Language

Ship and the rings it leaves in etymological waters
(Part 2)

By Anatoly Liberman
Alongside Old Icelandic skip “ship,” we find the verb skipa “arrange; assign.” It is tempting to suggest that the unattested meaning of this verb was either “arrange things on a ship; prepare a ship for a voyage; make it secure and shipshape” or even “board a ship, travel by ship,” because the connection between skip and skipa can hardly be doubted. However, not improbably, the earliest meaning of ship was simply “thing made, artifact,” rather than “vessel,” with skipa reminding us of that sense.

The linguistic impact of 9/11

By Dennis Baron

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 happened ten years ago, and although everybody remembers what they were doing at that flashbulb moment, and many aspects of our lives were changed by those attacks, from traveling to shopping to going online, one thing stands out: the only significant impact that 9/11 has had on the English language is 9/11 itself.

Ship and the rings it leaves in etymological waters
(Part 1)

By Anatoly Liberman
We are in deep waters here. A first puzzle is that ship has exact cognates in Frisian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Gothic, but nowhere outside Germanic. The ancient Indo-Europeans called their floating vessel something else, and we know what they called it. The modern echo of that word can be seen in Latin navis (from whose root we have navigation; and remember Captain Nemo’s Nautilus “little ship” and the Argonauts?), as well as in several other languages. So why ship?

New words are great for back to school

By Dennis Baron
It’s back to school, and that means it’s time for dictionaries to trot out their annual lists of new words. Dictionary-maker Merriam-Webster released a list of 150 words just added to its New Collegiate Dictionary for 2011, including “cougar,” a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man, “boomerang child,” a young adult who returns to live at home for financial reasons, and “social media” — if you don’t know what that means, then you’re still living in the last century.

Monthly Gleanings: August 2011

By Anatoly Liberman
One of our most faithful correspondents writes: “According to the Wall Street Journal, Indiana now outlawed teaching script in schools, so the kids can concentrate on their typing.” He was saddened by the news, and so was I. He asked me about non-cursive writing in old times, especially in the days of Chaucer. Here is a

Professor Wright and Professor Skeat

By Anatoly Liberman
From time to time I mention the unsung heroes of English etymology, but only once have I devoted a post to such a hero (Frank Chance), though I regularly sing praises to Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary. Today I would like to speak about Joseph Wright (1855-1930). He was not an etymologist in the strict sense of this term, but no article on the origin of English words can do without consulting The English Dialect Dictionary he edited.

Woot woot–get ready to retweet this breaking news.

Due to the incredible response to Angus Stevenson’s morning post, we’ve decided to share a little bit more about the brand new Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which is celebrating its 100th birthday. This fully updated 12th edition contains more than 240,000

Defining our language for 100 years

By Angus Stevenson
Since the publication of its first edition in 1911, the revolutionary Concise Oxford Dictionary has remained in print and gained fame around the world over the course of eleven editions. This month heralds the publication of the centenary edition: the new 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary contains some 400 new entries, including cyberbullying, domestic goddess, gastric band, sexting, slow food, and textspeak.

Web of Language fifth anniversary

By Dennis Baron
The Web of Language is five years old today.
The first post—“Farsi Farce: Iran to deport all foreign words”—appeared on August 17, 2006, which in digital years makes it practically Neolithic. To protest American meddling in the Middle East, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned all foreign words from Farsi: pizza would become “elastic bread,” and internet

Tennis

By Anatoly Liberman
Suggestions on the origin of tennis go back to the beginning of English etymological lexicography, and one can teach a semester-long course by using only the attempts to discover who, where, when, and why called the game this. The game of tennis is not called tennis in any other language, unless a borrowing from English is used (as happened to hockey and football among others), and some people thought this was reason enough to insist on the English origin of the word. They asked questions like: “Why should we go

Kneading bread for the needy

By Anatoly Liberman
In those rare cases in which people ask my advice about good writing, I tell them not to begin (to not begin?) their works with epigraphs from Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, for the rest will look like an insipid anticlimax, and, disdainful of ground-to-dust buzzwords and familiar quotations, I also suggest that people avoid (naturally, like the plague) such titles as “A Tale of Two Friendships/ Losses/ Wars,” etc. and resist the temptation to

That ugly Americanism? It may well be British.

By Dennis Baron
Matthew Engel is a British journalist who doesn’t like Americanisms. The Financial Times columnist told BBC listeners that American English is an unstoppable force whose vile, ugly, and pointless new usages are invading England “in battalions.” He warned readers of his regular FT column that American imports like truck, apartment, and movies are well on their way to ousting native lorries, flats, and films.

Engel’s tirade against the American “faze, hospitalise, heads-up, rookie, listen up” and “park up” got several million page views

Not an inkling

By Anatoly Liberman
Inkling: English is full of such cozy, homey words. There is the noun inkle “linen tape or thread” and the verb inkle “to whisper.” The noun is still listed as current, while the verb, which was extremely rare in the past, has survived only in dialectal use. Both, as well as inkling, were first recorded in Middle English, but little can be said about them. Winkle, twinkle, and crinkle shed no light on their past. Inkle “tape” and inkle “whisper” don’t seem to belong together. Dutch has enkel “simple,” and Swedish has enkel “single.”

The gods are on Twitter

By Mark Peters

I’ve been seeing gods everywhere lately. Not gods like Thor, Ganesha, and God. My cinnamon rolls have been deity-free, if not gluten-free. It’s lexical gods I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look someone is thanking, cursing, or begging some specific group of supreme beings. For example, I’ve recently spotted the following religious invocations: • […]

Bludgeoning oneself into a corner

By Anatoly Liberman
When asked about the origin of a certain word, I often answer: “I have no idea” (in addition, of course, to “I don’t remember” and “I have to look it up in a good dictionary”). Sometimes, after consulting a dictionary, I add: “No one knows.” The questioners express surprise: a doctor should be able to diagnose patients, a plumber is called to fix the leak, and etymologists are evidently paid for explaining the origin of words. There may or might be a fat living in

Are laws requiring English signs discriminatory?

By Dennis Baron
English on business signs? It’s the law in New York City. According to the “true name law,” passed back in 1933, the name of any store must “be publicly revealed and prominently and legibly displayed in the English language either upon a window . . . or upon a sign conspicuously placed upon the exterior of the building” (General Business Laws, Sec. 9-b, Art. 131).

Failure to comply is technically a misdemeanor, but violations