Tarry or hurry?

It is surprising how similar the verbs in the title sound, though they are antonyms: tarry means “to linger, delay,” while hurry refers to haste. One even suspects that there is some affinity (hidden attraction) between them, and perhaps there is, but on the surface they are quite different, except that both are probably native formations.

I’ll begin with hurry and quote two statements from Walter W. Skeat. This is what he wrote in 1885: “I derive this as Wedgwood does, from the imitative word to hurr, a Scandinavian word meaning to whir or whiz. I suggest that this hurr is a mere variant of whirr. I now find that Nares actually gives the verb to whurry, with the sense of ‘hurry’; with two examples. This clinches the etymology.” Hensleigh Wedgwood, it will be noted, was Skeat’s predecessor, and Robert Nares (1753-1829) is the author of a famous glossary.

Alas, nothing ever “clinches the etymology.” Here is Skeat’s final statement (1911). The abbreviations have been expanded. For sb. (that is, substantive) I used noun. “Not allied to harry. Formed from an older base hurr-. Like skurr-y from skir. Middle English horien, to hurry….. + Middle Swedish hurra, to swing, whirl round; Swedish dialectal hurra, to whirl, hurr, noun, hurry, haste. Compare Danish hurre, to hum, whir; Icelandic hurr, a noise; Middle High German hurren, to move softly. See Hurland compare whir, whiz, of similar imitative origin; whence whurry, to hurry….” Hurl is said to be perhaps of Scandinavian origin.

The volume of the OED with hurry appeared in 1899, and there the etymological section on this word is considerably more cautious than in Skeat. The same is true of the modern OED online. Hurry does not antedate late Middle English, even though a dubious earlier instance has been found. The Century Dictionary mentions hurr and whirr, “the last word well combining the two notions of rapid motion and buzzing sound.” The obsolete verb hurr meant “to buzz, hum.” The sources I have consulted also mention hurly-burly and sometimes hurrah, both of them referring to the same emotional sphere. In sum, Wedgwood’s old idea seems to have withstood the test of time.

In Germanic, numerous words mean “to hurry, to make speed.” Such are, for instance, Engl. rush, dash, and scurry. All three are also “emotional.” But a few members of this family have a convoluted history. This is true of Engl. haste and German eilen. As a rule, if the verb is not onomatopoeic, the sense “move at high speed” tends to go back to the idea of doing something with force. This fact may throw light on the question even professional language historians hardly ever ask. If English, German, and Danish already had several verbs meaning “hurry,” why coin its synonym? The answer may not be too far to seek. Instinctively, people want words to have transparent meanings. Grunt, kick, push, and their likes answer this demand, and speakers keep producing such words. Rush is iconic, and so are its German cousins rutschen and rütteln. To coin and remember them is easy. The same holds for words like jig, jog, and push. Language was probably iconic at its inception, and it partly remains such to this day. So much for hurry, which by its shape suggests the idea of moving fast.

Tarry

The Italian word chiaroscuro means, as Byron rendered it, “a clear obscure.” Clear obscure may serve as an excellent label for the history of the verb tarry. This verb has been obsolete in British English for a long time, but it is still alive in American English. Tarry surfaced in the fourteenth century in the forms tarien and terien “to provoke, worry, vex.” The original OED has a long note on the history and etymology of the verb, and so does the OED online. The latter cites numerous opinions on the history of the verb but does not provide references. My database contains only one important title (a paper by Leo Spitzer) and nothing postdating 1947. Apparently, the history of the verb has been given up as hopelessly controversial.

The difficulty is obvious. As just mentioned, the oldest known senses of tarry are “to worry, vex,” while today it means “to delay, linger.” The only solution, supposedly, reconciling those senses, has been known for a long time: it is believed that the English verb was influenced by Old French targer “to delay,” related to Latin tardus “tardy.” But don’t the paths of “vex” and “tardy” cross?

Tarry “worry, vex” has numerous cognates outside English (especially in Slavic and Baltic. Note, for example, Russian drat’ “to pull or strip with force.”) Such verbs also mean “rub; tie a knot” and even “torment”—obviously, figurative senses. We seem to be dealing here with a series of words related to labor activities, and all or most of those activities (cf. rubbing and tying knots) are slow. I would like to suggest that the oldest attested senses of tarry “worry, vex” are late, figurative (worry itself once meant “strangle, choke”!). It may also be of interest to remember that linger has the same root as long. Tarry, I assume, emerged as a verb denoting a protracted action. It is of course possible that Old French targer crossed the path of its English lookalike and reinforced its original sense.

Ernest Weekley summed up the problem of tarry most succinctly: where the senses match, phonetics fails us, and where the phonetic correspondences are perfect, the senses diverge. However, if, in light of the multiple cognates, we assume that the earliest recorded Middle English sense of tarry (“to vex, harass”) is late, going back to “perform a difficult time-consuming process,” “delay” will fit the phonetic and semantic mosaic quite well. And did tarry ever interact with hurry, so that they began to look like cousins? That we’ll never know.

I have said more than once that a conscientious researcher fears two things: to say something trivial (then there was no need to say it) or to say something new (then perhaps the idea is wrong). In each scenario, the researcher may become the target of severe criticism or ridicule. Have I solved the age-long riddle of tarry? It is not for me to decide. In any case, though like a medieval archer, I shot my bolt, I tried to make haste slowly.

POSTSCRIPT

Once again, my thanks are due to Professor Wraith, who noted my wrong division of the Russian word medved’ “bear.” See the blog “On big and little foxes.” The correct division is med(v)-ed’, that is, “honey-eater.”

_{Featured image: Photo by IgorShubin via Pixabay. Public domain.}