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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
By Anatoly Liberman The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) appeared thanks to the efforts of the Philological Society. Every May the society opened its “anniversary” (that is, annual) meetings with long presidential addresses, which also graced the early volumes of the Transactions of the Philological Society (TPS). Both the society and its transactions are still very […]
By Anatoly Liberman If you have ever written a grant proposal, the form you filled out must have had a question about your methodology. Among the many useless words invented to add ceremony or to the bureaucratic procedure, methodology occupies a place of honor. It is a synonym of method(s) but pretends to have a […]
By Anatoly Liberman In June and July there were several queries about word origins and a general question about the availability of linguistic information, which shows that no heat wave can dry up people’s interest in etymology. Wayzgoose. This word appeared late and is odd because it denotes an entertainment given specifically to printers at […]
By Anatoly Liberman There were days when anybody could write a letter to Notes and Queries, a biweekly magazine published in London, and see it in print a few days later. One correspondent, whose playful but sterile imagination suggested to him the pseudonym BUSHEY HEATH, wrote the following in Volume 12 of the Third Series, […]
By Anatoly Liberman Unpronounceable and unprintable English words no longer exist, and only the spellchecker turns red when smut defiles our screens for academic purposes (dictionary makers and etymologists treat all words with equanimity and, if needed, include and discuss them). Now that everything is discourse, taboo has been abolished. Strangely, the more sensitive people […]
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.
By Anatoly Liberman The Old Germanic word for “army” sounded approximately like harjaz. Its Modern German continuation is Heer, and nearly the same word is used in Icelandic, Norwegian, and Danish (army is a borrowing from French; the idea of this word is “armed force”). English has lost harjaz, but it is astounding how many […]
By Anatoly Liberman Language is unbelievably redundant. For example, vowels are called vowels because voice (Latin vox; compare Engl. voc-al) is an inalienable part of their production. Yet a word said in a whisper, that is, without the participation of voice, will not be lost. In a language in which the gender, number, and case of […]
By Anatoly Liberman It does not surprise us that naked and wretched do not rhyme with raked and etched. But the difference between learned in I have learned a lot in this course and I have seldom met such a learned man is disturbing. In native words and in many borrowings, English has lost most […]
by Anatoly Liberman If we disregard the use of runes, we may say that literacy came to Europe with Christianity. Two exceptions are Greece and Italy. England, like its neighbors, adopted the Roman script, but the sounds of the Germanic languages (and English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family) were in many […]
by Anatoly Liberman Alex, a fifth-grader and so far the youngest reader of this blog, wants to know how to start investigating one’s family name. This question interests many people who study their genealogy. (Pay attention to the spelling: in American English, genealogy rhymes with geology, biology, and philology, but its root is Latin genea […]
by Anatoly Liberman In dealing with a category like time, we have every reason to suppose that in the past the word for it designated something more concrete, for instance, a measurable interval or an observable event. What interval, what event? Scholars facing such questions look for words whose meaning is similar to the one […]