging, German schwanger “pregnant” is believed to be a different word. Why so? Pregnancy is a temporary state, isn’t it? Cannot it then be related to the many nouns and verbs with more or less the same reference?

Having reached this state of uncertainty, we come across swoon. The word has been known since the thirteenth century, and it once had g in the root (the verb –swogan existed). A similar-sounding German verb meant “to sigh.” The origin of swoon is said to be unknown. Really? Perhaps there is nothing to know. If we ignore the details, we may agree that being in a swoon, like being pregnant, is a temporary state! When things are up in the air, the phonestheme sw– comes in handy—unfortunately, too handy.

Even so, we need not treat our discovery with too much suspicion. When our authorities say that the origin of sway is obscure, perhaps we should say that the obscurity is a product of our striving for perfection. The OED quotes a 1598 statement that swagger was “created as it were by a natural Prosopopeia [here: without any known source], without etimologie or deriuation (sic).” I am inclined to say that that’s all there is to it. Swap, sway and swag are, rather probably, rootless sound-symbolic or/and sound-imitative formations, produced “instinctively,” as older scholars used to say. It is now believed that the human language emerged about 230,000 years ago. I am rather suspicious of exact numbers in this matter, but let us agree that the date is in principle realistic. As soon as people learned to produce the sounds needed for expressing their emotions, they began to say something like swap and swag.

Such English words often have cognates in closely related Germanic languages and sometimes in Latin, Greek, and non-Indo-European languages. Their common origin in Scandinavian and English or Dutch and English may mean that they are considerably older than the date of their first appearance in texts. Borrowing is also probable, but the main question is their distant origin, rather than their later history. Here is just one, almost random, example that shows how loose ties among such words may be. A Gothic verb that meant “to rejoice” (Gothic was recorded in the fourth century and is a dead Germanic language) has several related forms. In Old English it meant “to resound,” in Old Saxon, “to roar” (just one step from “rejoice” to “roar” and “resound”), but in Old Icelandic, “to splash.” Splashing is not too noisy. One would not be surprised if such a word acquired the sense “water”! Obviously, there once was a sound-imitative word with the phonestheme sw-, which developed in several ways.

Take your swag and go home with the swagger of a winner.

_{Featured image: Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay.}