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Probably no other ethnic group has been vilified with so much linguistic ingenuity as the Jews. For the moment I will leave out of account Kike and Smouch and say what little I can about Sheeny, a word first recorded in English in 1824 (so the OED).
Long ago I wrote a column with the title “Tit for Tat.” Engl. tip for tap also existed at one time. Words like tip, tap, top, tick, tack, tock, tit, tat, tot, as well as those with voiced endings like tid– (compare tidbit), tad, and tod (“bush; fox”), are ideal candidates for sound imitative coinages.
A word, some scholars say, can have several etymologies. This is a misleading formulation. Various factors contribute to a word’s meaning and form. All of them should be taken into account and become part of the piece of information we call etymology, because words are like human beings.
Anatoly celebrates a word pioneer.
Hermaphrodites are born rarely, and it is far from clear why their mythology achieved such prominence in Antiquity. Reference to cross-dressing during certain marriage rites does not go far, but the cult of Hermaphroditus is a fact, and Ovid’s tale of the union in one body of the son of Hermes and Aphrodite is well-known.
This is an old chestnut. How did ‘Raining Cats and Dogs’ come into being, and stay, in the language? The possibilities are few. A foreign phrase is occasionally repeated verbatim or nearly so, and turns into gibberish. It is possible that the first ‘cats and dogs’ were not even animal names.
English is a language of limitless opportunities. Strange things happen in it. Some words are spelled alike but pronounced differently: ‘bow’ (the bow of a ship) and ‘bow’ (bow and arrows); ‘row’ (she kicked up a row) and ‘row’ (the front row); ‘permit’ (the verb) and ‘permit’ (the noun).
The Oxford Eytmologist is at it again…
Some time ago I received a question about the word macabre. This adjective first appeared in Old French, in the phrase dancemacabre. The story begins with the fresco of the Dance Macabre, painted in 1424 in the Church of Innocents at Paris. The English poet and monk John Lydgate knew the fresco.
Only children and foreigners express their surprise when they discover that the verb long does not mean “lengthen” or that belong has nothing to do with longing. When we grow up, we stop noticing how confusing such similarities of form coupled with differences in meaning are.
On August 23, I appeared on the “Midmorning” show on Minnesota Public Radio. Many of you called in with questions, to some of which I could give immediate answers. But, the origin of several words I did not remember offhand and I promised to look them up in my database. Here are my responses.
Many words resemble mushrooms growing on a tree stump: they don’t have common roots but are still related. I will use few examples, because if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Nothing is known about the origin of cub, which surfaced in English texts only in 1530 (that is, surprisingly late).
Our egalitarian predilections have partly wiped out the difference between “vulgar” and “cool,” and the idea of being judgmental or appearing better educated than one’s neighbor scares the living daylights out of intellectuals. Dictionaries, we are told, should be descriptive, not prescriptive.
While working on my etymological database, I looked through countless old journals and magazines. I especially enjoyed reading the reviews of etymological dictionaries published in their pages. Some were shockingly abrasive, even virulent; others delightfully chatty and unabashedly superficial.
For some reason, interest in the etymology of copasetic never abates. This adjective, a synonym of the equally infantile hunky-dory, is hardly ever used today unless the speaker wants to sound funny, but I cannot remember a single talk on words without someone’s asking me about its derivation and thinking that the question is of a most imaginative kind.
The shape of the word weather has changed little since it was first attested in the year 795. In Old English, it had d in place of th; the rest, if we ignore its present day spelling with ea, is the same. But its range of application has narrowed down to “condition of the atmosphere,” while at that time it also meant “air; sky; breeze; storm.”