A few etymological pebbles

The readers of this blog must have noticed how often I suggest solutions connected with sound imitation. Time and again I say that a certain noun or verb owes its origin to onomatopoeia. In the previous post (July 8, 2026), I used this approach while discussing the verb baffle. Today we’ll encounter a similar situation.

Etymological solutions are often intelligent guessing. Many of our readers will remember that a special branch of linguistics deals with iconicity. It studies the ways in which the form of words in some way mirrors their meaning. Barf-barf, oink-oink, and bonkers (boinkers, as it were) are the most obvious examples of iconicity (the header features a picture of our iconic idol), but iconicity goes far beyond sound imitation. Consider the compounds tip-top, wishy–washy, ping-pong, and phrases like tit for tat. They always begin with short i. Top-tip and washy-wishy are unthinkable, because we instinctively begin the enumeration with something small, and short i as in ping and tip indeed suggests smallness. This is not a law: the adjective big has a “wrong” vowel, but consider the phrase big bang.

When we learn the meaning of the words jerk, jig, and jog, we almost sense that they mean what they are expected to mean. Last week, I tried to show that baffle is a sound-imitating (iconic) word. Now think of another situation. A stone falls into a river, we watch it go down and say “plop.” This is non-controversial, but when we are told that Latin plumber, as in Engl. plumb, has a similar origin (suggested by the great linguist Otto Jespersen), doubts arise. Really, is this possible? Latin plumbum?! Why not? Plop  ~ plum(b) goes a piece of lead. After all, plumbum is a word “of obscure origin.”

Consider the noun pebble, recorded in a great number of forms: popple, pipple, pyppel, and puble, among others. It also resembles bubble, whose imitative origin no one doubts. Is pebble from Old English papol a sound-imitative word, like Jespersen’s plumbum? You throw a small stone into water, and it goes pipley ~ papol ~ pebble ~ pipley. Boulder may be sound-imitative (see the post for February 22, 2017), and so may pebble. The problem is that nothing can be proved once we leave the safe haven of oink-oink and flip–flop. Serious etymologists recognize iconicity but treat it with caution.

The origin of pebble does not interest me too much (though I suspect that the word is indeed sound-imitative). I cited it as an introduction to the story of peevish. This adjective surfaced in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and like, for example, pawky “cunning, shrewd” (of Scandinavian origin?), it was probably slang. The meaning of peevish has changed over the centuries. We cannot decide what exactly the word meant in the early sentences at our disposal. Here is a shortened succession of glosses (from 1400 to 1669) in the original OED: “silly, senseless, foolish; malignant; spiteful.” The 1963 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology lists “spiteful, malignant; perverse, obstinate; querulous, fretful.” Most of those senses are obsolete. The OED online begins with “perverse, obstinate, skittish.”

Apparently, the exact connotations of peevish in those sentences are not quite clear to us (just something bad or unpleasant). Peevish is still “unpleasant” but no longer “repugnant,” because today, people who are peevish are grumpy and fretful, rather than perverse or malignant. This change is called the amelioration of meaning (as opposed to the deterioration).

The OED online gives Latin perversus as the etymon, that is, as the ultimate source of peevish. This may be correct. However, the way from perversus to peevish via Old French is not smooth. The French adjective had two quite audible r’s, while peevish has neither. Ernest Weekley (in his etymological dictionary) also derived peevish from perversus but did not discuss the phonetic details. The adjective perverse emerged in English at almost the same time as did peevish. Was the French adjective borrowed twice, once by the uneducated and some time later by those who could pronounce French, without mutilating it?

There is another suggestion about the etymology of peevish. Walter W. Skeat: “The leading idea seems to be whining, making a plaintive cry,” with reference to the bird name pewet, peewit. From the phonetic point of view, the match is perfect (the bird makes a high-pitched wailing pee-wee sound, from which it received its name and which I find rather disturbing), and indeed, peevish resembles an onomatopoeic word. Yet it is far from clear whether the earliest senses of peevish refer to that whining sound. Skeat’s glosses are “fretful, whimpering.” I agree with the OED: “Origin uncertain.” But I would add Skeat’s hypothesis in a note. It has some merit. It may even be correct.

And now, as promised last week, a short biography of Frank Chance, compiled by Dr. Stephen Goranson. I would be happy if this brilliant nineteenth-century researcher had at last re-emerged in our etymological studies from his undeserved obscurity.

Frank Chance was born at Highgate, the fourth son of Robert Lucas Chance, a Birmingham glass manufacturer. After two years in his father’s factory, he studied chemistry for a year at King’s College, London, and for two further years at Paris and Berlin. He went up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1850, and thence, having taken his B.A. in 1854, to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for his clinical training, graduating as M.B. in 1854. While at Cambridge he gained the Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholarship, and the study of languages became the chief interest of his life. He translated Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, at the author’s request, in 1863, and edited H. H. Bernard’s Commentary on the Book of Job in 1864. A year later he retired from practice. From 1875 to 1884 he was a member of the committee for the Revised Version of the Old Testament. He was a fluent linguist in German, French and Italian, and familiar with several other languages. He married in 1857 Jane Susan Katharine, daughter of James Brewster of Huntingdon, and had one daughter. He died at Nice.

_{Featured image: Image by Brett Sayles via Pexels. Public domain.}