Oxford Etymologist

Monthly Gleanings: June 2010

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.

Break and Other Br- Words

Given how many words that refer to breaking begin with br-, to what extent is classifying break with sound imitative words justified?

Break and Brake

Are break and brake related? Yes, they are, but the nature of their relationship deserves a detailed explanation. Break is an ancient word. It has cognates in all the Germanic languages, and Latin frango, whose root shows up in the borrowed words fragile, fragment, and refract, is believed to be allied to it (the infix n may be disregarded for reconstructing the protoform). The principal parts of break in Old English were brecan (infinitive), bræc (preterit singular; æ, as in Modern Engl. man), and brocen (past participle). At that time, verbs like break (so-called strong verbs, which displayed such alternations) had four principal parts.

Spelling and Swelling: Bosom, Breast, And Others

In today’s English, the letters u and o have the same value in mutter and mother, and we have long since resigned ourselves to the fact that lover, clover, and mover are spelled alike but do not rhyme. (Therefore, every less familiar word, like plover, is a problem even to native speakers.) Those who want to know more about the causes of this madness will find an answer in any introduction to the history of English. I will state only a few essentials. For example, the vowel of mother was once long, as in school, but, unlike what happened in school, it became short and later acquired its modern pronunciation, as happened, for example, in but.

From Week To Weak

This is a weekly blog, and ever since it began I have been meaning to write a post about the word week. Now that we are in the middle of the first week of the first summer month, the time appears to be ripe for my overdue project.

Monthly Gleanings: May 2010

Dickens and non-standard speech. In connection with wash-up for worship in Pickwick, it has been noted that, according to some, Dickens’s phonetic spelling cannot be trusted. I am aware of this verdict (compare, among others, his enigmatic kyebosk for kibosh). His rendering of the Yorkshire dialect (in Nicholas Nickleby) and even of Cockney has been challenged more than once.

Unable to Put the Kibosh on a Hard Word

The young Dickens was the first to record the word kibosh. We don’t know for sure how it sounded in the 1830’s, but, judging by the spelling ky(e)-, it must always have been pronounced with long i. The main 19th-century English etymologists (Eduard Mueller, Hensleigh Wedgwood, and Walter W. Skeat) did not include kibosh in their dictionaries. They probably had nothing to say about it, though Mueller, a German, hardly ever saw such a rare and insignificant word.

Old Slang: Rogue

Slang words are so hard to etymologize because they are usually isolated, while language historians prefer to work with sound correspondences, cognates, and protoforms. Most modern “thick” dictionaries tell us that rogue, the subject of this post, is of unknown origin. This conclusion could be expected, for rogue, a 16th-century creation, meant “a wandering mendicant.” (Skeat attributes the original sense “a surly fellow” to it but does not adduce sufficient evidence in support of his statement.)

Yes, Your Wash-Up

The title is from The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (wash-up is the way one of the characters pronounces worship), but I owe the idea of this post to two questions. I decided not to wait for the next set of “gleanings,” because my summer schedule will prevent me from answering questions and responding to comments with the regularity one could wish for. Both questions concern Engl. r.

Monthly Gleanings: April 2010

I notice that my posts on usage, including spelling, invite livelier comments than those on word origins, and most questions I receive also concern usage. This is natural, and, as always, I am grateful for questions, suggestions, and criticism. Today I will take care of about half of my backlog but will try to get rid of the other half in May.

The Oddest English Spellings, Part 16: Wistful Whistplayers and Other Wherry Important Words

By Anatoly Liberman

The number of people in the English speaking world who distinguish in pronunciation between witch and which, wine and whine, wen and when is relatively small, and those who make this distinction do not say w-hitch, w-hine, and w-hen, but rather hwitch, hwine, and hwen. What follows is a breathtaking story of the hw-sound and the wh-spelling.

To Love, To Praise; To Promise, To Permit

Anatoly Liberman’s weekly column.

Between Dodge and Kitsch

Anatoly Liberman looks at the words “dodge” and “kitsch”.

Monthly Gleanings: March 2010

Anatoly Liberman answers questions.

A Postscript to the Series on Unpleasant People: Humbug

Anatoly Liberman looks at the word “humbug”.

Unpleasant People
Part 3: Swindler

For the third part of his Unpleasant People series, Anatoly Liberman discusses the recent origins of the word swindler.