Seeing red

As I expected, Dr. Goranson did dig up some information about the mysterious F. (Frank?) Adams, celebrated in the previous post (see the comment following it). Yet we still don’t know where this man acquired his vast and accurate knowledge of etymology. He was an amateur, but such a learned one! It is amazing how much nonsense people have written and keep writing about word origins. In this case we are not dealing with a professional linguist, but his observations deserve nothing but praise. By the way, Frank Chance, whom I also mentioned last week, was a medical doctor. My attempts to learn something about him produced almost no results. James A. H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat treated him as their equal!

I also received a letter in connection with my last week’s note on the regional word rowen “aftermath.” Is the tree name rowan “mountain ash” related? No. Rowan was borrowed from Scandinavian. By the way, the tree is famous in Old Scandinavian mythology (it saved the god Thor from drowning) and elsewhere, because of its red berries in winter, and the word rowan may provide a clue to the mysterious curse aroint thee in King Lear and Macbeth. See my post for February 20, 2013. The OED online has no trust in this or any other etymology of the obscure phrase. Yet this derivation of the curse may not be so bad. Finally, a long letter came that I’ll answer next time.

And now back to business. The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English. One of them (in the phrase red gold) I discussed in the essay for October 26, 2022. But first, some notes on the etymology of red may not be out of place.

Word historians encounter two difficulties: either the facts at their disposal are too few, or they are too numerous. This trouble (paucity versus excess) is of course familiar to all researchers. The cognates of red are ubiquitous in the Indo-European world, but the sought-for ancient root emerges in too many forms. The word sometimes ends not only in d/t/th (which is fine) but also in b, f, and s. Also, the vowels alternate rather wildly. Given some finagling, there is of course a possibility to reconstruct a common protoroot, but one wonders whether such a root, valid for the entire language group, existed. It has therefore been suggested that we are dealing not only with a group of related forms but also with a so-called migratory word, a word that travels from language to language and changes its shape along the way. We’ll never know the truth.

To complicate matters, references to the color do not aways match: some of the words, seemingly related to red, mean “light brown.” The history of color words is, in principle, complicated, because at one time, people visualized a spectrum, partly different from ours. Homer’s wine-colored sea is perhaps the most often cited example. Nor is the modern picture of the spectrum quite uniform. For instance, English has to do with the phrases dark blue and light blue, while Slavic uses two different adjectives for them. Likewise, English has a most confusing adjective bleak, not related to black. Though red is the color of fire, its root seems to be the same as in rust.

However, my story today is not about the ancient root of red. While looking through some comments on my old posts, I noticed that the most enthusiastic of them were devoted to idioms and mysterious compounds. Hence a few notes on the word redneck. The first note at my disposal, by Sterling Eisiminger, is from the periodical American Speech 59, 1984, p. 284. The reference is to pellagra. The OED online refers to the same source, so that I’ll reproduce only one sentence: “…in the 1930s pellagra was still common in the southern United States among low-income groups whose diets consisted mainly of pork fat and hominy grits.” Hence perhaps the reference to the skin color of the neck.

But redneck also meant “union member,” especially so in the twenties and the thirties in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana. Here my source is the same periodical, but volume 69, 1994, pp. 106-11(the author of the article is Patrick H. Huber). Though this source is also known to the OED, I will supply a few details, because the OED online is not open access. We read that the origins of redneck “union man” remain uncertain, but that the word dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. It may be an analog of words like cracker (an offensive term for a poor white, etc.) and hillbilly (on hillbilly see my post for March 11, 2026).

The derisive term redneck was also applied to the members of a popular trade union (red, “Communist,” etc.) and, as we are told, with a side shot to the members’ poor, rural-South backgrounds, since so many Kentucky and West Virginia miners were failed farmers and former sharecroppers and agricultural laborers from the outlying rural areas, particularly from the Appalachians.

Especially important is the fact that the term referred not so much to the people’s red sunburned necks as to the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Bandanas, traditionally worn as a form of protection for railroad men, miners, and others, became a badge of honor. Here are the opening lines of the once immensely popular song: “Red Necks, keep them scabs away,/ Red Necks, fight them every day.” The term Redneck became “a badge of working-class solidarity and pride.”

This story does not mean that redneck has “multiple etymologies” (one can often find reference to this phantom). Words, like most rivers, have single sources, though later, tributaries may enrich their content. This probably happened to redneck: first, a literal sense (now forgotten), then figurative accretions. Here is the final statement by the author of the article on redneck: “…the United States labor movement’s adaption of the term redneck speaks powerfully to the fluidity and multiple meanings of language and to how those meanings are socially constructed and interpreted differently by people whose class positions differ.” Red seldom occurs in English idioms. The most interesting of them are to be in the red and to draw a red herring across the path. The curious phrase thin red line originated from the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War on October 25, 1854. However, the original dispatch, as Elizabeth Knowles pointed out, mentioned streak, not line. Red, White and Blue probably needs no comment.

_{Featured image: Little Red Riding Hood c. 1862 by Gustave Doré. Photo by Chris Olszewski. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}