Oxford Etymologist

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

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.”

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

Club ‘an association’

By Anatoly Liberman
It is inevitable that after dealing with club “cudgel” we should ask ourselves where club “group of members” came from. Some people think that the explanation is natural and easy. Skeat was among them. Following his etymology of club “cudgel,” he also derived this club from a Scandinavian source and commented: “Lit[erally] ‘a clump of people’.

Club ‘cudgel’

By Anatoly Liberman

Where there is golf, there are clubs; hence this post. But club is an intriguing word regardless of the association. It surfaced only in Middle English. Since the noun believed to be its etymon, namely klubba, has been attested in Old Icelandic, dictionaries say that club came to English with the Vikings or their descendants. Perhaps it did. In Icelandic, klubba coexists with its synonym klumba, and the opinion prevails that bb developed from mb, which later became mp.

Golf

By Anatoly Liberman
Before we embark on the etymology of golf, something should be said about the pronunciation of the word. Golf does not rhyme with wolf (because long ago w changed the vowel following it), but in the speech of some people it rhymes with oaf, and “goafers” despises everyone who would allow l to creep in

Monthly Gleanings: June 2011

By Anatoly Liberman
Half of 2011 is behind us. This is reason enough for looking through one’s notes and offering a retrospect.
Old Business
Once again many thanks to those who responded to my question about the difference between in future and in the future. I am sure

‘Pretty’ is as pretty does

By Anatoly Liberman

The adjective pretty had such a tempestuous history that it deserves an essay, even though no new facts are likely to shed light on the obscurities of its development. We will move from Old English tricks to Jack Sprat (surely, you remember: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, / His wife could eat no lean; / and so betwixt them both, you see, / They licked the plate clean”), from Welsh praith “act, deed” to Russian bred “delirium” and end up pretty much where we were at the beginning.

“Jump” and related matters

By Anatoly Liberman

Like the previous post on penguin, this one has been written in response to a question from our correspondent. His surname is Jump, and he has investigated the origin of the homonymous verb quite well. My task consists in adding a few details to what can be found in the Internet and easily available dictionaries.

Penguin

By Anatoly Liberman
Practically everything that can be said about the origin of penguin has been said in the OED, and in what follows I will only touch on three later works on the subject. It must be admitted that these works are almost as flightless as the bird they discuss. Here is the relevant part of the digest of the OED’s long note, as it appears in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: “…of unknown origin; first recorded in both applications [that is, as “great auk” and as “penguin”] in reports

Monthly Gleanings: May 2011

By Anatoly Liberman
I was delighted to hear from a fellow journalist that his experience matches mine: no reaction when one’s work is good and immediate rebuke when one errs. However, critics save us from complacency, so may they keep their vigil. I am particularly grateful for the explanation about the difference between in future “from now on” and in the future “in days to come,” because

The oddest English spellings, part 17:
The letter H

By Anatoly Liberman
Because of the frequency of the words the, this, that, these, those, them, their, there, then, and with, the letter h probably occurs in our texts more often than any other (for Shakespeare’s epoch thee and thou should have been added). But then of course we have think, three, though, through, thousand, and words with ch, sh,

Two hard L-words, second word: Lunker

By Anatoly Liberman
Lunker seems to be well-known in the United States and very little in British English. Mark Twain used lunkhead “blockhead.” Lunker surfaced in books later, but lunkhead must have been preceded by lunk, whatever it meant. In today’s American English, lunker has several unappetizing and gross connotations, and we will let them be: one cannot constantly deal with turd and genitals.

Two hard L-words, first word: Larrup

By Anatoly Liberman
For this essay I have to thank Walter Turner, who asked me about the origin of larrup. The verb means “beat, thrash, whip, flog.” Long before my database became available in printed form as A Bibliography of English Etymology, I described in a special post what kind of lexical fish my small-meshed net had caught. (Sorry for the florid style. I remember a dean saying in irritation to one of the speakers at

Monthly Gleanings: April 2011

By Anatoly Liberman
The best way of finding out whether “the world” is watching you is to err. The moment I deviate from the path of etymological virtue I am rebuffed, and this keeps me on my toes. Even an innocent typo “causes disappointment” (as it should). Walter W. Skeat: “But the dictionary-maker must expect, on the one hand, to be snubbed when he makes a mistake, and on the other, to be neglected when he is right” (1890). Apparently, this blog does not exist in a vacuum, though I would welcome more questions and comments in addition to rebuttals and neglect. Among other things, I noticed that