Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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
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.
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
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
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
By Anatoly Liberman
Toasting, a noble art, deserves the attention of all those (etymologists included) who drink for joy, rather than for getting drunk. The origin of the verb to toast “parch,” which has been with us since the end of the 14th century, poses no problems. Old French had toster “roast, grill,” and Italian tostare seems to be an unaltered continuation of the Romance protoform. Tost- is the root of the past participle of Latin torrere (the second conjugation) “parch.” English has the same root in torrid and less obviously
By Anatoly Liberman
As I said, when I first broached this subject, discussing the merits and demerits of the split infinitive is an unprofitable occupation: all the arguments have been repeated many times. But an ironic comment on my post made me return to splitting. The differences between me and a huge segment of the world (a look at British newspapers shows that the infection is not limited to American usage) can be formulated so: my principle is “split if you must,” while many others seem to stick to the principle “split at all costs.” Our correspondent asserted that nothing justifies keeping the particle to and the verbal form in close proximity. Not quite so.
By Anatoly Liberman
Today hardly anyone would have remembered the meaning of the word giaour “infidel” (the spellchecker does not know it and, most helpfully, suggests glamour and Igor among four variants) but for the title of Byron’s once immensely popular 1813 poem: many editions; ten thousand copies sold on the first day, an unprecedented event in the history of 19th-century publishing. Nowadays, at best a handful of specialists in English romanticism
By Anatoly Liberman
I have collected many examples about which I would like to hear the opinion of our correspondents. Perhaps I should even start an occasional column under the title “A Word Lover’s Complaint.”
Hanging as. Everybody must have seen sentences like the following: “…as the president, our cares must be your concern.” This syntax seems to be acceptable in American English, for it occurs everywhere, from the most carefully edited newspapers to essays by undergraduate students. The idea of the sentence given above is obvious: “you, being the president…” or “since you are the president…” but doesn’t the whole sound odd? Don’t we expect something like “as the president, you should (are expected to)….”
By Anatoly Liberman
Mash has nothing to do with mass or mess, but it sounds like them, and since I have been meaning to write about masher ‘lady killer, etc.’ for a long time (see the last sentence of the previous post), I decided that this is the proper moment to do so. Some of our best dictionaries say that the origin of masher is unknown. However, if we disregard a few insupportable conjectures, the conclusion at which we will arrive won’t surprise anyone: masher is mash plus -er. Only mash poses problems. Masher enjoyed tremendous popularity during the last two decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, before it more or less faded from people’s memory.
By Anatoly Liberman
Two weeks ago, I devoted a post to the history of the word mass “service.” While explaining how missa was abstracted from the Latin phrase missa est “is dismissed” and then turned into a noun, I quoted a bit ironically The Century Dictionary. In its opinion, the word for dismissal was applied to the entire service “by an easy transfer.” The transfer is far from easy, but I did not want to make a long post even longer and stopped there. As a result, I received two questions: one about the special literature on the etymology of mass and one just on this “easy transfer.” First the literature. Some titles are mentioned in my bibliography of English etymology. Perhaps the most interesting of them is the oldest, by John Bruce, “On the Word ‘Mass’” in Archaeologia 21, 1826, 113-16. In those days and even much later, journals on archeology, local antiquities, ethnology, and folklore often accepted contributions on the history of words (some of them still do).
By Anatoly Liberman
Words related to material culture often end up in a trashcan labeled “origin unknown.” This is not surprising, for things are regularly imported with their names, and those may be hard to trace to their roots. The number of English words for “basket” (some of them local and little used outside their dialects) is great, and the etymology of some has not been ascertained. For example, we have maund, strongly reminiscent of Dutch mand and possibly a borrowing from Dutch (“of debatable origin”), creel, from Old French (also “of uncertain origin,” perhaps ultimately from Latin craticulum, that is, a little cratis “wickerwork”), and punnet “a chip basket” (it surfaced only in the 19th century and appears to be a diminutive of pun, a dialectal variant of pound, for punnets, like other baskets, were in some places used as a measure; compare a basketful of…
The origin of plant names is one of the most interesting areas of etymology. I have dealt with henbane, hemlock, horehound, and mistletoe and know how thorny the gentlest flowers may be for a language historian. It is certain that horehound has nothing to do with hounds, and I hope to have shown that henbane did not get its name because it is particularly dangerous to hens (which hardly ever peck at it, and even if they did, why should they have been chosen as the poisonous plant’s preferred victims?).
By Anatoly Liberman
In 1984, old newspapers were regularly rewritten, to conform to the political demands of the day. With the Internet, the past is easy to alter. In a recent post, I mentioned C. Sweet, the man who discovered the origin of the word pedigree, and added (most imprudently) that I know nothing about this person and that he was no relative of the famous Henry Sweet. Stephen Goranson pointed out right away that in Skeat’s article devoted to the subject, C. was expanded to Charles and that Charles Sweet was Henry’s brother. I have the article in my office, which means I, too, at one time read it and knew who C. Sweet was. Grieved and
By Anatoly Liberman
The most universal law of etymology is that we cannot explain the origin of a word unless we have a reasonably good idea of what the thing designated by the word means. For quite some time people pointed to India as the land in which rum was first consumed and did not realize that in other European languages rum was a borrowing from English. The misleading French spelling rhum suggested a connection with Greek rheum “stream, flow” (as in rheumatism). According to other old conjectures, rum is derived from aroma or saccharum. India led researchers to Sanskrit roma “water” as the word’s etymon, and this is what many otherwise solid 19th-century dictionaries said. Webster gave the vague, even meaningless reference “American,” but on the whole, the choice appeared to be between East and West Indies. Skeat, in the first edition of his dictionary (1882), suggested Malayan origins (from beram “alcoholic drink,” with the loss of the first syllable) and used his habitual eloquence to boost this hypothesis.
By Anatoly Liberman
Part 1 appeared long ago and dealt with blackguard, blackleg, and blackmail, three words whose history is unclear despite the seeming transparency of their structure. Were those guards as black as they were painted? Who had black legs, and did anyone ever receive black mail? As I then noted, the etymology of compounds may be evasive. One begins with obvious words (doormat, for example), passes by dormouse with its impenetrable first element, wonders at moonstone (does it have anything to do with the moon?), moonlighting, and moonshine (be it “foolish talk” or “illegally distilled whiskey”), experiences a temporary relief at the sight of roommate, and stops in bewilderment at mushroom. The way from dormouse to mushroom is full of pitfalls. (And shouldn’t pitfall be fallpit? Originally a pitfall was a trapdoor, a snare, a device for catching birds, but then why pit?).