In and out of the box

Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box). I cannot offer a new solution and will support the etymology cautiously given in the OED online. Yet sometimes the way to the truth and chance byways are more exciting than the result, obtained at the end of the search. It will also be fair to mention the paper by the German linguist Hermann Flasdieck in the periodical Anglia (Volume 70,1951-1952, pp. 295-307), the best historical study of the word box in linguistic literature.

The earliest citation of box “to beat, bash, strike” in the OED online goes back to 1390, but we have to wait until 1519 until the next one. Even some time later, the word’s occurrences in print were rare. Apparently, box was not a word one chose to use in books. This fact confirms the origin (see it below), proposed tentatively by the OED’s first editor James A. H. Murray and now accepted with some caution by the revisers of the OED and other sources.

In the United States, boxing, a sport whose land of origin is England, became immensely popular. Those who have read Jack London’s short stories “The Mexican” and “A Piece of Steak” will agree. German tourists must have picked up the word box in America, because they brought it home in the forms boxen and baxen. A great difference exists between the way a word like box sounds in most of England and in the United States. Foreigners living and traveling in America often mistake box, not, and their likes for bucks and nut. German boxen ~ baxen tell us that long ago, the word box sounded in America as it does today.

One wonders whether box (the verb and the noun) has anything to do with its best-known homonym. The history of box, as in Christmas box, may not be entirely clear, but that box already occurred in Old English and is a borrowing from Latin. Nothing in the sport, as we know it, suggests its connection with any receptacle. Theater boxes and box offices return us to containers and throw no light on boxing either.

Along the way, we find the phrase to box a compass “to repeat the points of the compass in order and backwards.” Though also unconnected with boxing, the story is worth telling. Walter W. Skeat referred to the OED, but the OED had nothing to say about the etymology of this phrase. Nor did the 1914 edition of The Century Dictionary. The OED online refers us to the verb box (and that is what the original OED did). My surprise came when I consulted The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). This work seldom deviates from its great model. Yet, surprisingly, it contains a special entry on box the compass: “Probably from Spanish bojar (boxar) ‘sail round’.” Next, we find two examples and the statement that other nautical terms from Spanish also exist in English. Such are allegedly buoyant (which may be from Spanish or Old French!) and capsize (this is Skeat’s suggestion; elsewhere, including the OED online, we find the familiar verdict “of uncertain origin”).

References to authorities in the original OED and in Skeat are rather regular but not generous. In the 1966 dictionary, they never appear. What then was the source of the new entry? Perhaps I can provide the answer (of course, known to the Oxford team but not to the rest of the world, eager for an explanation). In the periodical Notes and Queries XII/1, March 18, 1916, p. 226, H. J. B. Clemens published part of a letter, written in 1836 by Thomas Bee, a native of South Carolina, who was at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1783 to 1789. Here is the relevant part: “You know I had always a smattering of etymology, but never indulged so much in it as since I have become a great reader of Spanish […]. I was principally gratified with the origin of the phrase ‘to box the compass’, which has puzzled me from a boy […]. Boxar (or as it is more modernly written, bojar—with the same pronunciation) signifies circumire, to go round: boxar el mundo, to go round the world; boxar la isla to sail round the island. To box the compass is, therefore, to go round the several divisions from north to south, and from south to north.” I could find no information on H. J. B. Clemens and do not know why he had access to Thomas Bee’s private correspondence. His etymology of the English phrase looks promising.

The 1966 dictionary cites the same two Spanish phrases, which clinches my belief that this note was indeed the source of the entry. Finding the true origin of a difficult word is “a big deal” in the uneventful life of dictionary makers, and the name of an occasional pathfinder should not be forgotten. Obviously, the Spanish verb throws no light on the word box that interests us, but let me repeat my idea that in a convoluted romance, digressions are sometimes more exciting than the main story.

Back to boxing. The Century Dictionary says, “supposed to be of Scandinavian origin”; doubts the relevance of the Scandinavian sources, because baste “to cudgel” and the noun bash “blow” are already known as the legitimate reflexes of those sources; mentions Dutch beuk “a blow” and Middle High German bochen “to strike,” but concludes that the most probable origin should be sought for in box “to place in a box.” The conclusion is not persuasive. The origin of bash is as obscure as the origin of box, and in principle, nothing prevents one etymon (source) from producing two or more reflexes (“offspring”). Reference to box “receptacle” leaves us nowhere. However, German bochen, known to the speakers of Modern German in the form pochen, and Dutch beuk may provide a clue to box.

If we look for the many variants, older forms, and cognates of pochen ~ bochen, we’ll find puchen, puggen, pukken, boka, buka, and (!) Engl. poke (verb). In the present context, it matters little whether poke is borrowed or native. More important is the fact that we are, rather obviously, dealing with sound-imitative verbs (the reference is to the sound heard in striking), like English kick, jab, dab, cuff, bang, boom, bash, Russian bukh (a word reproducing a loud noise, with cognates elsewhere in Slavic), and puk “fart.”

Murray, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, already supposed that box is an onomatopoeia. In all probability, he was right, and one cannot but admire his intuition. “Origin unknown,” so lavishly added to such verbs in dictionaries, is an unhelpful label. The OED online has no citations of box between 1390 and 1519. We may be dealing with two independent coinages: the same verb was perhaps invented or borrowed twice, with about a century and a half between those events. Such words travel widely from language to language, and it is hard to decide whether we see loans or independent coinages.

Such then is a rather probable history of the sound-imitative verb box. Origin unknown? Not quite. Uncertain? Of course! What else could one expect?

Postscript

My thanks are due to the two readers who commented on the previous post on the evils of Spelling Bee.

_{Featured image: By Natalya from Pixabay. Public domain.}