The level of our expertise: the perplexing verb baffle

Once again, my thanks are to Dr. Goranson. He succeeded in putting together a short biography of Frank Chance, my hero, whom I discovered many years ago (and learned to admire), while working on my bibliography of English etymology. His almost total obscurity today struck me as an incomprehensible slight. Dr. Goranson’s letter will be appended to the post next week. I also received a query from a reader about kayfabe. Alas, though I know something about the etymology of box/boxing (see the post “In and out of the box”), I cannot say the same about kayfabe; not a single publication on this word appears in my database. I should repeat what I have said more than once: my expertise depends on the huge database I have amassed, and when I draw blank, I appear as ignorant as any non-specialist. I know about kayfabe only what anyone can find online.

This post is about a related subject. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. The verb baffle, the subject of today’s post, has been investigated in an exemplary way in dictionaries and in both old and recent publications. Yet the OED’s latest verdict, despite the helpful notes, remains unchanged: “Origin unknown.” If so, let us look at what is known. Can everything be enveloped in impenetrable obscurity, like what you can see in the header, with a man lost in a forest?

Baffle turned up in English texts toward the middle of the sixteenth century, and rather probably, it was coined or borrowed around that time or a hundred year earlier. At that time, its recorded senses were “hoodwink, confound.” Scotch bauchle, which predates baffle, meant “to disgrace,” and it remains unclear whether we are dealing with several senses of the same word or with two different verbs. This detail of its history will indeed remain unknown or at least uncertain forever, though it is more probable that, regardless of the chronology, the same sound complex suggested to speakers several different negative associations.

The earliest English etymologists searched for the Greek originof baffle or tried to isolate the prefix be– in it. In 1766, Samuel Johnson thought of the French origin of this verb but went no further (etymology was in general not his forte). Almost a century later, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s predecessor in the field of English etymology, wrote a paper that contained a well-informed section on baffle (the earliest attestations and Romance cognates or lookalikes) and came to the following conclusion (his spelling is retained): “The origin of the Sc[otch] bauch, bauchle is, I believe, the interjection Fauch! Baw! Pah! Pooh!, Fr[ench] Bah! Pouah!, Spanish] Baf! all of which are representations of the strong exspiration accompanied by a projection of the lips, by which we instinctively defend ourselves against a bad smell, and are consequently in the first instance expressive of physical disgust, and then of contempt. ‘Buffa, the despising blast of the mouth that we call shirping.’ Thomas. A.D. 1548… Hence also Port[uguese] bafo, breath; Prov[encial] O[ld] Spa[nish] bafa, mockery jest; Sp[anish] befar, It[alian] beffare, to jeer; Fr[ench] baffler, to mock. From the notion of mocking to that of frustrating the effort of any one, in which the En[glish] baffle is now used, is an easy transition….” A few more examples follow.

Wedgwood, an excellent observer of speech, ruined his otherwise useful etymological dictionary of English (the above quotation is not from that dictionary) by relying too heavily on the similarity of words from various languages and ignoring sound correspondences. Yet many of his conclusions still stand, and what he said about baffle sounds convincing, as also shown by the opinions of the Romance scholars who dealt with the items Wedgwood mentioned.

In Romance, numerous words beginning with baf have a very wide range of meanings: they denote “to breathe,” “full stomach,” “puff up, bloat,” and so forth. Its “relative” is buff (buffo “comic actor” and its twin buffoon belong here). According to a unanimous agreement, such words are sound-imitative: biff, baff, buff…. Baffle rather obviously belongs here. The best proof of the onomatopoeic origin of the root we are discussing is the existence of Middle High German beffen “to bark.” Beff-beff (older German), gav-gav (Russian), or woof-woof (English)—the result is the same! Dictionaries also cite Dutch baffen, Modern German baffen and bäfzen, alongside Danish bjæffe and Swedish bjebba “to bark.” By the way, Engl. baffy is a kind of golf club, while Scotch baff means “to strike.” In blind-man’s buff, buff means “blow, stroke,” and in Russian, a gun goes pif-paf.

What then is “unknown” about baffle? The answer is clear. The same or nearly the same sound complex has been recorded all over Western Europe, more importantly (as far as we are concerned) in French. The unanswerable question is whether baffle is native or borrowed. Similar questions recur again and again, especially with regard to slang, expressive words, and the names of popular tools.

In the sixteenth century, wars never ended in Europe (surprise, surprise!). Mercenaries, native and foreign, were everywhere, and so were prostitutes and vagabonds, following the troops. Despite the unrest, merchants and artisans traveled all over the continent. Foreign words were adopted (and often distorted), sometimes forgotten, and sometimes retained. A few of them survived only in regional speech, others managed to stay and even infiltrated the language of the educated.

Baffle, a word of unquestionably imitative origin (and thus, an expressive word), may be native or borrowed. Seven centuries ago, it probably belonged to the common language of the lower classes. Germanic speakers recognized it as their own (when we speak, we don’t think about the etymology of the words we use!), and so did the speakers of the Romance languages. Baffle and its lookalikes may have been native in both English and French (!), or perhaps they were migratory words (Wanderwörter, as they are called in German), part of international slang (see my blog for August 22, 2012, on ajar and migratory words). It is an important detail of the verb’s history and the only one that is beyond reconstruction. From this (and only from this) point of view is baffle a word of unknown origin.

I believe that verdicts in dictionaries should be more nuanced. (In this case: “Baffle. Sound-imitative. In the early Modern period, similar sound complexes were current all over Western Europe, and it is impossible to decide which words of this type are native and which are borrowed.”) Some words are indeed so obscure that nothing at all is known about their prehistory. Baffle does not belong to this group of etymologically impenetrable words.

_{Featured image: Image by Joe from Pixabay.}