Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Anatoly Liberman
Last week I discussed the origin of the word cushion. Our correspondent wonders whether we are perhaps talking about bedrolls here. Judging by medieval miniatures from the East, old cushions were like those known to us, but the broad scope of referents, with the same word serving as the name of a cushion, bedcover, and mattress, does pose the question of the original object’s form and uses. The reconstructed sense “bundle”
By Anatoly Liberman
Borrowed words usually come to us with borrowed things, whether it is melon, pear, pumpkin, potato or church, piano, and sputnik. Yet this is more or less true of the names of things. Outside the world of nouns, people often borrow words they either do not need or may have dispensed with. For example, bold is native, but its numerous synonyms (brave, courageous, intrepid, and quite a few others) are of Romance origin. Subtleties multiply until the embarrassment of riches chokes the speakers who no longer know which near synonym to choose. The infamous F-word was taken over from Low (= northern) German and superseded its English rivals, though nothing changed in the islanders’ habits and the old verbs were equally expressive and equally frequent. It is anybody’s guess why such a strange substitution happened.
By Anatoly Liberman
When did people begin to say: “I will, like, come tomorrow” and why do they say so? It may seem that the filler “like”, along with its twin “you know”, are of recent date, but this impression is wrong. It is, however, true that both became the plague in recent memory. Occasionally an etymologist discovers a word that was current in Middle or early Modern English, disappeared from view, and then seemingly resurfaced in the modern language. One wonders whether this is the same word…
Every once in a while someone decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for over a century and a half.
By Anatoly Liberman
In regards to the sphere of application, pettifogger belongs with huckster, hawker, and their synonym badger. All of them are obscure, badger being the hardest. Pettifoggers, shysters, and all kinds of hagglers have humble antecedents and usually live up to their names, which tend to be coined by their bearers. At one time it was customary to say that words like hullabaloo are as undignified as the things they designate. Today we call a marked correspondence between words’ meaning and their form iconicity
By Anatoly Liberman
In an essay posted a few months ago, I spoke about the origin of the verb allow and noted its insecure ties with Latin laudare “to praise.” “Allow” and “praise,” as it turned out, form a union not only in English. At that that time, I promised to return to the idea underlying the concept of praise and the etymology of the verb praise. Every man, it is said, has his price, and so does every praise.
By Anatoly Liberman
Even the staunchest opponents of spelling reform should feel dismayed. How is it possible to sustain such chaos, now that sustainable has become the chief buzzword in our vocabulary? Never mind foreigners—they chose to study English and should pay for their decision, but what have native speakers done to deserve this torture? The answer is clear: they are too loyal to a fickle tradition.
By Anatoly Liberman
Part 1 appeared long ago and dealt with blackguard, blackleg, and blackmail, three words whose history is unclear despite the seeming transparency of their structure. Were those guards as black as they were painted? Who had black legs, and did anyone ever receive black mail? As I then noted, the etymology of compounds may be evasive. One begins with obvious words (doormat, for example), passes by dormouse with its impenetrable first element, wonders at moonstone (does it have anything to do with the moon?), moonlighting, and moonshine (be it “foolish talk” or “illegally distilled whiskey”), experiences a temporary relief at the sight of roommate, and stops in bewilderment at mushroom. The way from dormouse to mushroom is full of pitfalls. (And shouldn’t pitfall be fallpit? Originally a pitfall was a trapdoor, a snare, a device for catching birds, but then why pit?).
by Anatoly Liberman HOOSIER. Almost exactly two years ago, on July 30, 2008, I posted an essay on the origin of the nickname Hoosier. In it I expressed my cautious support of R. Hooser, who derived the “moniker” for an inhabitant of Indiana from a family name. I was cautious not because I found fault […]
When a journalist on a prestigious paper happens to use a word, it becomes common property almost at once. Suddenly I began noticing raft everywhere: a raft of shabby houses, a raft of proposals, and so forth. Whether raft will attain the status of a buzzword the future will show (it has such potential). Now is the time for all good writers to avoid it. Raft “multitude,” supposedly an Americanism, has slighting or disparaging overtones, though nowadays it sounds more like a colloquialism (“a whole bunch of…”). Its origin is unknown, but in search of help it may be useful to look at the other raft and its environment.
Here at Oxford, we love words. We love when they have ancient histories, we love when they have double-meanings, we love when they appear in alphabet soup, and we love when they are made up.
The word libel has perfectly innocent antecedents. Its etymon is Latin libellus, the diminutive of liber “book,” whose root we can see in library. When libel (later also libelle) appeared in English toward the end of the 14th century—a borrowing from Old French—it meant exactly what one expects, that is, “a little book, pamphlet.” The rest is a classic example of a process called in works on historical semantics the deterioration of meaning. The OED traces every step of the downfall. “Little book” → “a formal document, a written declaration or statement” → “the document of the plaintiff containing his allegations and instituting a suit” → “a leaflet assailing or defaming someone’s character” → “any published statement damaging to the character of a person” → “any false or defamatory statement” (the last stage had been reached by the beginning of the 17th century).
Two circumstances have induced me to turn to bamboozle. First, I am constantly asked about its origin and have to confess my ignorance (with the disclaimer: “No one knows where it came from”; my acquaintances seldom understand this statement, for I have a reputation to live up to and am expected to provide final answers about the derivation of all words). Second, the Internet recycles the same meager information at our disposal again and again (I am not the only recipient of the fateful question). Since the etymology of bamboozle is guesswork from beginning to end, it matters little how often the uninspiring truth is repeated. Below I will say what little I can about the verb.
Around 500 years ago the Spanish brought horses to the Americas and in the ensuing mêlée enough of those horses escaped captivity that they reestablished themselves as wild animals in the new world. Evidently more than 50 million years ago they evolved here but had become extinct. Although the name for wild horses in North America only emerged into English as mustang in 1808 this name was actually in the works by those same Spanish speakers before they ever shipped the horses across from Europe.
I often mention the fact that the questions I get tend to recur, and I do not feel obliged to answer them again and again. Among the favorites is the pronunciation of forte “loudly” and forte “a strong point.” Those who realize that the first word is from Italian and the second from French will have no difficulty keeping them apart, though I wonder why anyone would want to say forte instead of strong point or strong feature: in today’s intellectual climate, elegant foreignisms are paste rather than diamonds. Very common is the query about the difference between “I could care less” and “I could not care less.” The “classic” variant is with the negation. Perhaps someone decided that “I could not care less” means “I do care for it” and removed not.
Given how many words that refer to breaking begin with br-, to what extent is classifying break with sound imitative words justified?