Aftermath and its kin

First, two notes in the aftermath of the previous post. 1) My thanks are due to Stephen Goranson, who, as I expected, did find out everything about Thomas Bee, the gentleman, mentioned in last week’s essay on boxing. Mr. Bee discovered the origin of the phrase to box the compass. As usual, I wonder how my old friend Stephen Goranson manages to ferret out all kinds of information, because I also try to do some research along those lines and invariably fail. 2) I am equally grateful to Mr. Gavin Wraith, who asked me why I had not discussed Greek pyx “fist” in connection with box. This connection was noticed long ago. The problem, as James A. H. Murray already knew, is a late attestation of the English word box. As a cognate of box, pyx does not look promising either. Perhaps box indeed originated in university slang (from Greek to English), but this hypothesis is hard to substantiate.

My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape. Thus, aftermath is transparent to an etymologist but not to a modern speaker of English. The component –math goes back to a noun meaning “mowing; crop mown.” This noun still exists in modern British dialects, with the suffix –th being the same as in growth and truth. The correct explanation of –math can be found in all detailed dictionaries of English and online. Usually, the root, followed by –th, is changed beyond recognition, as in birth, filth, and death (here, the roots are easy to see in (to) bear, foul, and die). A synonym of aftermath is British regional yeomath. The prefix yeo– means “additional.” I was probably the first to recognize this prefix in yeoman (see the post for June 17, 2009). The OED online seems to concur.

As I said, for some reason, English words for “aftermath” are usually obscure from the etymological point of view. Such is also the case in Russian. For those who know Russian, consider the dialectal words shutyom, probably meaning “an empty space,” and otava “a place left to rest.” Both nouns are stressed on the second syllable, and the origin of both is opaque to modern speakers. I have mentioned Russian for a reason. One Russian word for “fallow land” may, as I believe, throw light on its English synonym. I made this point in the post for November 9, 2016, and would like to repeat my idea here. English fog is, most probably (and such is the common opinion), of Scandinavian origin, even though it surfaced in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century. But we now know that this chronology is not unusual. The Scandinavian invasion happened in the epoch of the Vikings (King Alfred fought the “Danes”). Yet it took some northern words, which flooded dialects, hundreds of years to emerge in written and printed texts.

Another fog, which can be very broadly glossed as “aftermath,” has been known from books since 1400. No doubt, we are dealing with the same word as fog “mist.” Or perhaps some doubt exists, because the senses seem incompatible? Yet the common denominator of both words is “moisture,” and here one Russian phrase comes in most useful. An unsown field is said to be “under vapor” (pod parom). Fog is, most probably, related to German feucht “wet.” By the way, old etymologists, who liked to trace words to their ancient Indo-European roots, reconstructed the root of fog as bhu, a typical sound-imitative complex (an onomatopoeia for a puff of air). English fog “aftermath” means “under vapor, wet.” Even the best historical linguists cannot know all languages in detail. Not unexpectedly, English, German, and Scandinavian etymologists never came across the Russian phrase pod parom, because otherwise, they would have detected the connection, so obvious to me, long ago and would have used it to substantiate the idea that fog “heavy mist” and fog “aftermath” are indeed two senses of the same noun.

Why, I may repeat, do people keep coining such hard words for “aftermath”? Here is one more example: eddish “aftergrowth, stubble.” The root of this noun seems to mean “again,” as, for instance, in eddy. I would probably have left this gallery of etymological riddles in peace if among my folders I had not discovered one, devoted to the word rowen. Here is a note by a man from Madison, Wisconsin (Notes and Queries, 9/VII, June 8, 1901, p. 453): “Aftermath, or second mowing, was not used by New England farmers in the last century. Rowen was their term, derived, doubtless, from those eastern counties where their forefathers lived. Nor has rowen been yet displaced.” Does anyone among our readers know this word? My computer fails to recognize it.

A lively discussion of rowen preceded that note, but I have brought it to light because of the letter printed on the same page. Its author, Mr. F. Adams, did not only debunk a “ridiculous” derivation of the word, given in a respectable English dictionary, and referred to several foreign dictionaries and scholarly publications: he cited the correct date of the first occurrence of the word in English texts and proposed the etymology that still stands, namely, from a word, related to French regain. It “had filtered into our language through a French dialect, w for hard g being common in the north-east of France.”

Who was F. Adams? He sent numerous excellent letters on word origins to NQ between 1892 and 1903 and does not seem to have contributed to any other periodicals. At that time, an English-speaking specialist in word origins could not wish for better exposure: “everybody” read NQ. The great Walter W. Skeat appeared there hundreds of times. But soon after the First World War, its popularity waned. The journal did not die (it still exists) but became more specialized and less “popular.” In this blog, I have often referred to Frank Chance, an outstanding etymologist, who, like F. Adams, never sought another venue for his ideas in addition to NQ and as a result is now almost forgotten. Those who have read my review of a recent book on Webster Unabridged (April 8, 2026) will see that the otherwise well-informed author called NQ an obscure provincial periodical.

At one time, NQ was a famous outlet, and I hope that Dr. Goranson will enlighten us on the career of F. Adams (what a terrible idea it was and still is to use only the first initials in the signature! In references, I have often seen female authors taken for males and namesakes confused). This is the end of my today’s travel through fields left to rest. Along the way, we have encountered many forgotten words and observed once again how rich the English language is and what problems etymologists face. A good aftermath indeed, if you ask me.

_{Featured image: Fallow land near Dale Farm by Bill Broaden. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}