Are you daft or deft? Or, between lunacy and folly
By Anatoly Liberman
The subject promised by today’s title has been simmering on my back burner for a long time, but now that the essay on simpleton is out, I am ripe for tackling it.
No simplistic etymology of “simpleton”
By Anatoly Liberman
Simpleton is an irritating word. At first sight, its origin contains no secrets: simple + ton. And that may be all there is to it despite the obscurity of –ton. We find this explanation in the OED and in the dictionaries dependent on it.
Monthly etymology gleanings for August 2013, part 2
By Anatoly Liberman
My apologies for the mistakes, and thanks to those who found them. With regard to the word painter “rope,” I was misled by some dictionary, and while writing about gobble-de-gook, I was thinking of galumph. Whatever harm has been done, it has now been undone and even erased.
Monthly etymology gleanings for August 2013, part 1
By Anatoly Liberman
I have received many comments on the posts published in August and many questions. Rather than making these gleanings inordinately long, I have broken them into two parts. Today I’ll begin by asking rather than answering questions, because to some queries I am unable to give quotable (or any) answers.
Looking “askance”
By Anatoly Liberman
I have been meaning to tell the story of askance for quite some time—as a parable or an exemplum. Popular books and blogs prefer to deal with so-called interesting words. Dude, snob, and haberdasher always arouse a measure of enthusiasm, along with the whole nine yards, dated and recent slang, and the outwardly undecipherable family names.
Three recent theories of “kibosh”
By Anatoly Liberman
The phrase put the kibosh on surfaced in texts in the early thirties of the nineteenth century. For a long time etymologists have been trying to discover what kibosh means and where it came from. Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Gaelic Irish, and French have been explored for that purpose.
Alphabet soup, part 2: H and Y
By Anatoly Liberman
This is a story of the names of two letters. Appreciate the fact that I did not call it “A Tale of Two Letters.” No other phrase has been pawed over to such an extent as the title of Dickens’s novel.
Monthly etymological gleanings for July 2013
By Anatoly Liberman
As always, I am grateful to our correspondents for their questions, suggestions, and corrections. Occasionally I do not respond to their queries because I have nothing to say and keep trying to find a quotable answer.
Alphabet soup, part 1: V and Z
By Anatoly Liberman
It is common knowledge that an average page of an English dictionary contains at least twice as many borrowed as native words, even though come, go, see, sit, stand, do, make, man, woman, in, on, and other similar heavy duty words go back to Old English.
How courteous are you at court?
By Anatoly Liberman
“Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been? I’ve been to London to look at the Queen,/ Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, what did you there?/ I frightened a little mouse under the chair.” Evidently, our power of observation depends on our background and current interests.
Flutes and flatterers
By Anatoly Liberman
The names of musical instruments constitute one of the most intriguing chapters in the science and pseudoscience of etymology. Many such names travel from land to land, and we are surprised when a word with romantic overtones reveals a prosaic origin. For example, lute is from Arabic (al’ud: the definite article followed by a word for “wood, timber”).
When it rains, it does not necessarily pour
By Anatoly Liberman
Contrary to some people’s expectation, July has arrived, and it rains incessantly, that is, in the parts of the world not suffering from drought. I often feel guilty on account of my avoiding the burning questions of our time.
Monthly etymological gleanings for June 2013
By Anatoly Liberman
One cannot predict which posts will interest the public and which will leave them indifferent. I hoped that my “revolutionary” hypothesis on the origin of Old Nick would result in a tidal wave (title wave, as some of my students write), but it did not produce as much as a ripple, whereas the fairly trivial essay on the letter y aroused a lively discussion.
Multifarious Devils, part 4. Goblin
By Anatoly Liberman
Petty devils are all around us. Products of so-called low mythology, they often have impenetrable names. (Higher mythology deals with gods, yet their names are often equally opaque!) Some such evil creatures have appeared, figuratively speaking, the day before yesterday, but that does not prevent them from hiding their origin with envious dexterity (after all, they are imps). A famous evader is gremlin.
Multifarious devils, part 3. “Pumpernickel,” “Nickel,” and “Old Nick”
By Anatoly Liberman
Although a German word, Pumpernickel (which in what follows will not be capitalized) seems to be sufficiently familiar to the English speaking world not to require a gloss. The origin of the bread (Westphalia, and there perhaps the town of Osnabrücken) has been ascertained, but the etymology of the name remains a puzzle—at least to some extent.
Multifarious Devils, part 2. Old Nick and the Crocodile
By Anatoly Liberman
In our enlightened age, we are beginning to forget how thickly the world of our ancestors was populated by imps and devils. Shakespeare still felt at home among them, would have recognized Grimalkin, and, as noted in a recent post, knew the charm aroint thee, which scared away witches. Flibbertigibbet (a member of a sizable family in King Lear), the wily Rumpelstilzchen, and their kin have names that are sometimes hard to decipher, a fact of which Rumpelstilzchen was fully aware.