Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s

About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder. It is frustrating that the origin of hog is unknown. The word surfaced in Middle English, and it would seem that a relatively recent monosyllabic animal name (and hog always had only one syllable) need not give language historians too much trouble. But this is not the case, as the history of dog (Old English) and hog (Middle English) shows. All we can know for certain is that twelve and six, and three centuries ago, people coined words, motivated by the same impulses as today. They have always produced monosyllables like big, dig, gig, bog, gag, smug, and lug, and most of them were “emotional,” that is, sound-imitative or sound symbolic. Hogs grunt. Is the word hog onomatopoeic? Do swine “say” hog-hog or pig-pig? Perhaps. In any case, their Dutch siblings “say” big-big!

Why then is the hedgehog called hedgehog? The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) explains: “So named from frequenting hedgerows and its pig-like snout.” I assume that the corresponding page in the OED online has not yet been edited, because the same formulation appears there. Or perhaps there is nothing to edit in this statement. Perhaps. Hedgehogs may be attached to hedges, but it is amazing that such an inconspicuous feature was chosen for naming the familiar rodent. Isn’t our solution too good to be true?

Hedgehogs don’t live in America, and every time I discuss the Grimms’ tale “The Hare and the Hedgehog” with my students (I often teach German folklore), I have to describe the protagonist’s way of life. I also very much admire the end of the tale, the storyteller’s advice: “If you are a hedgehog, always marry a hedgehog.” I have seen many young people who disregarded this advice and paid dearly for it.

What are the most conspicuous features of the hedgehog? A hedgehog, if attacked, rolls itself into a prickly ball (what a wonderful way of hedging against enemies!), but other than that, it is easily domesticated and is great fun to have at home in summer except that you cannot pet a hedgehog. Also, like mongooses, hedgehogs attack and devour snakes.

In my opinion, the name hedgehog does not do justice to the creature’s behavior and shape. It is also unclear why English replaced the ancient word for “hedgehog” with a new (dialectal?) one. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian have retained the Indo-European name (such is German Igel; the Slavic name is also related to it). Be that as it may, since the hedgehog’s projecting mouth and nose do resemble a snout, prickly hog (this is what the creature is called in numerous Dutch dialects) would be a more accurate name than hedgehog.

Let us now leave hogs to their devices and look at the noun hedge. This word has a dramatic history. The Old English for hedge was hegg. I will not go into phonetic niceties and will only say that hegg is related to haga “enclosure, yard.” Hegge yielded hedge, and haga became haw, as in hawthorn, which is also familiar from the last name Hawthorn. Yet haga is also recognizable, because we know the place name The Hague, Den Haag (see is image in the header). The name of the capital of the Netherlands has retained its ancient form and even its definite article. Last week, we looked at burg and its likes, and I noted that town is akin to Icelandic tún “enclosure.” This is what town meant (consider Modern German Zaun “fence”), exactly like Den Haag.

The most dramatic part in the history of the root we now see in hedge and haw concerns the Old English word hagosteald “bachelor; warrior.” Its counterparts elsewhere in Germanic displayed several meanings: “king,” “retainer,” “servant,” “peasant,” “widower”—a partly incompatible medley of senses. But only at first sight. Among other things, the original “enclosure” was the feudal lord’s residence. In those days and much later, the eldest son inherited his father’s property. His brothers, those who aspired to a career, had little choice and usually became soldiers, or, to use the feudal term, retainers (the same situation with the younger brothers continued into the nineteenth century). Those retainers were, of course, bachelors, and as far as language is concerned, the step from “bachelor,” to “widower” (a male without a wife) must have been short. In Modern German, Hagestolz (now obsolete or facetious) still means “bachelor”; stolz “proud” is a product of folk etymology.

It is amazing how words change their meanings and attain secondary senses, which oust the original sense. From “king’s retainer” to “bachelor”! But incompatible senses also coexist in modern languages and give us no trouble. This, for example, happened to English bachelor. Its Old French source meant “young man aspiring to knighthood,” while Medieval Latin baccalārius referred to a laborer on an estate (baccalāria “area of ploughland”). Though our BA’s don’t aspire to knighthood, getting a college degree is an important step to the proverbial room at the top. And we, the readers of this blog—well, we have made a long way from a piece of enclosed land to the heights of historical semantics. In our journey, we passed by hogs and hedgehogs, visited The Hague, and almost attained a BA. (Yet I keep wondering whether hedgehogs have anything to do with hedges.)

To Our Readers

My sincere thanks to the two readers who have researched some obscure words and asked me about their origin. My resources are good but limited. I have an excellent etymological database and a huge collection of books on word origins. If they provide me with no answers, I give up. This is especially true with regards to the non-Indo-European languages. Alas, all etymologists are in the same position. They know only what little they know.

From My Collection of Useless and Evil Proverbs

It is amazing how many proverbial phrases people have invented to demean women! Here is an Early English gem in its original spelling: “…by the common prouerbe, a woman will wepe for pitie to see a gosling goe barefoote.” John Heywood, a sixteenth-century playwright, is mainly remembered today for his collection of proverbs. He knew the saying quoted above, and it was familiar to English readers of Notes and Queries as late as 1891. Walter Scott seems to have made one of his characters use this saying in Rob Roy (so I have read but did not check). As usual, we have no information about the date and the author of this saying, but the ugly “sentiment” is familiar. The Russian saying “A woman’s tears are water” is still current. What a shame!

_{Featured image: Charlemagne at Court, illuminated manuscript. Public domain via Picryl.}

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<i>Unabridged</i>: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words

Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis. This volume of nearly 400 pages has the subtitle: “The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary.” Below, I will summarize my impressions of Fatsis’s book. Perhaps Unabridged in the title also refers to the volume’s scope, because it presents a broad picture of British and American lexicography for more than two centuries.

Fatsis has been a passionate word lover since early age, so his foray into the history and practice of dictionary making was not a whim. He approached his project in the best way possible: he got himself hired as a lexicographer-in-training, spent several years with Webster, wrote numerous definitions, spoke to dozens of specialists in the United States and at Oxford, and finally produced this book about dictionaries and dictionary making—not only about Webster’s Unabridged. Rarely does he say something that gives away his insufficient mastery of the subject. Thus, on p. 71, he calls Notes and Queries an obscure British journal. In fact, it was for years one of the most popular weeklies in the English-speaking world, and it still exists. The OED has always been fully aware of it. But this is just faultfinding. Fatsis did become an expert.

I am surprised that we never met. For years we attended the same biennial conferences of The Dictionary Society of North America, talked to and made friends with the same people, and listened to the same presentations. Better late than never. Now we’ll meet virtually in this blog. The book, which in addition to the indispensable introductory remarks, acknowledgments, endnotes (excellent endnotes), bibliography, and an index, contains thirteen chapters. Among other things, they are devoted to the history of Webster’s dictionary. Who were the two Merriam brothers? Their names are now indelibly tied to Noah Webster’s. We do know such hybrids, Schubert-Liszt and Verdi-Liszt, for example. What stands behind the symbiosis? In this case, the story is worth reading. 

Two main questions about dictionaries recur again and again. How many words should be included? And how should they be defined? How, for example, do you define in, as, so, oh, weather, be, and thousands of others? And does anyone need such definitions? New words flood language (any language) at all times. When we study the past, we depend on written records, because only such as are extant. But even a dictionary of Old English, which deals with a closed corpus, is incredibly difficult to put together. Though a living language grows every minute, most of us need not worry about this circumstance. We know what we know, and if some word is new to us, we may either disregard it or look it up. But lexicographers have to anticipate everybody’s questions, and when we do look up a word (for its meaning, spelling, pronunciation, use, or origin), we expect it to be there. Hence this endless, self-defeating chase for the words coined the day before yesterday, yesterday, or five minutes ago. Hundreds of them are stillborn. For an online dictionary space is not a problem, but paper editions cannot be allowed to weigh a ton.

Fatsis believes that modern dictionaries should be all-inclusive: if a word exists or once had, in the poet’s words, its singing minute, get hold of it and rejoice. Also, volatile slang, obscenities, and ethnic slurs? Well, yes. This book is by far not the first one about dictionaries and their problems. Webster’s Third had the audacity to include the F-word and the seemingly innocuous ain’t (my spellchecker still underlines ain’t in red). Today the storm that followed the publication of that dictionary is hard to imagine. The unpronounceable F-word? My goodness! This is the most frequent word (plus its derivatives) hundreds of people use actively. Even our elected representatives constantly feel f-ed up by their f-in’ opponents and share their hurt feelings with the public. Why should dictionaries be guardians of good manners? Actually, they often (and nowadays, even regularly) do play this role, by explaining how certain words are used, where they may or should be avoided, and so forth.

What I missed in this book is a broad discussion of dictionary inclusion and culture. A great dictionary, a monument erected for all times, does feature all the words it can net, but this feast is partly wasted. The vocabulary of our young people is tragically small. Even the books by Mark Twain and Jack London (whom our American children and grandchildren seldom read, if at all), to say nothing of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackery, are full of words they don’t understand and don’t care to learn. Dictionaries are getting richer and richer, while individual vocabularies have dwindled like Balzac’s la peau du chagrin (my favorite phrase, which, much to my chagrin, no student I have met so far was able to understand).

More harping on the same note! Fatsis did not mention Spelling Bee, this institutionalized torture chamber, but devoted an enthusiastic chapter to the Word of the Year. What passions, what spirited discussions about a moth that will die an hour later! And all that from the people who call themselves linguists. That says something about the level of modern linguistics. Fatsis, as I said, takes the liveliest interest in such contests. He is a man of liberal views, investigates at great length the history of the adjective woke, likes the new use of pronouns, and many other things that are not to my taste. But I am a highbrow, while he would probably be proud to call himself a lowbrow (no offence meant, and I hope no offence taken). I would prefer chapters on pronunciation and etymology in dictionaries. Both subjects are barely mentioned in the book.

Glossaries and dictionaries have existed for millennia, but the Internet and AI killed their print versions. Such is the way of all flesh. Though even today people sometimes ride horses in towns, usually they drive cars. The OED and Merriam Webster have survived so far by resorting to websites and ads of all kinds and thus attracting funding, but even they have gone online. All print editions have succumbed to the spirit of our virtual epoch. Do you still remember Funk and Wagnalls, the glorious Random House, and the many editions of Heritage Dictionary? Gone, all gone, and with them hundreds of lexicographers were, to use the impolite British phrase, made redundant. In his recent interview with the Pennsylvania Gazette, Fatsis said (in connection with print books and newspapers): “The New York Times is thriving in part because of its growth of its games and recipes offerings.” Hear, hear!

My conclusion? A fine book. Read it from cover to cover. Some chapters are truly excellent, the best one being about the late collector Madeline Kripke. The last two chapters are also excellent. And here is the opening sentence of the Introduction: “I fell in love with the dictionaries on my eleventh birthday. My big present that day in 1974 was Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Second college edition, Deluxe Color edition), published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio).” Nothing is better than remaining true to one’s first love, especially when it is reciprocated.

_{Featured image: Image from page 450 of “The California horticulturalist and floral magazine” (1870). Public domain via The Internet Archive on Flickr.}

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An etymological ham<i>burg</i>er

My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.

English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.

The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!

The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.

Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”

What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.

The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~  u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.

It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?

As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.

_{Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Endless trouble with <i>breeches</i>

The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches? In the best books on the history of English, I could not find a satisfactory answer, but this complication is minor. The real problem is the origin of the word. (I cannot do this without an impotent jab of AI, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. I asked the computer about the short vowel in breeches, and AI supplied me with several lines of nonsense.)

The names of articles of clothing are often troublesome to an etymologist, partly because they tend to travel from land to land with the objects they designate, so that, for example, specialists in English etymology are called upon to deal with the history of Greek, Latin, Celtic, or Slavic words (to name just a few of the possible sources) and offer opinions about the data they know imperfectly or not at all.

As long as we stay with breeches, consider some other names for “loose-fitting garments for the loins and legs” (dictionary definitions of the most common words are a joy to read): pants (shortening of pantaloons; Italian), trousers (French), jeans (also Romance), knickerbockers (from a proper name), and in connection with proper names, bloomers may be mentioned. Probably, most people remember the origin of Levi’s.

Breeches and its cognates have traveled over half of the world for centuries, and over time, a mountain of linguistic literature dealing with the word has accrued. This word certainly originated in the singular (that is, breech was meant). It occurred in all the Old Germanic languages, except Gothic. We know Gothic only from a fourth-century translation of the Gospels (the original was in Greek), but the characters mentioned in the New Testament did not wear trousers (or breeches). The forms of the word in the recorded Germanic languages are so similar that all of them either go back to the same ancient native protoform or were borrowed from the same foreign source. That form or source must have sounded as brōk (ō designates a long vowel, approximately as in Modern English awe; as far as we can judge, that brōk rhymed with Modern English hawk).

And here’s the rub. If the word was native (Germanic), why did people call that article of clothing brōk? (Such is of course the perennial question of all etymology: only onomatopoetic, sound–imitative words, like ga-ga and croak, are transparent.) As regards brōk, we know only one thing for sure. The old noun was singular (that is, breech). To give a relatively late example, in a thirteenth-century German romance, the youth’s mother sews such a brōk (German bruoch) for him as part of a one-piece hunting outfit.

Since the Germanic word refuses to reveal its origin, historical linguists looked at the evidence in other languages and, naturally, noticed Celtic brāca (a similar meaning), along with its less common doublet bracca. The once powerful Celts were close neighbors of the “Teutons,” as Germanic-speaking tribes were referred to in the past (the German form is die Germanen). Germanic and Celtic share numerous words, and sometimes such words occur only in those two language groups. They may designate natural phenomena (shadow belongs here), tribal property (the most interesting term in this group is town), social relations(here the history of free and oath is worthy of notice), and so forth. The most spectacular borrowing from Celtic into Germanic is perhaps iron: apparently, it was the Celts who taught their Germanic neighbors how to deal with iron.

Even when a word has been recorded only in Germanic and Celtic (that is, without cognates elsewhere: in Greek, Latin, Slavic, and so forth), we cannot be sure who borrowed from whom or whether speakers of both language groups borrowed their word from a third source about which we have no information. The recorded Celtic forms that interest us are braca and bracca. Whence the long consonant in bracca? This cc is usually called emphatic, but what was so emotional about a rather trivial piece of clothing? Or did the word once have n in the root (branca?), so that nc became cc? To repeat: who borrowed from whom? Or was there a third source from which the Celts and the “Germanen” borrowed both the piece of clothing and its name? Incidentally, the oldest (unrecorded) Celtic form is also controversial.

Elmar Seebold, the most recent editor of Fridrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary of German, wrote a detailed entry on Bruch and pointed out that the Germanic word has a less opaque history than the Celtic one, because it may be related to the verb break, while the Celtic word has no cognates. But the relation of breech to break is uncertain, and I could not verify the Old English and Old Icelandic names of the body parts Seebold cites. Where then are we? In a sadly familiar place: the hunt was exciting, but the target escaped us. Breech is a very old Germanic and Celtic word, whose ultimate origin has not been found. The etymologist, as I have noted more than once, is a lonely hunter.

Recently, I cited a proverb advising us not to eat cherries with great men. Such adages seem to have bookish origins: they are insipid and too long, even bombastic. In one’s breeches (synonym: in one’s buttons) “perfectly fit” was recorded in several parts of England a century and a half ago and sounds like a genuine “folk creation.” Probably the same holds for the phrase to wear the breeches “to usurp the authority of the husband.” A medieval equivalent of this phrase existed in Italy, and in the nineteenth century it occurred in French and Dutch. Incidentally, in medieval Iceland, the husband was allowed to divorce his wife if she wore breeches. A look at breeches in the OED is also revealing. Other than that, stay in your breeches.

_{Featured image: Christ with his disciples, A.N. Mironov. C-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows

This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy. This is also what the entry in the OED online says. The entry has not yet been updated, but as regards etymology, there may not be anything to update. Though the word is rather old, the dates of its first occurrence in print vary. In a source for 2008,1893 is mentioned. The extremely detailed entry in Wikipedia gives 1892. Webster’s dictionary online pushes the date to the 1880s but gives no references. Those details matter little: apparently, the word became rather well-known toward the end of the nineteenth century, which means that it was coined earlier. We have no way of knowing how much earlier.

From an etymological point of view, hillbilly does not look more exciting than, for example, blackboard. A blackboard is indeed a black board, but think of blackmail, blacksmith, greyhound, blueprint, greenhorn, and redneck. Is their origin fully transparent? Greyhound is particularly tricky (even though the dog is grey!). Hillbilly may also contain a secret, among other reasons, because compounds and collocations with rhyming components (like claptrap, hobnob, hodgepodge, and Georgie Porgie) are almost too good to be true, that is, their origin may not be as transparent as it seems. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde wrote a tale titled The Sphinx without a Secret. You never can tell.

Surprisingly, an alternate etymology of hillbilly has been offered. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a well-known passage from an old column in the New York Times: “Protestants who came of Appalachian stock were called ‘hillbillies’ and the term connoted ignorance, poverty, vile habits and, in general, low lifers perfectly at home in a pig pen.” Jack Morgan published a short note on the subject in the journal Comments on Etymology (22/8, 1993, p. 22). He was intrigued by the emphasis on Protestant and cited another researcher, in whose opinion the word hillbilly goes back to the emigrants’ preoccupation with their hero “King Billy” (that is, William of Orange), so that they became known as Billy-boys of the hill country. This is a very unlikely source of hillbilly (to put it mildly).  

The historians who stress the North English/Scottish ancestry of the original settlers “of Appalachian stock” failed to find a probable source of the word in Scotland (that is, no appropriate etymon ofhillbilly exists in Scots). Most likely, the word hillbilly is an American coinage, though this fact does not exclude a non-Appalachian “ancestor.” The authors of the article published in the journal American Speech 83, 2008, p. 215, say: “… prior to [!] the word’s chief association with mountaineers in Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks, hillbilly was also generally used in the American language to refer to residents of hill country, especially those in the backwoods districts, in the lower Midwest and Deep South” (emphasis added). To conclude, anyone from hill country was a hillbilly! (Those interested in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the discussion of this book will find a lot of information on the Internet.)

I’ll now cite a curious German parallel to hillbilly. German Hillebille is a wooden hardboard that served as a primitive signaling device, chiefly in the Graz mountains. People struck it in case of fire and on many other occasions. The etymology of this word is unknown, because neither component of Hillebille means anything in German. Only some dialectal Dutch cognates of hille– seem to contain allusions to romping and other precipitous movements. Between 1894 and 1898, a spate of publications appeared in the local, now little-remembered, but at one time well-read German periodicals describing the device, but almost nothing was then or later said about the word’s origin (the few suggestions I found are not worth discussing). The German Wikipedia describes the device, gives a picture of it, and points out that no connection exists between the German and the American noun. (In America, this connection would not have occurred to anyone, because outside Germany, Hillebille is a word people do not know, while I ran into it more or less by chance.)

Indeed, the similarity is, most probably, coincidental, except that both might be “emotional formations.” English hillbilly is a humorous coinage, even if it surfaced as an offensive sobriquet, while the German noun is rather obviously sound-imitative. Nothing points to the fact that German immigrants brought this word to the Appalachians and produced a German-English pun, that is, turned Hillebille into Hill Billy. Only the coincidence is curious. Thus, we have come full circle: Hillbilly emerged unscathed (a “Billy” from the hills), while the German near-homonym remains unexplained and unrelated to its English twin.

Stalled in the mountains, we will progress to the ocean with our Americana. Chapter 53 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is titled “The Gam.” Those who have read the book will remember that it opens with a page bearing the title “Etymology.” Therefore, they won’t be surprised that the author supplied us with the following explanation toward the end of that chapter: “GAM. Noun—A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.” A good professional definition, even though not containing an explanation of origins.

The OED online features this odd word but cannot offer a decisive etymology. Indeed, such a monosyllabic word might come from all kinds of sources. Erich Maria Remarque even wrote a novel about a woman named Gam (certainly, not his best book). Once again, I have nothing to offer, except for an uninspiring lookalike. Russian gam (pronounced like English gum) means “great noise; ruckus.” The word is probably sound-imitative (onomatopoeic). Could English gam also once refer to a noisy gathering? To conclude, we ended up with two obscure, possibly sound-imitative, words, whose origin should have been clear, but the solution escaped us. As usual, I am turning to our readers’ expertise. Perhaps someone knows more about Hillebille and gam than I do. If so, kindly send us your comments.

_{Featured image: Photo by Ken Jacobsen. Public domain via Pexels.}

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Hobnobbing with a hillbilly

It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure. Urban dwellers are urbane and genteel, while dwellers in villages are villains. Right? To be sure, those are the most extreme traces of the medieval (feudal) attitude toward the populace, but our more modern vocabulary is neither more tolerant nor gentler.

A look at some of the better-known synonyms for hillbilly is worth an effort. One such word is hayseed, a late sixteenth-century metaphor, now, at least in the US, mainly remembered as meaning “comical rustic.” (Rustics, except in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, are comical by definition, aren’t they?) Now, what is wrong with the inconspicuous, tiny hayseeds, “grass seeds obtained from hay,” as dictionaries very properly inform us. Yet a hayseed is also one of the names for a country bumpkin. The suffix –kin in bumpkin is Dutch (as in mannikin, napkin, Wilkins, and the unforgettable bare bodkin), so that the entire noun bumpkin is probably also of Dutch origin. It seems to mean “a little tree” (implying a blockhead?).

Wood has not fared well in our metaphors. For instance, Russian dubina “a big wooden stick” (stress on the second syllable; the word more or less rhymes with English farina) means “idiot.” The root bump– in bumpkin ends in an excrescent sound (that is, a sound added without etymological justification: see the post for last week) and means “wood,” as do English beam and German Baum. The implication seems to be clear, because wood is neither gentle nor genteel. A wooden smile will hardly meet with a sweet response. Nor is a wooden gait graceful. However, a bumpkin does not have to be a country dweller. Oliver Goldsmith introduced a rather endearing spoiled brat and trickster Tony Lumkin in his play She Stoops to Conquer. The name, modeled on bumpkin, became proverbial. Tony was not a “hayseed.”

Back to the countryside, where one is expected to meet numerous hicks and rubes. Surprisingly, hick is Hick, a doublet of Rick (Richard), just as Hob is a doublet of Rob, and Hodger of Roger. The union of h and r has a long and interesting history, but it is anybody’s guess why just Hick became a synonym for bumpkin. We may also ask why our genteel restroom is called john and sometimes jenny, while Shakespeare’s contemporaries used a jake for the same purpose. Words from names are countless, and you need a historical linguist, rather than any Tom, Dick, and Harry, to explain their origin. Modesty prevents me from discussing dick, but Richard arrived at Dick by way of its rhyming partner Rick (who, as we have seen, is also Hick). Hick is as good a synonym for “country bumkin” as any other.

More words like bumkin? Take joskin. It sometimes seems that any name, supposedly or really common, might acquire the sense “hayseed.” Yet most peasants were never called Hick! The same holds for Rube, briefly mentioned above. Rube is short for Reuben. According to the story known from the Old Testament, Reuben came to a sad end, but to repeat, Reuben/Rube was never among the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and especially in the countryside. Why then are hicks also called rubes? Just to commemorate a man cursed by his father and to transfer the guilt to an uncultivated villager? Incidentally, some of the names mentioned above are rather recent, a fact that complicates our story even more.

The stock of names for hayseeds and their ilk is almost inexhaustible. Louts and lubbers (the latter as in landlubber) join this motley, nondescript company. Lout is supposedly related to a verb meaning “to bend” (by way of “clown”?). No one takes this derivation seriously, but every dictionary mentions it with a question mark. Lubber is also problematic. Its Old French lookalike does mean “swindler,” but though Middle English may have borrowed such a word from French, more likely, lobur ~ lobeor ~ lobre was part of the Common European slang of the lower classes and criminals (such words existed; this jargon or argot, is called Gaunersprache and Rotwelsch in German).

Another etymology traces lubber to Middle Dutch lobben “clown” (again clown!) with reference to words for “lump.” More probably, the French, Dutch, and English nouns are indeed part of thieves’ (wandering traders’, strollers’) late medieval jargon, used in several parts of Europe. The very word slang may have a similar origin. See the post for September 28, 2016 (“The origin of the word ‘slang’ is known”) and the comments.

The king of hayseeds is probably the hillbilly. The etymology of hillbilly is of course clear, isn’t it? By no means! To this subject the entire next post will be devoted.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Last week, I mentioned William Bates, the author of an excellent essay on the origin of limerick in Notes and Queries, and expressed my regret that I could not find any information about him. As usual, my colleague Dr. Stephen Goranson came to the rescue. This circumstance did not surprise me. Over the years, I have often witnessed his uncanny ability to ferret out all kinds of well-hidden information. This time, he sent me an obituary of Dr. Bates (1821-1884) from the Birmingham Daily Post, an important regional newspaper. Willian Bates, a surgeon, was also well-known in the world of art and literature. The short obituary made a special mention of his contributions to Notes and Queries. A century and a half ago, permanent association with NQ might make one famous or at least distinguished. Those were days! I may add that my database of English etymology features fifteen contributions by William Bates to word origins. No doubt, he also wrote on other subjects. Incidentally, I, too, searched for William Bates and found two celebrities called this, but not the one unearthed by Stephen Goranson.

2. I have a rich database of obscure proverbs and idioms. Here is one of them: “Those that eat cherries with great persons shall have their eyes sprinkled out with stones.” Its analogues have been recorded in German, Romanian, and in a famous medieval Dutch poem. Such an elaborately picturesque and seemingly usleless proverb! Does anyone know its source? Perhaps Dr. Wolfgang Mieder, our great specialist in this area, will enlighten us. Anyway, enjoy a peaceful image of eating cherries below.

_{Featured image: A group of farmers harvesting paddy in Bangladesh. Photo by Zaheed Sarwer Khan. CC-BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A tortuous journey: the word <i>pamphlet</i>

In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon. The word surfaced in writing in 1415, and only two things are clear about its origin: pamphlet did not carry political overtones when it was coined, and it must have had a foreign source (or, because of its spelling with ph, was at least understood to be a loan from Latin or Greek).

It is astounding how often and how passionately scholars and amateurs at one time discussed the origin of pamphlet in the popular press. The main vehicle was, as usual, Notes and Queries, but no old etymological dictionary missed the word. The OED online presents a clear picture of the history of the word and supports a well-argued etymology, which was first offered in 1874 by the great French philologist Gaston Paris in Revue Critique, for September 26, 1874, p. 107. The full OED volume with the letter P appeared in 1909.

These are the main old hypotheses about the derivation of pamphlet. Perhaps the etymon is the French phrase par un filet “(held together) by a thread,” with reference to a single occurrence of the word written as paunflet (as though panflet, with u inserted) and an additional reference to French brochure “brochure” (brocher “to stitch together”; see a picture of a relatively old brochure in the heading). This etymon has been offered and rejected many times, because pamphlets contained a page or two, without a cover, and did not have to be connected by means of a thread.

Another suggested source was papyrus, and I might have passed it by as devoid of interest if it had not been defended by Frank Chance, a talented philologist. In some form this hypothesis can already be found in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 etymological dictionary of English. Chance believed that in a word like papyrus the consonant m might easily be inserted (another insertion!). He cited a few analogs of this phenomenon but not English empty: this adjective goes back to ǣmtig. Also,sumpter “packhorse” developed from Old French som(m)etier; in it the entire group mp is excrescent (that is, added without etymological justification). The Old Dutch noun pampier meant “paper.” Frank Chace believed that pampinus and papyrus “got mixed up.” There is a cruel law of etymology: the more complicated the proposed derivation, the greater the certainty that it is wrong. Not without regret, I have to dismiss Chance’s hypothesis as unrealistic.

A somewhat similar guess was offered in 1889 by Richard Stephen Charnock, a good folklorist but a totally unreliable word historian: “…from Spanish papeléta, diminutive of papél paper from which, with an infixed m, pamphlets might have been formed.” Why the infix, and why Spanish?

Naturally, Walter W. Skeat did not stay away from this discussion either. He reconstructed the date when papyrus probably turned up in English texts and came to the conclusion “that the word must be French, with a Greek root.” And here the Greek historian named Pamphila appeared on the scene (she was discovered long before Skeat in this context). Pamphila lived in the first century CE and enjoyed great popularity. Her multiple works are, it appears, lost. As far as our word is concerned, the posited way must have been from the author’s name to a common noun. The process is common. For instance, we may say that travelers take a Baedeker when they go abroad. Yet in the latest edition of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Skeat wrote: “Etymology quite uncertain. We find French pamphile, the knave of clubs, from the Greek name Pamphilus. Similarly, I should suppose that there was a French form *pamphilet [the asterisk denotes here and below a reconstructed form] or Late Latinpamphilētus, coined from Latin Pamphila….” At the end of the entry, he added a noncommittal reference to Gaston Paris.

Pamphlets were erotic (“amatory”) tracts, and as early as 1344, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and a great bibliophile, recollected in his book Philoliblon (“The Love of Books”) that the youths of his generation had cared more for fat palfreys than for leanpanfletos (sic). In those days, students were advised to stay away from pamphlets! Surely, the learned Pamphila need not interest us in this context. Such was also the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s main predecessor in the area of English etymology. Another Pamphila, responsible for the manufacture of silk, enjoys renown. She cannot be the heroine of our tale either.

The most detailed summary of older views on the history of the word pamphlet will be found in an article by William Bates (Notes and Queries 3/V, 1864, 187-169; see also NQ 3/IV, 1864, 325). I am sorry that I could not find any information about this extremely knowledgeable man.

The second edition of The Century Dictionary summarized some of the attempts to explain the derivation of pamphlet and listed four main hypotheses: 1) from a supposed Old French *paum-fueillet (as though “a leaf of paper held in the hand”), 2) from a supposed Medieval Latin *pagina filata “a threaded (sewed) leaf,” 3) from a supposed use of French par un filet “by a thread,” and 4) from a supposed Old French *pamfilet, Medieval Latin *pamfiletus, resting upon a name Pamphilus or Pamphila, of Greek origin. And here is the corollary at the end of the entry: “The last conjecture is plausible (compare the like personal origin of donet, a grammar, from the name Donatus, and of French calepin, a notebook, from the name Calepinus), but historic proofs are lacking.” My reference to Baedeker is less exotic. Yet I tend to agree with the conclusion by the Century Dictionary.

These are the reasons for my uncertainty. It is usually believed that pamphlet emerged in French, made its way into English, and was later retranslated by French. Perhaps so. I can only add that though words from names and titles are fine, no one, not even the knave of clubs, was called Pamphlet! It is understood that –et in pamphlet is a French suffix. English, –let (as in rivulet, bracelet, and their likes) seems to have emerged in English a century and a half later than the word that interests us. It seems that in 1415, no one in England would have divided pamphlet into pamph-let, but the new noun may have sounded vulgar. Sound groups like pump, pomp, pimp are sound-imitative (the German noun Pumpf means “a fart”). Perhaps this circumstance contributed to the word’s popularity among students. And as for the sound f after m in pamphlet, compare English humph, with its exotic spelling ph!

POSTSCRIPT

1. After the reemergence of this blog, two of our readers expressed their joy that THE OXOFORD ETYMOLOGIST is back on track. I am deeply grateful for their comments.

2. In connection with my derivation of yeoman, a reader reminded us of the British river yeo and suggested that the earliest yeomen might be recruited from that area. I could find no evidence of this connection, while the existence of another word with yeo– (which I mentioned) and of the Dutch cognate of yeo– seem to point in another direction.

3. In commenting on the history of limerick (see the previous post), Stephen Goranson pointed out that during the Civil War in the US, the phrase come to Limerick meant “get to the point, come to terms,” in connection with the Treaty of Limerick (1691). This is a most welcome reference. Search the Internet for THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.

_{Featured image: Pamphlet, “Adieux de madame la duchesse de Polignac aux francois,” 1789. Photo by Eliasdo, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Bob Turvey, a student of limericks

I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.). The first book was sponsored by The Mad Duck Coalition, about which I know nothing and am not certain whether it should be featured among the publishers. This, however, matters little, because what really matters is the author’s career and achievement. Last week, I promised to write about his books and am happy to be able to keep my promise.

The author’s career is certainly worthy of mention. Bob Turvey has a doctorate from Cambridge University. As a research chemist he worked in many countries and now lives in Bristol, England. He devoted forty years to studying the history of limericks, spared no money on buying old and recondite books, and never stopped learning more and more about his subject. Probably no one in the world knows half as much about limericks as he does, and therefore, I first envisaged a limerick in his honor, composed in my best Bristol fashion. “A limerick, new, for Bob Turvey?! / Indeed, but it went topsy-turvy. / Neither reason nor rhyme. / I am not in my prime, / Though still unabashedly vervy.” Too bad! I mean the self-effacing admission, but at least this is the first occurrence of the adjective vervy in English. Does the OED take note of blogs?

The earlier of the aforementioned volumes contain the history of eighteen famous limericks. By the way, according to Turvey, here is the most often translated limerick ever: “There was an old man of Boolong/ Who frightened the birds with his song/ It wasn’t the words/ Which astonished the birds/ But the horrible dooble-ontong.” This masterpiece is now almost forgotten, or perhaps it has fallen into temporary desuetude. One wonders what there is to study, while dealing with this or any limerick. Many, many things. First of all, the references. For example, what is and where is Boolong? Is it Boulogne? And why is French entendre pronounced in this ridiculous way? It turned out that such was indeed the way people pronounced the French group –endre when, for example, Dickens and Thackeray were active. No, it did not “turn out”: the fact had to be discovered and documented.

And who composed the limerick? We are not delving into the epoch of Homer or even Shakespeare: no limerick predates the nineteenth century. But popular limericks are almost folklore, and finding their authors is like chasing the author of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (By the way, as Jack Zipes has shown, this tale did probably have an individual author!) And here I am coming to one of the main points of my report.

The first printed version of nearly all limericks appeared in students’ magazines at Oxford/Cambridge or in newspapers. Bob Turvey sifted through tens of thousands of pages in British, American, Canadian, and Australian magazines and newspapers, many of which can now (fortunately) be found online, and sometimes (!) he ran into what seemed to be the first occurrence of the printed text. (I know only too well this labor of love, though in hunting for articles and long-forgotten notes on etymology I limited myself to journals and popular magazines. I realized that I would drown in newspapers, with their word columns and answers to the readers’ queries, and stayed away from this inexhaustible source.) But even the seemingly secure result may not be final. Thus, the author of the Boolong limerick remains undiscovered, though at least two viable candidates have emerged as such.

Is this labor worth the trouble? To my mind, certainly. To give an example from another area. Recently, a piece of music has emerged, with the notes written by Chopin. The piece has been known for years, and yet the discovery was hailed as a great sensation. And quite rightly so: Chopin’s own hand! Limericks are a noticeable part of the culture of the English-speaking world, and their history deserves the attention of those who care for culture. Unfortunately, “history” is made up of tiny details. Only later may they be assembled to produce an impressive whole. Bob Turvey collected countless fragments, and the mosaic he produced is impressive. I should add that he is often satisfied with negative results: he might not be able to find the exact date and the sought-for author, but always succeeded in rejecting fanciful hypotheses. Once again I see a parallel to my work. Sifting through numerous hypotheses of a word’s origin, I often manage to get rid of silly or fanciful conjectures but fail to discover the truth. Such is the way of all reconstruction, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Note my reference above to the culture of the English-speaking world. Limericks can also be produced in other languages, but only English speakers compose them by the hundreds. Bob Turvey noted how hard it often is for foreigners to understand the funniest limericks. He ascribed this fact to the specific English sense of humor, but his examples feature the people whose knowledge of English is inadequate for detecting a pun or a hidden reference. Though the English (French, Jewish) sense of humor certainly exists, we still don’t know why Edward Lear’s 1846 The Book of Nonsense was such a success. Limericks, though not called limericks, existed before him.

As noted, Turvey’s second volume is titled Why Are Limericks Called Limericks? But the book is also about when and who. The earliest mention the word limerick Bob Turvey dug up goes back to 1879, that is, at least a decade earlier than what one could find in old dictionaries. Now 1879 is also the date given in the OED online. Rather probably, limericks were called limericks because they were sung between verses of a song whose chorus included the name Limerick and typically invited the listener “to come to Limerick.” Why come to Limerick? The question remains open. For comfort, you will see a view of that town in the heading of this post. Anyone with a better derivation of the word limerick is welcome to contest this hypothesis. Limerick is certainly not a “corrupted” form of Learick.

You expected a sensation and received a reasonable hypothesis. That’s because the author of the books discussed above bases his conclusions on facts and is not interested in sensations. He is a true scholar.

POSTSCRIPT

I have recently received two questions. Since I am not sure when I’ll be able to post the next issue of my traditional gleanings, I’ll answer both right now. 1) Some people believe that the idiom chock a block is a loan from Turkish, in which an identical word means the same. This conjecture looks unconvincing, because their proponents are unable to show how the Turkish idiom reached English. In chock a block, the word chock is the same as in chockfull. 2) Another correspondent cited a Polish word, whose Russian cognate is diuzhii “strong,” and asked me whether I know it. Yes, I do. It is a cognate of English doughty and German tüchtig, whose origin has been explained quite well.

_{Featured image: King John’s Castle in Limerick by Eric the Fish. CC-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Labor and luck in etymology

The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey. He spent forty years researching the subject, and I’ll devote a special post to his work, but at the moment, I can offer only “point counter point”: this short essay is about how worthwhile conclusions come as a reward for an unpredictable encounter or chance knowledge. All the examples are from my own experience, and I have written about them in the past, but they will perhaps make a stronger impression when collected in one place.

An especially enigmatic English word (enigmatic with regard to its origin) is yeoman, which surfaced in written texts in roughly the middle of the thirteenth century (obviously, it existed in speech some time before it was recorded). The riddle is yeo-. The etymology, half-heartedly (?) supported by the revised OED (the entry was touched up last in 2025), traces yeo– to young. I assume that my hypothesis is more realistic, because, for phonetic reasons, yeo- cannot be traced to young.

Now back to coincidence and luck. In my research, I look through numerous books, on the off-chance that they may contain some information I need. In an obscure book on Dutch linguistics, I came across a detailed discussion of the English dialectal noun yeomath “a second-year crop of grass,” which, predictably, the OED also records, and the entry contains a sagacious guess about yeo– that provides a good but not final clue to this enigmatic sound group. Young grass? No, the prefix means “additional.” With regard to the details, see the post for June 17, 2009. A yeoman was, quite probably, understood as an “added man.” In nearly seven years since 2009, neither Wikipedia nor etymonline (both are sensitive to new hypotheses) has commented on my suggestion, and I decided to repeat it here. I also contributed an essay on yeoman to an excellent Festschrift, but alas, the scholarly climate has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. Such volumes, honoring retired and still active philologists, are now so numerous that even specialists have a hard time following them.

Watch one more attack on grassroots. English fog means “thick mist,” but in dialects, fog also refers to “second-year crop.” This time, it was a different kind of luck that provided a clue to the riddle. How can “fog” and “grass” be connected? By an accident of birth, my native language is Russian, and I know the Russian words par “steam, vapor” and par “field left under steam/vapor.” Both have the root meaning “to become damp, moist.” Fog, with its final g, is almost certainly a word of Scandinavian origin (English words, like sedge. ridge, bridge, and so forth, end an affricate). Related to this fog is, quite probably, German feucht “damp.” The same semantic thread connects Russian par¹ and par² as the two English nouns. If I did not know Russian, this analogy would never have occurred to me.

Another reward for knowing Russian may not impress too many of our readers, because that key word is Icelandic, rather than English. Yet the case is curious. Icelandic glenna refers to all kinds of open spaces, from “a ray of sunshine” and “a deceptive move in wrestling” to “a clearing in the forest” and “perineum” (hear, hear!). It also means “joke” and all kinds of trickery. Given enough ingenuity, semantic bridges can be built between any two concepts, but still, “joke” and “perineum”?

I decided to look up Russian shutka “joke” in etymological dictionaries and discovered that its Bulgarian cognate means “vagina.” This sense left Bulgarian researchers nonplused. But Icelandic glenna explains everything. We remember “perineum,” don’t we? In the past, shutka referred to a quick motion, leap (with the legs spread wide!), and the like. Henceanytype of opening. The sought for connection becomes clear when we look at all the old senses of shutka and the word’s related forms. But who knows Icelandic, Russian, and Bulgarian?

Until roughly the 1870s, most specialists in comparative philology were Germans. As we have seen, to connect glenna and shutka, an inquisitive linguist should be aware of the relevant Russian and Icelandic words and “accidentally” note the otherwise hidden connection. Too bad, I have never studied Welsh, Ewe, and Japanese. What precious associations must be left fallow in them, as far as I am concerned! A few historical linguists of old, Jacob Grimm and Antoine Meillet among them, knew many languages. Today, their peers are rare. To exacerbate the situation, famous polyglots, those who can talk glibly in thirty or more languages, are seldom endowed with great analytic abilities. As St. Exupéry’s Fox remarked sadly, nothing in the world is perfect.

My most amusing discovery, which I have celebrated more than once in my publications, concerns the origin of the noun pimp. See also the post for June 7, 2007. The word did not interest me, but while reading an old dialectal dictionary, I ran into the entry “pimp ‘faggot’.” I was surprised by the proximity of two infamous nouns with sexual connotations and discovered that the origin of pimp is “contested.” It is “contested,” because older English etymologists did not know the German word Pimpf, while German scholars had no idea of English pimps. Pimpf refers to a youth and specifically, to a member of the youth organization under Hitler. Like Engl. pimp and pimple, it has a root meaning “to swell” (faggots, that is, bundles of sticks, are, it follows, big pimps!).

Finally, galoot “an awkward fellow.” Like pimp, it revealed its history to me by chance. An article on Italian seafaring terms made me aware of the Italian noun galeotto “galley slave; scoundrel.” The rest was plain sailing. My etymology, proposed first in the post for July 23, 2008, has had some recognition, but alas, Webster and the OED keep saying “origin unknown.” I am patient. Everything comes to him who waits, and I hope that the tie I suggested will one day gain wider recognition.

Luck? To be sure. But to quote Tchaikovsky, inspiration never visits the lazy.

_{Featured image: Yeomen of the Guard, in procession to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for the annual service of the Order of the Garter. Philip Allfrey, CC-by-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Your Indo-European beard

It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name. This rule works for foot, partly for eye and ear, and also for heart (even though the heart isn’t typically open to direct observation), but it breaks down for finger, toe, and leg. In any case, beards cannot easily be hidden, even with our passion for masks. Moreover, through millennia, beards have played a role far in excess of their importance, and beard is indeed a very old word. A beard used to manifest virility and strength in an almost mystical way. We remember the story of Samson: once deprived of his beard, he became a weakling and had to wait until the hair grew again on his chin, to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The earliest example of clean-shaven in The Oxford English Dictionary (OED online) goes back to 1863 (in a poem by Longfellow!), while beardless was usually applied to boy and young man.

Five years ago, I discussed, among other things, the origin of the idiom to go to Jericho, roughly synonymous with to go to hell. Judging by what turns up on the Internet, today, the origin of the phrase is known to those who are interested in etymology, but Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) claimed that he could not find any explanation for it and referred to the Old Testament (2 Sam. X. 5 and 1 Chron. X. 5). He appears to have been the first to explain the phrase.

The story runs as follows: after the death of the king of the Ammonites, David sent his envoys to Hanun, the son of the deceased king, to comfort him. But Hanun’s counselors suspected treason, seized the envoys, had half of their beards cut off, and sent the men back. This incautious move resulted in a protracted war and the defeat of the Ammonites. When David’s envoys, deeply humiliated and almost beardless, returned home, David advised them to “tarry at Jericho till their beards were grown.” In their present shape, they were “emasculated” and could not be seen in public.

Reference to the absence of a beard is familiar from various sources. Thus, Njál, the protagonist of the most famous Icelandic saga, was wise and virile but had almost no hair on his chin, and this defect became an object of obscene jokes. By contrast, the great Scandinavian god Thor (Þórr) did have a huge beard. More about the Scandinavians will be said below.

English beard has a few immediately recognizable cognates in Germanic, such as Dutch baard and German Bart. The Slavic and Baltic words sound nearly the same. Latin barba, despite some inconsistency in the correspondence between the final consonants, seems to belong here too. But barbarian does not. Barbarian was a Greek coinage (the Greek name for beard is quite different) and referred to foreigners and their incomprehensible babbling. Those people did say something (barabara), but who could understand them, and who cared? Perhaps it should be added that the Old Celtic name for the poet (bard) has nothing to do with beards either.

As usual, a list of cognates may not tell us anything about the ultimate origin of the word (in this case, beard), and as happens so often, we find ourselves in a linguistic desert. It is not for nothing that while discussing beard, our best dictionaries list several related forms and stop. There was indeed the Old Icelandic noun barð “edge, verge, rim” (ð has the value of th in English the), but whether it is cognate with beard is unclear. It may be: the affinity between “beard” and “edge” is obvious. If so, the association that gave rise to the coining of beard stops being obscure. (Though Icelandic barð “beard” also existed, it might be a later loan from German.)

The only other Germanic name of the beard occurred just in Icelandic, and its cognates continue into Modern Scandinavian. The word was skegg, related to Old English sceacga “rough hair or wool.” Its modern reflex shag still exists, but most will remember only the adjective shaggy, related to Old English sceaga “thicket of underwood and small trees; coppice, copse,” almost a doublet of sceacga, cited above.” (In my experience, no one recognizes the word coppice, and even the spellchecker does not know copse; hence my long gloss.) We have seen that in some societies, a beardless man was not really considered to be a true male, and in light of this fact we are not surprised to find that Old Icelandic skeggi meant “man” (boys of course waited for the time when they became men). Yet the famous Romans (as far as we can judge by the extant statues) were beardless, while the Greeks had sizable beards. No custom is or was universal.

Coppice and copse are almost dead words in Modern English, and the same holds for shaw “thicket,” the modern reflex of sceacga, though still common in dialects and place names. The word owes its fame to George Bernard Shaw. No need to feel surprised at the existence of such a surname: don’t all of us know the family name Wood?

One of the curiosities of English is the verb beard “to oppose,” remembered, if at all, only from the idiom “to beard the lion in his den.” Is the implication “to face the enemy (beard to beard)” or “to catch the opponent by the beard”? An example of this phrase also occurs in the Authorized Version of the Bible, and again in connection with David. Beards, it appears, were famous, but they had to be cut and trimmed. Thorr was an obvious exception (but in the figurine that has come down to us, his beard merges with his male organ and emphasizes his potency, which is fair: an ancient thunder god was responsible for fertility). Having paid reference to shaggy males, let us also remember barbers. Today, a barber more often cuts hair than trims beards, but the etymology of barber is obvious. The Barber of Seville immortalized the profession. Long live Beaumarchais and Rossini!

_{Featured image: the Florida Grand Opera presents The Barber of Seville. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A handful of remarks on hinting and hunting

Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together. My pair of distinguished guests is hint and hunt. They look very much alike and, in a way, their meanings are not incompatible: both presuppose the existence of a searched-for target. One wonders whether they aren’t even variants of the same verb or at least related.

It is the third time that I am returning to the origin of English hunt. See especially the post for February 12, 2020, and the comments. There will be some overlap between that essay and the one I am offering today, but now that several years have passed, I think I have partly solved the riddle (for myself) and decided to return to that intractable word.

Like some older authors, I suspect that hint and hunt are related. They even resemble non-identical twins. Mark Twain wrote a little-remembered but very funny tale “The Siamese Twins.” In the final sentence, it informs the reader that the ages of the brothers were respectively fifty-one and fifty-three. The author apologized for not mentioning this fact earlier. I decided to avoid his mistake and to make things clear right away. Hunt (the verb) has been known since the days of Old English, that is, for more than twelve centuries. By contrast, hint (the noun) first surfaced in texts by Shakespeare.

Though hint is a relatively recent word without a respectable pedigree, it looks like it belongs with hunt and hand (we use the hand for seizing things; hence an association with hunting). As expected, opinions on their relationship differ. Hunt is a typical English verb for “chasing game.” It lacks obvious cognates, but in many other languages, words meaning “hunt” are also obscure. For example, German has jagen, about whose origin nothing definite is known either.

There may be a good reason for this seemingly unexpected opaqueness—unexpected, because hunting is such a common and seemingly transparent occupation. For millennia, hunting sustained early communities, and people’s survival depended on the success of the chase. Danger lurked everywhere: the hunter might get lost, killed by his prey, or return empty-handed. Words designating such situations often fell victim to taboo, just as, for example, many animal names did. Call the bear by its name, and it will come and destroy you. But if you speak about the bear as a honey-lover (that is what they do in Russian) or the brown one (that is the case in Germanic: from a historical point of view, bear means “brown”), the beast will be duped and stay away. (Talk of the Devil, and he will appear! Right?) The same practice prevailed for the names of several wild animals, body parts, and diseases. (My apology: taboo was also made much of in the earlier post.)

Common words were distorted, and today we usually have no way of guessing what the original form was. Yet we sometimes know the idea behind the euphemism: for example, not the Devil but the Evil One (or Flibbertigibbet, for variety’s sake); not the bear, but the honey-eater or the brown one. The main Latin verb meaning “to hunt” was vēnārī, related to Venus. The idea must have been “to do something with a will, full of desire.” (A digression: the most often hunted animal was the deer, so much so that Tier, the German cognate of deer, means simply “animal.” Deer is a Germanic word, but those who have read the anthologized opening chapter in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe know that it was the Anglo-Saxons who killed deer, while the meat went to the table of the French barons. Hence venison, related to the Latin verb, cited above.)

The same seems to hold for Russian okhota (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic; stress on the second syllable): the root khot– means “to wish, desire.” The English verb hunt should probably be “deciphered” as “to catch, seize.” Perhaps, it was a vague taboo word, like its Latin and Slavic synonyms. If hint really appeared so late, it cannot be related to hunt, which, though devoid of relatives (and thus “local”), was already old even in Old English.

Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. Hint, first recorded as a noun, meant “opportunity; slight indication or suggestion”; thus, just a dab, as it were. It was a mere reshaping (or an alternate form) of the now obsolete old verb hent “get, receive”! The desired time bridge has thus been restored. We can proceed with our chase, and while looking around, we notice the already mentioned hand, a Common Germanic word again (!) of uncertain origin, to quote some dictionaries (elsewhere in Indo-European, this extremity has quite different names.)

Could hand also be a taboo word for something like manus (manus is Latin for “hand”)? Indeed, it could. As just noted, the names of body parts are often products of taboo. Hand is an instrument of catching, grasping, “handling” things. It is an ideal member of our ill-assorted family. The scholarly literature on hunt and especially hand is huge, and many (but not all) language historians defend the ideas mentioned above. The bridge exists. Though it rests on unsafe supports, it may sustain the construction rather well.

The final actor in our drama is the Gothic verb fra-hinþan “to take captive” (fra– is a prefix; þ has the value of English th in thin). Gothic, a Germanic language (now dead), was recorded in the fourth century. Some of the Old Germanic words, related to –hinþan, mean “to reach” and “booty.” Though –hinþan and hand have often been compared, þ and d don’t match, and a reliable reconstruction depends on exact sound correspondences. Once such correspondences fail, etymologists are in trouble. However, here we seem to be dealing with a “special” taboo word, and it would be unrealistic to expect great precision in the coining of its forms. Obviously, I am pleading for special dispensation.

As usual, I refuse to press my point, but I also refuse to concede defeat. It sems that a special taboo word with the sense “grasp, seize, catch,” sharing the root hent/hint ~ hunt ~ hand did exist in Germanic, and its reflexes are still discernible today. Hinþan was a strong verb (that is, a verb, whose root vowels alternated by ablaut, as, for instance, in English bind ~ bound or run ~ ran). The nouns, related to it, were like English bend and band. If this conclusion deserves credence, hint (from hent), hunt, and hand are modern reflexes of that ancient taboo word. Let me repeat that numerous researchers think so, but the most cautious critics prefer to sit on the fence. This is fine. The fence is as good a support as any other.

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An etymological knockout

We know that in English words beginning with kn– and gn– the first letter is mute. Even in English spelling, which is full of the most bizarre rules, this one causes surprise. But no less puzzling is the rule’s historical basis. At one time, know, knock, gnaw, and their likes were pronounced as they still are in related Germanic languages, that is, with k– and g- in the onset. What happened to those k- and g- sounds? The groups are hardly tongue twisters and give no one trouble in the middle of acne, acknowledge, magnet, and ignite. To be sure, in acne and their likes, k/g and n belong to different syllables, but one sometimes hears canoeing, pronounced as c’noeing, and the first consonant survives. Nor is the group kn endangered in the coda, as in taken and spoken. (Yet King Knut has become Canute: don’t expect justice from language!)

According to the evidence of contemporary observers, the destruction of k and g before n happened about five centuries ago, that is, shortly before and in Shakespeare’s time. Why did it? True, sounds undergo modification in the process of speech. For instance, most people pronounce a group like his shoes as hishshooz (this process is called assimilation), but kn– and gn– are word-initial groups, and no neighbors threaten k- and g-. As a most general rule, the cause of a systemic sound change is another major sound change. Obviously, this is not the case with initial kn– and gn– in English: no previous event triggered the loss of k and g before n.

A few analogs of the change in English have been found in German Bavarian dialects, but nothing even remotely resembling the loss of k and g before n has happened elsewhere in Germanic. In the remote past, many words began with hl– and hn-. Thus, listen and neck were at one time hlysta and hnecca, but h is a perishable sound, and “dropping” it causes little surprise. By contrast, k and g are sturdy. Our best books on the history of English describe in detail the loss of k and g before n but are silent on the causes.

Nor can I offer an airtight argument about why that process occurred, but I decided to look at the origin of the affected words and risk putting forward a hypothesis. Though knee and know have secure Indo-European cognates, most other items on the list are limited to Germanic. As usual, cognates shed little light on the prehistory of the words that interest us unless their senses diverge radically. In this case, they do not. Here are two instances. Knack: perhaps borrowed from Low German or Dutch; of imitative origin, because knack “sharp blow” exists, and in English (knack), we may be dealing with the same word. (German Knacks means “crack.”) Likewise, knapsack was taken over from the same sources, with knap perhaps being related to German knappen “to snap, crush”; thus, knap is a doublet of snap and snatch, both possibly sound-imitative.

The latest (cautious and conservative) German etymological dictionary says bluntly that kn– is a sound-symbolic group denoting pressure. The statement looks correct, but it is doomed to remain guesswork: since many words with initial kn– refer to pressure, we conclude that such is the nature of this group. The vicious circle in this reasoning (begging the question) is obvious. We are on safer ground with knell: all over Germanic, knell-, knoll-, and their look-alikes and synonyms are probably indeed sound-imitative.  

Knot and knit perhaps make us think of some increase in size. Both evoke clear visual images and are thus in some way “expressive.” Knob and its near-synonym knub (both mean “a small lump”) align themselves rather easily with the rest of kn-words. The same holds for knop “a round protuberance.” The idea that Germanic kn– is expressive (whether sound-imitative or sound symbolic) is old, and I hope the suggestion I am about to advance has some merit. Couldn’t the semantics of kn-words, their constant use under emphasis, contribute to the simplification of kn-?

Every sound change has a cause, but none is necessary. The same words retained their initial kn– in Frisian, Dutch, and Scandinavian. Languages and dialects go their different ways. It is the system’s business to ignore and suppress or make use of the stimulus. The same is true of every change. For instance, some societies resolve crises peacefully, while others are famous for continual revolutions.

If my guess has any merit, it follows that once the group kn– lost its k, the non-symbolic knife (or is it sound-symbolic?!), knee, and know remained in isolation and followed suit under the pressure of the system. It would be interesting to observe whether they were indeed the last to succumb. But we cannot relive the past in such detail, and our spelling makes us blind to the change: we still write kn-, long after its loss of k. Kn- probably did not become n– as an instantaneous act: more likely, it went through the stage of initial hn-, and some kn- ~ hn– doublets indeed existed in Old Norse.

The English gn– group is tiny: gnarled, gnash, gnat, gnaw, and a few bookish loan words: gneiss “a kind of rock,” gnome “a legendary creature,” gnosis (as recognizable in agnostic), and gnu “an African quadruped.” Gnarled is a misbegotten word, whose cognates begin with kn-. German Knorren means “knot, gnarl.” In any case, gnarled is from the historical point of view another kn-word. For the verb gnaw (Old Icelandic gnaga, German nagen) an ancient Indo-European root has been reconstructed, because similar words occur outside Germanic, but more probably, we are again dealing with a sound-imitative verb, and the same is true of gnash. It is curious that Old Icelandic gnat meant “noise.” The same is true of many Scandinavian words beginning with gn-.

Incidentally, n- in the verb neigh goes back to Old English hn-, and we witness a curious set of variants: Old Icelandic gneggja, Modern Icelandic hneggja, and Swedish gnägga versus Swedish regional knäja. This unexpected variation perhaps confirms my guess that however English kn– may have lost its k, it went through the stage hn-. At present, English has retained initial h before a consonant only in the speech of those who distinguish between witch and which, but hn-, hl, and hr– are the norm in Modern Icelandic.

If some students of the history of English sounds happen to read this blog, it would be interesting to know their opinion about my hypothesis. Here it is in a nutshell: English words with kn– and gn– lost their k/g under emphasis, because nearly all of them had a strong expressive character.

Editor’s Note: We’re taking next week off, but Anatoly will be back the following week with a new post!

_{Featured image: Image by Birgit from Pixabay.}

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Flunkeys and lackeys two centuries ago

In An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, I called William L. Blackley’s 1869 book Word Gossip singularly uninformative, and I am sorry for that remark. One consolation is that when we are young and say something inappropriate or wrong, we fear swift retribution. But with age, most of us realize that the chance of being noticed (whatever we publish) is close to zero and lose no sleep over the mishap. Yet I am indeed sorry that I based a negative opinion of a respectable work on the basis of several unfortunate pages and will now discuss a few things that may be of interest to the readers of this blog.

The Reverend William Lewery Blackley (1830-1902) was an active parish priest in Ireland, a well-known (successful!) social reformer, and the author of many books. Unfortunately, I could not find his portrait on the Internet. By way of compensation, we featured an anonymous parish priest in the header. Blackley knew German and French very well and must have had a good command of Swedish. His education as a prospective churchman presupposed a study of Greek and Latin (and most probably, of Hebrew). Incidentally, quite a few British churchmen were linguists. Thus, the great Walter William Skeat was an Anglican deacon, but he could not function in that capacity because of problems with his voice, while being a professor at Cambridge did not require too much lecturing. (What a contrast! Today’s linguists may not be moderately proficient in any language except their own, while professors teach a good deal as a matter of course.)

Word Gossip was “a series of [fifteen] familiar essays on words and their peculiarities” that first appeared in Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and were published in book form in 1869 by Longmans, Green and Co. (London). In the introduction we read: “The kind reception accorded to the matter of the following pages on its appearance this year [1868] in successive numbers of ‘Churchman’s Shilling Magazine’ had induced me to republish it in a collected form.” I am aware of a single review of the book (in the Athenæum), but there must have been others, and perhaps letters from the readers.

Thoughts (very sensible thoughts) on etymology are strewn all over the volume of 234 pages. However, only the last two chapters deal directly with words of disputed origin. Blackley was aware of the linguistic literature of his time and of some old dictionaries, and since he was fluent in German, he did not miss German books on language history (a rare case in England before the days of Henry Sweet and Skeat, though German colleagues sometimes reproached even Skeat for not paying enough attention to their contributions), but surprisingly, he missed Jacob Grimm and remained unaware of the gigantic progress made by historical linguistics between the 1820s and his time. Therefore, even in 1868 his conclusions were of some interest only to the extent that they did not depend on the progress of Indo-European linguistics.

English (like every other European language) is full of native and borrowed words that appeared in print late, and one does not have to be a comparative linguist to discover their origin. Two such English words are flunkey “man in livery; obsequious person” and lackey “footman, valet.” The words are near-synonyms, and neither (especially lackey) is heard or seen too often. Lackey occurred at one time as a term of political abuse; for instance, the phrase the lackeys of the bourgeoisie was much in use in certain circles. Flunkey surfaced in the eighteenth century, and lackey in the sixteenth.

Both words are “of uncertain origin.” Blackley argued that at one time, they must have been applied primarily to soldiers, or rather mercenaries, for which reason they still “retain a contemptuous signification.” He referred to French flanqueur: “It means one who fights on the flank, a skirmisher.” In English, flunkey first meant “a liveried servant” and only later “toady.” Whether correct or not, Blackley’s guess is reasonable, and our best authorities have nothing to add to it. He also had an alternative hypothesis of the origin of flunkey, which I’ll skip, as well as a few fanciful etymologies of this word, not worthy of mention. Incidentally, those who coined the verb flunk don’t seem to have had flunkeys in view.

Lackey is a still harder word. Its Romance source began with the vowel a, which perhaps points to this noun’s Arabic origin, a- being part of the definite article. The Arabic home of lackey was suggested long ago, but the true etymon remains hidden. Blackley refused to go to Arabic and cited Latin laqueus “a rope with a slip knot, and especially a noose used for hanging.” The way from “criminal” to “hanging,” he said, is short. He also mentioned German Strick and Strang, both of which so often meant “rope, used to bind and hang criminals” that Strick became a common epithet “for a good-for-nothing dissipated fellow.” 

Blackley derived both flunkey and lackey from the names of despised mercenaries. His etymology of lackey does not go too far, but I find all the old conjectures worth knowing. Though quite often they are obviously wrong, a certain idea or association may inspire a better approach to the problem. Such at least has been my experience. Not all that is wrong is nonsense. The idea that in researching the origin of lackey we should turn to military terms is, most likely, correct, because in the fifteenth century, a certain class of soldiers, especially crossbowmen, was called alagues, alacays, or lacays. Arabic luk‘a means “worthless, servile; slave.” Skeat gravitated toward the Arabic hypothesis but added: “This is a guess; it is much disputed.” Yet this guess sounds no less probable than a direct derivation from Italian leccare or German lecken “to lick.” As mentioned above, our best authorities prefer to say almost nothing about the etymology of lackey, which is a pity.

The last word I’ll mention here, bat-fowling, is unknown to me, and it is probably unknown to most of our readers. The OED cites no contemporary examples. Bat-fowling means “catching birds at night by dazing and then netting them.” Blackley was sure that throughout England (!), “people said bat-folding, and for good reason…. The instrument in question is a net stretched upon a rood frame, consisting of two parts which, when opened out, are about of the same shape as a large paper kite, or a gigantic racket, or bat, and is hinged at the top, the ends at the bottom being in the operator’s hands.” I wonder whether those remarks deserve the attention of our lexicographers. Anyway, reading Blackley’s book is what my students call fun. Very much in accordance with the remarks about bat-fowling, I’ll cite the title of Chapter 1: “On Word Hunting in General.” Word hunting, by day or at night, is a noble pursuit.

_{Featured image: Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels.}

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In full swing

First, my thanks to those who commented on my previous post. One comment in the busy exchange was negative: the correspondent likes some of those turns of speech I dislike. That’s fine, but I want to defend myself against the reproach that my subject should be limited to etymology. I receive questions from all over the world about usage and occasionally answer them in this blog. The title “Oxford Etymologist” does not tie me exclusively to word origins.

I have no theory for why people say something like do it real quick and she sings beautiful. German or Yiddish, as the comment suggests? Or a product of natural development? German/Yiddish usage also needs an explanation. Finally, I congratulate our reader who keeps a dictionary of Wellerisms on his desk. Our culture of reading classical literature is dying (none of the hundreds of students I have taught has read The Pickwick Papers). Yet I believe that Dickens will be the last to go downhill.

And now back to my main theme. I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right. I discussed sw-words almost exactly a year ago (see the post for June 19, 2024) and will try to repeat myself as little as possible.

In 1992, I wrote a paper, titled “The Dregs of English Etymology.” Among other things, it contained a list of about a thousand words whose origin was said to be unknown in the 1985 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Compiling such a list proved to be a much less straightforward task than I had expected, because the text contains numerous phrases like of uncertain, doubtful, dubious, disputable origin, obscurely related, and so forth. Are they polite synonyms for “origin unknown”?

In any case, the many senses of swag have been traced quite well. Some occurred in the 14^th century, while others, like “booty,” turned up in texts almost the day before yesterday. There is no way of deciding whether we are witnessing a long continuous history of one word, or if the sound complex swag was like an empty box, ready to acquire almost any sense with which speakers chose to endow it. Norwegian svagga “to sway” is cited in some dictionaries, but it is a rare (dialectal?) verb, and nothing points to its being the source of English swag. Incidentally, sway also sounds very much like swag.

Swag has as many lookalikes as senses, and this is the main problem with it. Here are some sw-verbs from my list of words of unknown origin (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in texts): swank (20) “to behave ostentatiously” (apparently, little known in American English); swash (16) “to dash violently, etc.” (said to be sound-imitative like clash, dash, lash, and mash); another swash (17) “inclined obliquely to the axis of the work (in turning),” and swizzle ~ switchel (19) “an alcoholic drink.” The material at my disposal is richer, but going over lists of verbs (mainly verbs) is boring. Anyway, one looks at swing, switch, swipe, swither “to hesitate,” swoon, and quite a few other more or less similar words and gets the impression that all of them refer to some quick or erratic movement and are in some vague way related. There is a special term for groups like sw -, namely, phonestheme. The term was coined by John Rupert Firth, a renowned British scholar.

The presence of the phonestheme cannot be predicted, and the same sound group (here, sw) occurs in words in which it evokes no association with movement. Think of swamp, swan, swain, swear, sweat, sweet, and swine. But what about swap, sway, swim, swirl, and swoon? Sw- does suggest a swinging, swaying movement (hence swag and swagger). There is no law, but a tendency is apparent.

Some connections have to be restituted by historians. Thus, German schwach means “weak,” not “swinging,” but the verb sweken once meant both “to become weak” and “to swing.” Swinging, it appears, led to being weak. While German im Schwange sein “to be in vogue” obviously refers to swinging, German schwanger “pregnant” is believed to be a different word. Why so? Pregnancy is a temporary state, isn’t it? Cannot it then be related to the many nouns and verbs with more or less the same reference?

Having reached this state of uncertainty, we come across swoon. The word has been known since the thirteenth century, and it once had g in the root (the verb –swogan existed). A similar-sounding German verb meant “to sigh.” The origin of swoon is said to be unknown. Really? Perhaps there is nothing to know. If we ignore the details, we may agree that being in a swoon, like being pregnant, is a temporary state! When things are up in the air, the phonestheme sw– comes in handy—unfortunately, too handy.

Even so, we need not treat our discovery with too much suspicion. When our authorities say that the origin of sway is obscure, perhaps we should say that the obscurity is a product of our striving for perfection. The OED quotes a 1598 statement that swagger was “created as it were by a natural Prosopopeia [here: without any known source], without etimologie or deriuation (sic).” I am inclined to say that that’s all there is to it. Swap, sway and swag are, rather probably, rootless sound-symbolic or/and sound-imitative formations, produced “instinctively,” as older scholars used to say. It is now believed that the human language emerged about 230,000 years ago. I am rather suspicious of exact numbers in this matter, but let us agree that the date is in principle realistic. As soon as people learned to produce the sounds needed for expressing their emotions, they began to say something like swap and swag.

Such English words often have cognates in closely related Germanic languages and sometimes in Latin, Greek, and non-Indo-European languages. Their common origin in Scandinavian and English or Dutch and English may mean that they are considerably older than the date of their first appearance in texts. Borrowing is also probable, but the main question is their distant origin, rather than their later history. Here is just one, almost random, example that shows how loose ties among such words may be. A Gothic verb that meant “to rejoice” (Gothic was recorded in the fourth century and is a dead Germanic language) has several related forms. In Old English it meant “to resound,” in Old Saxon, “to roar” (just one step from “rejoice” to “roar” and “resound”), but in Old Icelandic, “to splash.” Splashing is not too noisy. One would not be surprised if such a word acquired the sense “water”! Obviously, there once was a sound-imitative word with the phonestheme sw-, which developed in several ways.

Take your swag and go home with the swagger of a winner.

_{Featured image: Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay.}

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The words we use

The town where I live has a good newspaper. From time to time, it gives advice to its readers for avoiding language mistakes and for speaking correct English. Today’s post has been inspired by a column by Gary Gilson the Minnesota Star Tribune published about two years ago. It is amusing to compare his advice and the advice I constantly give to my correspondents from all over the world.

Number One on his and my list is the use of buzzwords. People are formulaic creatures, they like cliches as much as being fiercely individual. Some phrases are unavoidable. We cannot substitute anything for Good morning, thank you very much, please sit down, don’t worry, and their likes. It is less obvious whether we should say have a nice weekend every time we part on Friday. But the real problem is with important-sounding phrases that once were new but have lost their freshness from overuse. When I am promised unswerving support or a thought-provoking story, I no longer expect either assistance or excitement.

Likewise, when I write letters of recommendation for my former students, I wonder whether I should say that their research is interdisciplinary. The epithet has been trodden to death and means nothing. Though it takes years for a budding scholar (sorry for this phrase) to master the chosen area and though not everybody succeeds, at twenty-eight, one is supposed to be a giant astride at least two oceans. But if I don’t mention the applicant’s interdisciplinary greatness, this will be noticed and remembered! Everybody is interdisciplinary, and everybody needs a job. I weep but walk in step. Rest assured: my recommendations are always thought-provoking, and I promise my proteges unswerving support.

Not only epithets like glamorous, fascinating, and mature have been worn thin. Even worse are some adverbs. One shudders at abominations like free gift, future prospects, final outcome, exact opposites, and the most precious gem of them all: honest truth. Those who cannot be smart often try to look or sound smart. One of the ways of impressing an interlocutor is to speak long and say little. At this point in time is of course weightier than now or at present, and utilize eclipses the modest monosyllabic use.

Language changes, and the avant-garde variety always sounds like an abomination to the cultured group. When all pedants die out, the “progressives” begin to guard their norm, which has now become conservative! Here is a curious example. In German, gut means both good and well, that is, adverbs lack a suffix like –ly. But I have heard someone saying on the radio: “She sings beautiful.” My neighbor suggested that we ride real quick. This is pure German. To be sure, fast is both an adverb and an adjective (we drive a fast car fast). Is English progressing in the direction of German? Perhaps.

One example I cited in some older post, but my students keep reminding me of this phenomenon. “The mood of the stories are gloomy.” Judging by this ineradicable feature of even graduate students’ style, American English has established a rule: make the verb agree with the closest noun, rather than with the subject. Should we bother? Yes, for the time being. But one day, this usage may become the norm. Incidentally, here is a sentence from a paper by a distinguished British philologist: “The small corpus of nineteen… epigraphical inscriptions… do not correspond very well, in either the date or their geographical distribution…” I understand the British collective in my family are early risers, and the couple were seldom seen together, but the corpus are? Yet I am more troubled by sentences like “They invited my wife and I,” because I cannot explain what analogy produces such phrases. However, we do say “Yes, this is me” and don’t worry.

One of the oldest chestnuts is: “I insist on Mrs. Smith appearing.” Obviously, it should be “Mrs. Smith’s.” But the tug of war between those construction has been going on for two centuries (at least). A grammarian will have no trouble parsing either variant. Yet the speaking community has never had any interest in linguists’ opinions.

A special problem is language and social engineering. Every time I write is not and does not, the computer suggests isn’t and doesn’t. Who programmed it to promote the conversational variants of such forms? I am immune to my computer’s bidding, but many others, especially insecure foreign speakers, will probably obey the command. I wince at constructions like “When someone asks you for help, never send them without assistance.” This usage was imposed on us for two reasons. “Him or her” is bulky,” and the older him is sexist. Yet I constantly see sentences like “It is the viewer’s opinion that matters, and we cannot ignore her reaction,” as though her is less sexist than his. Medication is expected to cure, rather than kill.

My final example has been trodden to death. Everybody fights the phrase very unique. The correspondent of the newspaper I referred to as an inspiration of this essay began his notes with the appeal: “Avoid very unique!” Some people don’t understand that unique means “one of a kind” and take it for a synonym of rare. The misunderstanding is sad, but in the history of language, such events cause astounding changes. Words for “bad” begin to mean “good,” and the other way round. Everything depends on whether any given speaker prefers to be conservative and resist change or is happy to swim with the current. If one day, unique loses its ties with the idea of uniqueness, the avant-garde usage will become neutral. Incidentally, the adverb very is rarely needed. It, too, has lost its freshness, and that is why people often say very, very. Ours is a community of overstatement. Editors used to call very a four-letter word, which it certainly is.

NOTE. During the summer months, the blog will keep appearing but not always with the same regularity as usual.

_{Featured image: sampling of types of dictionaries used in proverb studies by Pete unseth. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A vicious beehive

One more Spelling Bee is behind us, and one more benighted youngster took the cake. In the final round, he spelled the word éclaircissement “making an obscure subject clear” correctly. He is thirteen years old, he has been playing this game for seven years, and he was the runner up in 2024. According to his statement, he spent five to six hours daily on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends studying the dictionary for unfamiliar words. Moreover, he has been practicing this thing for the last seven years, that is, almost since his kindergarten days. I am of course sorry for the kid, because I am not a fan of child abuse and because I know that one can be young only once. Rather long ago, I already spewed my contempt and ire at Spelling Bee, and I remember that my pamphlet did not produce the slightest stir. But as Cyrano de Bergerac said on a different occasion: “One does not always fight to win.” That is why I’ll once again return to Spelling Bee, Spelling Reform, and Walter William Skeat.

Learning the spelling of the words one will never use or even encounter looks like an unprofitable occupation. I suspect that the hero of this year’s contest does not read or speak French (there was no time to learn it). What then is the use of knowing the word éclaircissement? He also spelled Chaldee, Symlin, olona, and adytum correctly. The website says that after winning the prize, he collapsed with excitement and fatigue. And the admiring people who would not hurt a tadpole watched and applauded.

English spelling is irrational and tough, but why should our youngsters know how to spell olona? Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mark Twain (not of course for five or six hours a day) and come across all kinds of unfamiliar language in them: obsolete but interesting nouns and verbs used in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, the British slang of Artful Dodger, and some medieval vocabulary occurring in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? What a feast of words! Our winner could have learned French and even Latin, or (since he knew how to spell Chaldee) even Hebrew.

English speakers are poor spellers (and for good reason), and considering the fact that most schools in the United States do not teach grammar, this fact should not surprise anyone. My undergraduate students need a semester to learn the difference between the present and the past participle and the mysteries of subordinate clauses. But spelling stopped bothering them long ago, because today, the spell checker does all the work for them. It dutifully changes the inveterate occurance to occurrence and sometimes knows the difference between principle and principal. A spelling bee might sound like a clever idea in the early twentieth century, but nowadays, it has degraded into an ignoble sport. Let me add that this is my opinion, and if someone happens to express indignation at being exposed to it, all the blame goes to me, rather than to Oxford University Press, on whose site this blog appears every Wednesday.

The first Spelling Bee seems to go back to 1908. Below I will discuss a booklet on Spelling Reform, published almost at that time (in 1906). By the way, the origin of bee in spelling bee has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Bee is a word of unknown etymology. It first surfaced in the US at the end of the eighteenth century and meant “a social gathering.” Perhaps it is the same word as the name of the insect: bees, as everybody knows, are great “gatherers.” In Derby, Whitby, and their likes, –by once meant “town; dwelling.” By(e) “cowstall,” with its variant bee, is still known in British dialects. Could this bee mean both “gathering place” and “the company gathered in it,” like court and forum? Just guessing.

Before the First World War, it seems that English spelling would soon be reformed, partly because several famous people supported the idea. On May 2, 1906, Walter W. Skeat gave a talk at the British Academy, and in the same year, a brochure with that speech was published by Oxford University Press. He explained why English spelling is so erratic and what progress philology had made by the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1908 (again the same date!), The English Spelling Society was founded. It advocated “simplified spelling,” The society still exists and is quite active. Today, philology enjoys no prestige, courses in the history of language (even of the English language) have fallen into desuetude, and a graduate student interested in this subject will find neither an adviser nor a job. But English spelling is still a nightmare to millions of native speakers and foreigners.

Below, I’ll only list Skeat’s suggestions, without discussing them. There are twelve of them. Skeat followed Henry Sweet, another great contemporary of his. 1. Abolish silent e, where it is useless (spell hav, giv, abuv, cum “come,” solv, freez, adz, ax). As we know, adz and ax are accepted variants in the US. 2. In the same spirit, write litl, promis, activ, therefor (in today’s spelling, therefore and the rare therefor are different words). 3. The use of ea for short e is absurd and troublesome. Write medow, brekfast, hed, as well as lepard, jepardy (the horror of it! Our beloved Jeopardy!), and also peeple. 4. The use of ie for ee is unhistorical and should be discontinued. Thus, acheev, beleev, cheef, feeld.

5. The Tudor (fifteenth-century) form oo should be restored in words like improov, looz, moov. 6. Norman scribes, while producing their manuscripts, had trouble with um, but there is no reason why we should avoid cumfort, cumpany, cum “come,” munk, muney, and cuver. 7. Skeat suggested curage, cuzin, flurish, and touch. His spelling labor, honor, harbor will not shock anyone in the US, but some of Skeat’s contemporaries feared looking like Americans. Times change (don’t they?), and some people change with them.

I’ll skip 8 and go directly to 9. Get rid of useless double letters. Thus, eg, od, ful, stif, batl, wrigl, traveler. (Needless to say, traveler is now the only American spelling.) 10. Skeat suggested abolishing b in debt, lamb, limb, numb, and thumb. 11. Ache and anchor should become ake and anker. 12. Here are a few verbal forms: puld, lookt, slipt.

At the end of his presentation, Skeat, as always, berated the ignorance and laziness of his countrymen, be it in language history or phonetics. I wonder what he would have said if he found himself in a modern college. He had no illusions about the future, and yet he thought he saw a glimmer of hope in some actions at Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, he could not predict that soon after his death in 1912, the world would collapse and, in a way, never recover. But we are still alive, and English is now a world language. Millions of children at home and in the great world around learn English and curse wright (God forbid, not write or right!), doubt, choir, and occurrence. Have I made myself clear? Was my éclaircissement lucid enough? If so, I am happy, because never in the world would I have been able to win the most modest prize in a deadly fight against bees.

_{Featured image: giant honey bee by Dinesh Valke. CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Cringing with dignity, or the crux of the matter

I have “sauntered,” I have paid some respect to “lust” (see the previous two posts), and now I am ready “to cringe.” The most interesting part of today’s story is not even the origin of the verb cringe but the multitude of words, possibly related to it and explaining nothing. Hence the reference to sham dignity in the title.

In the form in which it has come down to us, cringe was recorded rather late, only in Middle English texts (the first known example goes back to the thirteenth century). The form cringe and its old doublet crenche correspond to Old English cringan ~ crincan “to fall in battle.” Historical semantics knows two processes: the deterioration of meaning and the amelioration of meaning. For instance, the adjective nice, also first recorded in the thirteenth century, was borrowed from French with the sense “silly, simple” and did first mean “foolish; wanton; difficult to manage” but ended up as a “pleasant, delightful.” By contrast, fond meant “foolish” and gradually merged with the sense “having a strong liking (for).” Cringe has obviously “deteriorated.”

The English verb has cognates in most languages of the Germanic-speaking world. Dutch krengen “to heel over” and Old Norse kranga “to creep along” (there also was krangr “weak”) seem to belong here. This list of related forms does not provide a clue to why a sound combination like kr-nk suggested to speakers the idea of bending or shrinking. We may not be able to find the golden key, but etymologists are beggars and should not pretend to be choosers. Knowing this, we may go back to the environment of cringe.

Next to Old English cringan ~ crincan “to fall in battle,” crincan “to yield” (originally, “to weaken”) existed. As the OED online suggests, the two verbs coexisted: one meant “to bend” and the other “to make bend.” Today, the verb crinkle “to bend; wrinkle, etc.” (from Old English crincan) exists. Its oldest history is obscure, but there is hardly any doubt that cringe and crinkle are in some way related, and that is all we need to know. In older German, the verb krenken “to weaken” existed, which interests us mainly because Modern German krank “sick, ill” is related to it.

With krank, we find ourselves in a rather inhospitable snake pit. The cousins of krank are plentiful in English. Crank “liable to capsize; crabbed; awkward; infirm, shaky” is not a borrowing from Dutch or German but a true cognate. The noun crank “portion of an axis bent at right angles” also seems to be related, even if a bit obscurely, to Old English crincan and cringan (“yield” and “bend”). Crank “bend, crook” is, for all intents and purposes, the same word. Cranky “tortuous, eccentric, cross-tempered; silly” emerged in books only in the sixteenth century but obviously, belongs to our story. Hence the Americanism crank “an eccentric person” now well-known also outside the United States. No doubt, cringle “a ring of a rope”, borrowed from Low German, is another part of the family. As a curiosity, I may mention that German Kringel ~ Krengel “a kind of pretzel,” deservedly popular in its country of origin, made its way into Russian and became krendel.

There is no doubt that all the words discussed above have a common feature, namely “round or crooked.” It comes as a surprise that they have no established etymology: in the best dictionaries, we find only long lists of cognates, sometimes also outside the Germanic family. Occasionally, a special helpful note alerts us to the fact that the oldest history of the entire group is unknown. But already in 1902 (such is the earliest reference in my database), Joseph Schrijnen, an excellent Dutch philologist, observed that the Germanic words for “ring” (hear, hear!) resemble and may be related to those meaning kring-. The resemblance is unmistakable.

At one time, ring had initial h: the oldest form was hring-. We also notice the similar-sounding word wring. Of those, hring holds out more promise to etymologists, because it has a good Slavic cognate, Russian krug “round, circle,” among others. It is related to Engish rung (from hrung), defined as “stick of rounded form [“stick of rounded form”!!] used as a rail; a spoke of a wheel,” etc., though most of us probably associate rung with “a step of hierarchy.” Rung had related forms in fourth-century Gothic, namely, hrugga (pronounced as hrunga) “staff.” Though staffs and poles are not round, roundness seems to be the implied goal: in order to twist or bend something, one should first have a straight object. (It seems that with this kind of reasoning one can prove almost anything.)

The previous statement looks like trying to save a hopeless etymology, but long ago, the initial meaning of rung was reconstructed as “a round pole.” This odd gloss was, naturally, contested by other specialists. Squaring the circle and making a straight object round are hard tasks. Rung, in its figurative sense, means “step,” and steps are neither round nor bent. To show how shaky our ground in this case is, I may mention a few more cognates of rung. One of them is Latin crux “cross.” Still another noun, related to rung (from hrung), is ridge (from hrycg; Germs Rücken, noun, means “back”). About every word, mentioned above, solid dictionaries say with rare consistency: “Origin unclear, doubtful, unknown.” Isn’t it amazing? Reliable cognates in Slavic, Latin, and Sanskrit, all having more or less the same sense, and yet the origin is still “unclear.” A squirrel is busy running in its cage and not getting anywhere! What is it that will make the sought-for etymology clear? How can our squirrel leave its cage and reach a tree?

Perhaps English wiggle ~ waggle will provide some help? Alas, no. The English verb is a borrowing from Dutch, where its traces are lost. I am finally coming to the point: no more meandering. It seems that once upon a time Germanic had the sound groups hring- ~ kring- ~ wrink-, all of which, for the reasons that are beyond reconstruction, suggested bending, twisting, and coiling (with the initial point being, naturally, something straight). Those groups mut have been sound-symbolic, and that is perhaps why we failed to find their origin. Sound symbolism is in the eyes (ears) of the beholder. Its existence cannot be proved. Only sound imitation (croak, gaggle, twitter, and the rest) is obvious. Yet the existence of three rhyming synonyms, whose etymology remains undiscovered (and for aught I understand, will remain such) perhaps makes my idea, inspired by Schrijnen’s observation, not entirely groundless. A blog is a genre that allows its author to risk a hypothesis, without being laughed out of court or fearing retribution. If it is promising, fine. If it is unacceptable, too bad.

At the end of this month, the merry month of May, I will be at the conference of the Dictionary Society in Buffalo, NY. Therefore, the next installment of this blog will appear in two weeks.

_{Featured image: A squirrel in a wheel. CC0 via Picryl.}

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The four-letter word <em>lust</em>

Years ago, I wrote about our four-letter words, and the comments were, as could be expected, numerous. Incidentally, the origin of those words is nether too interesting nor (in at least one case) too complicated. Lust is not l*** or l**t, and one can speak about it, without hurting anyone’s sensibilities. The hitch is that the history of this word is far from clear.

Here are some basic facts. Lust (perhaps surprisingly) is an ancient non-borrowed noun. It occurred in all the oldest Germanic languages and had practically the same form and meaning everywhere. It turned up even in the fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament, in which lustus rendered Greek epithumía “desire.” Unlustus “dislike,” the opposite of lustus, also occurred in that translation. A few Modern English words contain the root of lust, but their ties with lust are no longer felt, the more so as they are hopelessly obsolete. Such are list “pleasure, desire” and to list “to be pleasing”. Only listless “apathetic, dispirited” has survived. By contrast, German lustig “merry” is still a conversational word, along with the noun Lust “desire, joy.” The same can be said about the Scandinavian cognates (losti, lysta, and others). Only Icelandic elska “to love,” if it belongs here, adds an interesting detail to the list above. (Compare what I said about love in the post on free two weeks ago.)

The origin of lust, to use a formulaic phrase, remains a matter of debate. People long, yearn, and strive for many things, and all kinds of metaphors underlie those words. A metaphor has also been searched for lust, but I will mention it later. First of all, etymologists noticed a few words outside Germanic that sound like lust and mean approximately the same. The first of them is Latin las-cīvus, which found a safe haven in English lascivious “lewd” or, according to a more pompous definition, “inclined or inciting to lust.” Amazingly close is the Russian noun laska “caress” (almost the same form elsewhere in Slavic).

A common Indo-European root las– “to be greedy, lascivious” seems to underlie all those forms. This “root” may have existed, but we of course want to know why such a combination of sounds conveyed the meaning ascribed to it. An old etymology connected lust with words for “bowing, bending” (then lustful would emerge as “having a certain inclination”). Even English little may belong to this group. However, those words are themselves of undiscovered origin and can throw no light on another obscure corner of our ancient vocabulary.

In principle, this result need not surprise us. As mentioned more than once in this blog, only sound–imitative words have a transparent origin. Ga-ga, shoo, pop, and crush ~ crash pose few or no problems. Sound symbolism is in the eye of the beholder, but it is still a factor to be reckoned with. According to a bold suggestion, all those l-st ~ l-sk nouns and verbs are indeed sound-symbolic. We may add license to the words, mentioned above, and refer to the authority of the great French historical linguist Antoine Meillet, who called Greek lilaíomai, Gothic lustus, Sanskrit lásati, and Slavic lask- expressive and belonging originally to unbuttoned, informal speech. Given this reconstruction, we have no need to look for some ancient root, but even if Meillet’s guess is acceptable, it is not immediately clear why l + some vowel + s suggested to the speakers of a huge continent the idea of desire, caressing, and unrestricted sexual freedom. I have never seen this hypothesis discussed, but Meillet’s name justifies our attention.

By contrast, another etymology of lust, allegedly explaining why, how, and where all such words came into being is known very well. I am now returning to the idea of a metaphor. The German linguist Jost Trier always looked for the origin of words in the labor activities of ancient people (in principle, an attitude worthy of unquestionable support). It is his fixation on a single factor that arouses suspicion. One of his favorite themes was the role of saplings, more precisely, of what may be called “coppice” in English. The German word Niederwald, occurring in Trier’s works, refers to a growth of young trees. He reconstructed the old root leus–a (as seen also in English lose) and offered the following scenario. Allegedly, this root denoted the leaves of trees, cut down in spring. Animals, he explained, are especially fond of such leaves, and from the animals’ leaning for and consumption of them our word, denoting “desire,” sprang up. Trier even derived the placename Lustenau from this source and supported his conclusions by explorations of ancient myths. He devoted two books to the Niederwald.

Trier’s reconstruction attracted both admirers and denigrators. The admirers followed him unconditionally. One of them was his lifelong friend Jan de Vries, an outstanding etymologist and expert in Old Germanic literature and mythology (especially Scandinavian), who, unfortunately, tended to worship a chosen idol, be it in politics or scholarship. But even Elmar Seebold, the latest editor of Kluge’s German etymological dictionary, found Trier’s hypothesis worthy of discussion, even though he balked at endorsing it, and Alfred Bammesberger, a leading expert in the etymology of Old English, found Trier’s idea acceptable.

Nobody harms an imaginative scholar more than the students who lack the talent of their teacher but blindly defend and develop even such of his theses that should be taken as hypotheses and treated with caution. Trier did not avoid this danger (and, most probably, encouraged his “school,” as one can judge by some dissertations he advised). Both he and his advisees have been exposed to ruthless criticism, sometimes justified, sometimes too harsh. Reading Trier is a joy. Following him blindly is dangerous.

By way of postscript, it may be mentioned, that lust has also been compared with German los “free from,” allied to the English suffix less and the archaic English word leasing “lying, falsehood.” Gothic laus and Old Icelandic lauss mean “empty.” Both lose and loose are kindred words. Apparently, we are told that lust means letting oneself “go loose.” Here again, I am not aware of anyone’s comments on this suggestion. Does it sound too simple and therefore not worthy of discussion? Scholars like convoluted and imaginative hypotheses. One also wonders whether the multiple Indo-European cognates of lust also find a good explanation in the reference to –less and its kin.   As already stated, specialists have not reached a consensus on the origin of the word lust. Those who will turn to the most reliable dictionaries, including the OED, will not discover a definite answer. Even suggestions are usually missing. My opinion on this subject does not matter, but if I were pressed, I’d rather stay away from Trier’s hypothesis and treat with some interest Meillet’s idea of the expressive nature of lust and the words related to it. Lust and all kinds of desire need expressive words for naming them. One only wonders why the sound complex l-s evoked such wild associations.

_{Featured image: Drunken satyr. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. CC-BY-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Speaking in and about tongues

First of all, let me thank those who commented on the previous posts and said so many kind words about the blog. Invigorated by this support, I am ready to ask the greatest question that should bother a philologist: Why is the tongue called tongue?

The tongue allows us to speak, and it seems that language historians should know how this word came into being. Perhaps they even solved the riddle (at least, to a certain extent). In any case, they reconstructed several long words that look like the searched-for protoform, the alleged ancestors of many related or seemingly related forms of tongue. Some such forms look fanciful, while others are more realistic. At the moment, this is all one can say about the situation at hand.

First: a digression is perhaps in order. It seems that when our very distant ancestors acquired the gift of articulate speech, their first utterances were short and either sound–imitative or at least sound-symbolic. Boom, crack, tread, and pat look like acceptable early words, while prestidigitation or imperturbability do not. Historical linguists reconstruct ancient roots, all of which are short, even very short. The reality of such roots has been questioned more than once, but their existence is probable. As time went on, short roots, we assume, acquired prefixes and suffixes, added sounds, lost sounds, and changed them according to “laws” or in violation of them, and finally acquired the shape familiar to us. This is the stuff of courses on historical linguistics.

But a strange phenomenon attracts our attention. Some rather old languages are known to modern scholars. Tocharian, Hittite, and Sanskrit, let alone Classical Greek, Latin, and fourth-century Gothic have come down to us. To be sure, they are millennia away from the hypothetical date of the first articulate words. People hardly became glib talkers more than a hundred thousand years ago. For comparison: Hittite inscriptions are about 18,000 years old. We have no means to bridge the gap of ninety or so millennia, though we may, for the sake of the argument, agree that once upon a time one language existed and that (consequently) all the languages spoken today go back to that single primordial ancestor.

Fast forward from Hittie to Modern English. Wherever we look, we observe that words tend to become shorter and shorter. English is of course an extreme case in the Indo-European family (nearly all its old words are monosyllabic: come, go, do, see, and so forth). But abridgement characterizes the history of even the most conservative languages. The famous linguist Otto Jespersen called this change progress. It is more profitable to stay away from such emotional terms and speak only about development. There is no connection between the state of any given society and the structure of its language, but we note that some tribes living under primitive conditions have extremely long words. On the other hand, Old Chinese and Old Vietnamese were monosyllabic languages. To be sure, this could be the result of a long period of evolution.

Our modern word tongue is a short word and has almost the same form all over the Germanic-speaking world: Dutch tong, German Zunge, and their likes. The old forms were similar: compare Old Norse tong and Gothic tuggo (pronounced as tungo). The oldest Germanic form must also have been tungo-, but etymologists, naturally, want to know whether a common oldest Indo-European form can be reconstructed. And did it mean “tongue”? To accomplish this task, it is necessary to look at the name of the tongue in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and everywhere. The search has been accomplished, but the results produced more questions than answers.

The Latin for “tongue” is lingua, familiar to us from bilingual, linguistics, and other words having this root. By the First Consonant Shift, Germanic t should correspond to non-Germanic d. Lingua certainly does not begin with a d, but fortunately, Latin also has dingua. The relation between these words has been an object of protracted debate. Two suggestions turn up again and again in the attempts to explain the origin of tongue in Latin and elsewhere. It seems that the sound shape of tongue has been influenced by the verb meaning “lick,” which rather regularly begins with the consonant l over a large territory. The tongue certainly licks. Analogy is a constant process, but one can only suggest, not prove, its role in such a case.

A different hypothesis refers to taboo. In days of yore, people were afraid to say certain words. You pronounce eye, and an evil spirit will attack it. Or you say bear, and the bear will come. Therefore, speakers deliberately maimed words (this is what is meant here by taboo). Perhaps the word for “tongue” also fell victim to this practice (hence lingua for dingua?). Unfortunately, I have to repeat what I said about analogy: taboo, unless observed in a modern society, can be suggested but not proved.

Other than that, the names for “tongue” vary greatly all over Indo-European. A few have some similarity to Latin, because they begin with l: for instance, Armenian lezu and Lithuanian liežùvis. Old Irish tengae may hold promise to a non-specialist, but Celtic is not Germanic, and where Germanic has t, Irish is expected to have d (by the just mentioned law of the First Consonant Shift). Or is the Celtic word a borrowing from Germanic? Though Sanskrit jihvā perhaps resembles Russian yazyk (stress on the second syllable), it is miles away from dingua/lingua. The Tocharian forms begin with k. To exacerbate our troubles, Greek glossa “language” looks very much like a square peg in this moderately round hole, and its etymology remain a riddle. I will pass over the numerous fanciful attempts to produce a protoform that allegedly yielded this almost infinite variety. Many dictionaries cite some form like dunghu or dunghawa (my transcription is simplified), with the d ~ l variation by taboo. This reconstruction is not wrong but it is uninspiring.

It was suggested long ago that the most ancient Indo-European form of the word for “tongue” was a compound, and that is why it was so long. A most ingenious reconstruction deciphers the original form of the word for “tongue” as dnt-ghua (this is again a simplified transcription), a compound consisting of a word for “tooth” (dnt) and a word for “fish.” The meaning emerged as “fish (or muscle) of the teeth.” A tongue does look like some fish! A similar proposal suggests that tongue was indeed a compound but made up of the words for “under” and “the roof of the mouth.”

Not every expert in the field believes that ancient Indo-European had a single protoform for “tongue,” and not everybody accepts the idea of a compound underlying the forms in different languages. The role of taboo in naming the tongue is reasonable, but of necessity, it remains a guess. A tie between the words for “tongue” and “lick” is not improbable, but it cannot be proved either. In this blog column, I have discussed the etymology of kidney, eye, ear, hand, finger, and leg. The riddles were tough but less menacing than the one to which the present post is devoted. There may be a bit of irony in the fact that of the many words whose origin linguists cannot discover, the word tongue proved to be the most intractable.

_{Featured image: A cow eating grass from a person’s hand. Public domain via Picryl.}

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In free fall, being also a story of and about love

This is a story of the adjective free, and the story is complicated. Let me begin from afar. English has the verb liberate, whose root goes back to līber, the Latin for “free.” This fact deserves our attention here because of an unexpected meaning of the plural noun līberī “children.” The word has nothing to do with liber “book,” whose origin is veiled in obscurity but from which we have library (it will be seen that liber “book,” unlike līber “free,” had a short vowel in the root). Līberī was a legal term, unlike puer and infāns (both meant “child”; for comparison’s sake, think of English puerile and infant/infantile). It was not used in the singular and consequently, could not be applied to one child. The unexpected connection between “children” and “freedom” seems to go back to the distinction between free (one’s own, “genuine”) children and the children born to the same father by a slave.

The second situation (slaves’ children) is known quite well from the history not only of Greece and Rome but also from medieval Europe, especially from Icelandic sagas. Such children, even if they were their parents’ favorites, were still unfree. “Free” has always been a legal term. In the past, it seems to have referred to those who enjoyed support and legal defense. Hence its connection with children (as in Latin). To repeat: the free were family members, the Old English frēobearn (“free bairns”), as opposed to slaves. The free were of course the offspring of free parents and therefore entitled to the privileges attached to legitimate birth. They had to be taken care of and protected. The phrase free life, occurring in an Old English poem, must also have meant “protected life.”

We should now look at the origin of the word free. The oldest recorded Germanic root of this word occurs, as so often, in the fourth-century Gothic Bible: it was freis (rhyming with English fees), from the more ancient frijaz. Multiple ties between freedom and kinship come to light at once. Both Old and Modern Icelandic frændi, a word containing the root of free, means not “friend” but only “relative.” Frændi, as well as Modern English friend and German Freund “friend,” looks like the present particle of a verb, related to Gothic frijon, Old English frēogan, and others, which is traditionally glossed as “to love.”

Caution is required when we approach the idea of love, because love, like many other words designating abstract concepts, has a long history. In our story, we should better ignore lovers and stay with relatives, as suggested by frændi. In the past, even more than today, relatives were the mainstay of an individual’s life. One’s safety and success depended on the support of the family (clan). Romantic love, instilled in us by poetry (“I cannot give you what men call love….”—Shelley), was alien to the oldest societies. No doubt, people had the same feelings we have, but the social context was different, and therefore they verbalized their attitudes in a different way. The Gothic verb frijon is surrounded by the words meaning “reconcile” and “take care of.” One of the Old Germanic goddesses was called Frija-Frigg (Friday commemorates her). Some dictionaries gloss her name as “the loved one,” but the older opinion that she was “the protecting one,” “the one guarding family members,” may be more to the point. Deities were not loved: they were “adored” and in return granted favors to their worshipers.

One of the most memorable Gothic words is freihals “free neck; freedom.” Its closest cognates occurred all over the Germanic speaking world and have been interpreted as “neck, unhampered by chains” or (less convincingly) as “one having legal protection and accordingly no requirement to bow his neck before a property owner.” Once again, we notice that the word free was a sober legal term that from an etymological point of view had nothing to do with love. Dictionaries no longer compare free with Greek prāús “gentle,” and this is good. By contrast, Slavic words beginning with p- and meaning “pleasant” do belong here. (Non-Germanic p corresponds to Germanic f by the so-called First Consonant Shift, often mentioned in this blog: compare English father and Latin pater.)

The Germanic forms are also close to those in some Celtic languages. The Celts had a well-developed legal terminology, and it has been suggested that the speakers of Germanic borrowed some of it. Whether we are indeed dealing with a loanword or a cognate cannot be decided, but the similarity confirms the idea of free being a legal term and having nothing to do with love.   

Gothic frijon did mean “to love,” but only insofar as it translates a verb from the New Testament, which tells us little in regard to Germanic. We observe that even in such late texts as Icelandic, ást (often in the plural), traditionally glossed as “love,” rarely, if at all, had the connotations, invoked by our word love. And its Gothic cognate ansts meant “thanks; grace; favor,” very much like Modern German Gunst (g- is a remnant of an old prefix).

By way of conclusion, I may add that since among the Germanic-speaking people free was a legal term, known to us only from comparatively late texts, it must have owed a great deal to its Latin counterpart, namely, liber (regardless of whether we should also reckon with the influence from the Celts). A legal term is the product of abstraction and should be understood in its context. In our research, we deal with both “words” and “things.” Above, many concepts have been invoked. The main one is free. A free person was not a slave. Freedom presupposed mixing and mingling with other free members of the community. People didn’t have to “love” their relatives, but they were supposed to be loyal to them. One’s great debt was to one’s children. Hence Latin līberī. Pagan deities took care of married couples. Here, too, no one was made to “love” one’s spouse, though being in love never hurt anyone.

Most words we use today do not mean (or at least do not mean exactly) what they meant in the past. One of them is “love.” Also, words broaden and narrow their meanings. Today, free is an all-encompassing word. Birds are free to fly, animals are free to roam (see the previous post), and we are free to do what we want. It certainly was not so even fifteen hundred years ago. Perhaps one even had to learn a word for this concept from a neighboring tribe. Initially, I also wanted to discuss the etymology of the verb fall. But though this ancient verb occurs in practically the same form all over the Germanic-speaking world, nothing (nothing at all!) has been discovered about its etymology. People fall from grace and fall in love without knowing the origin of the verb. This is what I call a major accident. Feel free to offer your hypotheses.

_{Featured image: Homer, Alaska, United States – Bald Eagle in mid-air flight over Homer Spit Kenai Peninsula. Photo by Ragamuffin Brian. CC-BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.}

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Sauntering is hard work

To saunter “to walk in a leisurely way, stroll” is a verb, famous for its etymological opacity. It is instructive and a bit frustrating to read the literature on this word, published between roughly 1874 and 1910, though a few amusing notes in my collection antedate the eighteen-seventies. No one knows where saunter came from. Charles II was seemingly fond of “sauntering.” That monarch seldom denied himself the pleasure of walking in the royal gardens and paying a visit to one of his mistresses. Saunter clung to Charles II, and probably for good reason. The obscurity of the verb and the playful connotations, attached to it, suggest that saunter might be seventeenth-century slang, a humorous neologism. If I am right, this may be the reason the verb’s origin is almost beyond reconstruction.

Saunt(er) has a French look, like so many other words rhyming with its root (daunt, flaunt, gaunt, taunt, vaunt,andso forth), but may still be an English coinage: think of our nineteenth-century verb gallivant. John Minsheu (or Minshew), the author of the first etymological dictionary of English (1617), did not include saunter, most probably, because he had never heard it. Indeed, an earlier and much rarer verb saunter “to muse,” seems to have existed, but no one knows whether it was the same word. Something in the sound complex saunter, with its frequentative suffix –er (as in chatter or pitter–patter), must have suggested a leisurely activity.

The second etymological dictionary of English appeared in 1671. Its author, Stephen Skinner, included the verb and even had an idea of its origin: allegedly, the etymon of saunter was French sauter “to jump” (look up saltation in English dictionaries for the Latin root of sauter). But soon a hypothesis emerged that outlived many others. Sancta terra “Holy Land” was conjured up, “because when there were frequent Expeditions to the Holy Land many Idle Persons went from Place to Place upon pretence they had taken the Cross upon them or intended to do so, and to go thither.” This is Nathan Bailey (1721), whose dictionary was revised and reprinted countless times. His derivation of saunter from sancta terra (or its translation into French) stayed until the age of serious comparative philology.

However, not everybody rejected Bailey’s derivation of saunter. I’ll quote Ernest Weekley’s etymological dictionary. “SAUNTER: ‘From c. 1660, to roam loiter, and earlier and rare saunter, to muse to hesitate, being perhaps a different word.’ Etymologists of the 17^th century agree in deriving from French sainte-terre, Holy Land. Although this etymology is now derided, it may be partly true [!]. I suggest as origin Spanish santero ‘sometimes an hermit, sometimes one that lives with the hermit, and goes about questing for him and his chappel’ [Stephens, a 1706 dictionary of Spanish]. This word is also used of a ‘shrine-crawler’ in general. We may compare Italian romigare, ‘to roame, to roave or goe up and downe solitarie and alone as an hermit’ (Florio [a 1598 Italian dictionary] ….” ROAM: “‘Traditionally from Rome, as place of pilgrimage’; cf. Old French romier, pilgrim to Rome, Spanish romero, Italian romeo ‘a roamer, a wanderer, a palmer.’ The NED [= OED] altogether rejects this and suggests Middle English ramen, a cognate with Old High German rāmen ‘to aim at, strive after.’ It is quite clear that roam was early associated with Rome, the earliest occurrence of ramen… being connected in the same line with Rom-leoden ‘people of Rome’. The word is also older than dictionary records, as roamer, quoted by NED from Piers Plowman, was a surname in 1273…, surviving as Romer. For another word that may have influenced roam see saunter.”

Walter W. Skeat kept returning to saunter and ended up saying “of unknown origin.” Those interested in the history of saunter waited with impatience for the appearance of the volume of the OED containing the mysterious word, but Henry Bradley, the volume’s editor, failed to solve the riddle. Nor did James A. H. Murray, the chief editor of the OED, ever write anything about saunter. The OED online offers no solution either, but it made one important concession. The original OED rejected any connection between roam and Rome, while the latest version of the great dictionary admits, even if without much enthusiasm, Weekley’s explanation (Weekley’s name does not appear in the entry, but this fact is irrelevant). If roam goes back to Rome, saunter con be derived from sancta terra!

However, I don’t think the two are connected. Saunter “stroll” seems to have turned up too late to be derived from sancta terra, and if we add saunter “muse” to the equation, the senses won’t fit. Also, I keep thinking that saunter was coined or revived in the palace slang of King Charles II, and if so, at that time, everybody would have known the reference to pilgrims, but Skinner did not. Thus, roam may not throw light on saunter.

There has been a vague feeling that saunter consists of the prefix s and some Romance root. Hence the suggested etymon s’adventurer “to expose oneself to danger.” Skeat at one time reluctantly accepted this uninviting solution, though he admitted that no analog of such an odd derivation could be found. Auntre, the Old French for “adventure,” loomed large in various hypotheses, but no one could account for initial s, and of course, “to adventure oneself” sounded odd. The latest attack on saunter known to me was made in 1945. Leo Spitzer (Philological Quarterly 44, pp. 27-28) derived the verb from Old French cintrer “to mold an arch” (originally “to gird”) and then, allegedly, to “search, stroll, muse.” Perhaps saunter “to muse” and saunter “to stroll” do belong together, but it is rather unlikely that the verb that interests us has a long, complicated history between French and English.

Here are a few other suggestions, given below for amusement’s sake. “Is it possible that sauntering should be derived from sanitas, and have, when applied to a walk, the same meaning as our common word constitutional?” (1874). Our common word! Cornelia Blimber informed little Paul Dombey that she was going for a constitutional, and Paul wondered what that was. If you, too, wonder, (re)read the unforgettable Chapter 12 of the novel Dombey and Son. Constitutional, a piece of university slang (no citations predating 1829 in the OED; Dombey and Son was published in installments between 1846 and 1848), was not so short-lived, it appears. Another guess, antedating Weekley: “The dual signification of [Spanish] santéro, i.e. ‘one who collects alms for a holy man or hermit’ and ‘a hypocrite’, together with the lazy life led by like hangers-on of the Church, may serve to render such a supposition [santero as the etymon of saunter] plausible—at least on the surface” (1889). “Armstrong’s Gaelic Dictionary has sanntair, a stroller, a lounger—derived from sannt, lust or carnal inclination—and sanntach, lustful; whence to Santee—to prowl about and follow women with a lustful desire” (thus, saunter from Gaelic; 1875). And so it goes (one luminary after another): Hensleigh Wedgwood, Walter W. Skeat, Richard Morris, and even the indomitable Frank Chance. Etymological sauntering, it appears, is indeed hard work.

_{Featured image: English School, circa 1665. Double portrait of King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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The salt of the earth and salt in a saltcellar

First of all, my thanks to those who commented on the previous posts. Don’t miss the note about the ancient Romans’ view of babies on the father’s knee and the suggestion that the idiom to pull one’s leg may be of nautical origin. If this suggestion is correct, to pull one’s leg will align itself with to pay through the nose. From what I have read, to pay through the nose is indeed a technical expression coined by sailors. As concerns the Greek origin of the verb moan, I found no confirmation of this idea in the books I consulted.

Now on to today’s topic, but first, an acknowledgment. Below, I’ll use the material of several publications, without referring to them. Such is my usual practice in this blog. When I write a scholarly paper, I supply it with a detailed bibliography, but for a popular exposition like the present one such details will probably only bore the readers. Anyway, I found the names for “salt” all over the world in a 2009 paper by Václav Blažek and some useful information in a 2010 paper by L. P. Dronova, in Peter Schrijver’s 1995 paper, and in Victor Hehn’s 1873 book Das Salz, to mention a few.

In Eurasia, all the forms look similar: sāle, sāl, sol’, and the like. The forms elsewhere usually have a root ranging in meaning from “good” to “sour.” Here is a short list of such “exotic” forms: bera, hmog, jot, kiho, melakh, mbulano, sipo, tabtu, tirdi, and úogo. However, surprises may occur even closer to home. Thus, Latvian (Latvian is of course an Indo-European language!) druskà “salt” means “something small, crumbly.” In dealing with the name of such a product, one never knows whether it goes back to some extremely ancient protoform or is a migratory word, that is, a term traveling from place to place with the object it designates. Of course, in their migration westwards, Indo-European tribes found great deposits of salt on the shores of the Aral and the Caspian Sea. Be that as it may, a common Indo-European name of salt probably existed and looked like s-l, with a vowel between them.

One notices that the word meaning “salt” often resembles the word for “sea.”  Thus, the Latin for “open sea” is salum. As studies of the British Iron Age show (to cite just one example), salt was produced on the coast. Seawater was probably let in in spring and allowed to sit until autumn, when a salt crust was formed. An important observation is in order here: the spread of salt is inseparable from the spread of agriculture, because salt is an indispensable condiment only in the food of those who depend on vegetable products. (See the image of deer salt licks!) By contrast, meat-eaters can do without salt. To give just one example: as late as the nineteenth century, some Bedouins did not use salt.

Germanic also contains some words that point to the connection between salt and sea water. In Old Scandinavian, we find hit eystra salt (literally, “the eastern salt”) for the Baltic Sea. Not improbably, English silt, which is a borrowing from Scandinavian, contains the same root. But English silt means only “sediment,” while in modern Norwegian and Danish dialects, similar words have wider currency, and the related verbs usually mean “to pickle.” German Sülze “pork jelly” belongs here too, although it’s not so much salt, the crystalline compound NaCl, that interests us in this context as its use in food preparation.

Let us return to the ties between salt and agriculture. In the Indo-European language family, the root sal– is widespread in the area in which also the root ar– “plow” is known. (The English adjective arable “fit for tillage” is a borrowing from Old French or directly from Latin, but whatever the source, it gives English speakers an idea of that root. Incidentally, Old English also had the verb arjan “to plow,” and to ear is still known in some dialects.) The point of this short excursus is obvious: plowing presupposes agriculture, and that is why in language, the plow and salt as a food product go together.

A striking detail in the history of the word salt is that its seemingly ubiquitous cognates (so in Greek, Latin, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic) do not show up in the Indo-Iranian group. They are absent from Sanskrit. If such a word had existed, it would have shown up in Rigveda and Avesta. The perennial question that bothered medieval scholars and often bothers us is whether the absence of a word means the absence of the object it designates. This is not a good place for going into philosophical depths, but the fact remains that a cognate of salt is absent from a most important language group.

The etymology of salt is perhaps known. Of interest are a few words whose phonetic shape resembles that of salt and which refer to the dirty-grey color. Such are English sallow, German Sal(weide) “willow” (Latin salix), and Russian solovei “nightingale” (stress on the last syllable; if so, then “a grey bird”). They have often been compared with salt. (There is no justice in the world: of all the memorable qualities of the nightingale only its color was singled out by the Slavic speakers of long ago!). Thus, salt “grey substance”? It also easy to notice that the root sal– sounds like the Latin word sōl “sun.” According to a bold and rather adventurous hypothesis, salt is related to sōl and meant “the sediment left after the water had evaporated.” 

Whatever the distant origin of salt, an amazing twist in its history deserves our attention. Some close cognates of our word mean “sweet”! Here, Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Lettish) and Slavic provide the most striking evidence. In Russian, slad– means “sweet” and solod means “malt.” The root must have had a rather indeterminate sense, just “something adding good taste to the consumed food,” that is, “condiment.” Ambiguity in this sphere is common. Sweet is probably related to sap. Both salty and sweet must have meant (rather vaguely) “making the food more edible.” Sour goes back to the sense “wet” (but in Lithuanian, the related adjective changed its sense to “salty”!), and bitter is, most probably, from a historical point of view, “biting” (yet the metaphor underlying “bitter” is different in other languages). All our words designating taste are metaphors, whose origin we usually no longer remember. But even knowing the general principle, one cannot help admiring the infinite resourcefulness of language. Language is great, while etymology, we should admit, is sweet and sour, and most of what etymologists say should be taken with a grain of salt.

_{Featured image: Location of the Baltic Sea in the region. Image by Aplaice. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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On a limb

One can teach an advanced course on etymology, while climbing up the leg, ant-wise. On foot we reach the territory of Indo-European, but it is not every day that an English word finds itself in such respectable company. Greek pod– and Latin ped– are of course related to foot (the variation p ~ f and d ~ t goes back to the First Consonant Shift, a familiar motif in this blog; compare pater ~ father and duo ~ two). The Latin root turns up in English pedal, pedestrian, and so forth. We walk pad-pad-pad, and so did people millennia ago. The most ancient word for “foot” was obviously sound-imitative. Probably the same holds for path, despite some hurdles, not worthy of discussion in the present context.

By contrast, leg is a loan from Scandinavian. What a surprise! For about a thousand years, English speakers have been out on a (borrowed) limb and are none the worse for it! So it goes… To exacerbate matters, we discover that the etymology of Old Norse leggr is unclear and that its original meaning must have been simply “limb,” because it turns up in such transparent compounds as armleggr and handleggr. Arm-limb and hand-limb look like so-called tautological compounds of the pathway type (both constituents mean almost or exactly the same). Leggr could also mean “bone hollow”!

The once popular comparison of Old Norse leggr with Latin lacerta “lizard” should be dismissed, because the origin of the Latin animal name is unknown and can therefore shed no light on another obscure word. Even if Latin lacertus “arm” has the same root as lacerta, the etymology of those two words does not become clearer. Leggr is related to Old Norse lær “hip” (the Swedish cognate is lår, and English once had lire, with the same sense), but this is where the story ends, though some Greek nouns have been cited as possibly related. Leg, we should admit, is a word of obscure origin. Nor does the history of German Bein “leg” shed even the weakest light on leggr, because it too is a word of unclear etymology.

We should move on, but we immediately stumble at ankle, another loan from Scandinavian! This is an especially unexpected case, because Old English had the word anclēow. Chaucer still used it in a slightly modernized form, but then the Scandinavian very similar competitor took over. Anclēow, a compound, was related to such words as Latin angulus “angle,” which, considering the shape of the ankle, makes perfect sense.

We seem to have reached the shin but have nothing to boast of. Old English had two closely related words for “shin”: scīa and scina, both “less than fully transparent,” which means “of unknown” or “of unclear origin.” The now accepted derivation of the word from the root for “cut” (as in German schneiden) is, in my opinion, doubtful, and I am glad that the OED online does not mention it. Shin resembles German Schenkel “thigh,” another rather obscure word. The Germanic cognates of shin mean “splint, a thin piece.” Skeat, hesitatingly, admitted that shin might be related to skin (skin, with its characteristic initial sk– is still another borrowing from Scandinavian: the native English word for “skin” is hide). The connection is dubious but not improbable. Once again, consider Russian golen for “shin,” that is, a bare place (goly “naked”). The association between the shin and a place covered only by skin is not improbable. However, all this is clever guesswork and speculation.

Onward, only onward! With knee we are again on solid Indo-European soil: Latin genu, Greek gónu, and others. However, the soil is swampy. Several words, once they are reduced to protoforms, sound alike (almost indistinguishable). Such are knee, chin, and kin. Kin is particularly intriguing. For clarity we may compare such English words as genuflection “bending the knee” and generation. Both are of Romance origin. Genu– in genuflection obviously refers to knees. The etymology of generation needs no comment. Is there a connection between generation and knee? Though in some languages this connection is obvious, speakers do not notice it. For instance, the Russian for “knee” is koleno (stress on the second syllable), while the word generation (as in the first generation of…) is po-kolen-ie.

It has been suggested and more or less accepted in both linguistics and anthropology that the connection is not fortuitous. An old ritual has been cited, according to which when a baby is born, the father puts it on his knee and thus recognizes the newcomer as belonging to the kin. This ritual, which has been observed in several cultures, naturally, presupposes the patriarchy. The somewhat puzzling tie between generation and knee has also been recorded in a few languages not belonging to the Indo–European family.

We have finally reached the thigh and the hip. With thigh “the upper part of the leg” one is again on firm ground. The word has unmistakable Indo-European cognates and contrary to the well-known idiom, here, we do have a leg to stand on. The word’s root seems to mean “fat, thick.” Now on to the hip! But first, it might be of some use to give a few definitions, in order to avoid misunderstanding: thigh “part of the human leg between the knee and the hip”; hip “part on either side where the bone of a person’s leg is joined to the trunk.” For highbrows: perineum “the region between the scrotum and the anus in males, and between the posterior vulva junction and the anus in females.” In bilingual dictionaries, thigh and hip are sometimes confused. With so much light shed on the subject, I am pleased to add that the only English minimal pair illustrating the difference between th, voiceless, and th, voiced, is thigh versus thy.

Like thigh, hip is well-connected. Greek kúbos “hollow above the hips on cattle; cubical die” is probably the most transparent cognate of hip outside Germanic (h-p versus k-b is again due to the Consonant Shift). Of course, we do not know why some ancient sound group like kew– (the reconstructed root) suggested to people the idea of bending and thus of a hole or in general something round. We don’t even know whether such “roots” existed, but it appears that the words listed as cognate in our dictionaries are indeed related, unless the entire procedure is an aberration of vision, the result of looking at an incredibly remote object through the wrong end of the binoculars. Mission accomplished! Ant-wise, we have crawled all the way up the leg and ignored only the toes and sitting in one’s lap.Leg is a part of numerous idioms, most of which are transparent. Only pull one’s leg, fist recorded in texts in 1821, is enigmatic. Even about a hundred years later, many British speakers had never heard it, though both Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde used it in their plays. In the Victorian epoch, leg was avoided in polite conversation (the more reason, of course, for the phrase to be widely known!). It appears that the idiom enjoyed more popularity overseas (in India and in the US) than in Great Britian. It has also been suggested that its home is Scotland, but no evidence at my disposal supports this idea. Of course, such a vulgar idiom must have a well-hidden origin. Consider British English you are having me on!

_{Featured image: Image by David To from Pixabay}

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A grim shadow of a broad grin

While working on the post about mean and moan, I decided to write something about groan, but I did not realize how far this word would take me. Gr– is one of the best-known sound-imitative (onomatopoeic) complexes. Greedy animals in fairy tales and disgruntled shopkeepers in novels say gr-gr. They grunt and growl. Grinding and the monster Grendel (from the Old English poem Beowulf) are not “far behind.” All is grist that comes to this mill, even perhaps groin, let alone great. Yet when one looks up groan in an etymological dictionary, one learns with surprise that the answer will appear in the entry grin. We certainly don’t grin when we groan. People seem to have once had the “root” gr-n, which was like a bag into which any vowel might be put for the production of a rather unpredictable sense.

We find the same situation all over the Germanic-speaking world, and exploring the roots of groaning and grinning resolves itself into an almost endless list. This list is not uninteresting, because it probably shows how millennia ago people coined their “first words.” To be sure, we are not witnessing the production of primordial cries, but even a later process is instructive. Old Norse grína meant “to grimace, to distort one’s face in joy or disgust” (note that though by devious ways, grimace has the root grim!). The numerous cognates of grína mean “to snarl; growl, groan.”

And what about grunt? The same story. To be sure, pigs are famous for grunting, but each of us may sometimes give a grunt. Grunt is an old verb. German grunzen, Latin grunnire, and Greek grúzein mean the same. One sees such words in a dictionary and does not give them another thought. Yet this list should cause surprise. If everybody from Old England to Ancient Greece had practically the same sound-imitative verb, how can we account for this phenomenon? Granted, primitive noises make the same impression on people everywhere, but still: almost the same verb, not just gr-gr-gr! It has been a long time since I mentioned Wilhelm Oehl, a Swiss linguist, who once wrote a series of papers about what he called primitive word creation. I find his examples “thought-provoking” (in quotes, because this epithet has been trampled to death: every time I open my computer, someone offers me another thought-provoking story). Similar impulses produce similar reactions (and words) everywhere, but in this case, the uncanny similarity of the form comes as a surprise.

Can such words be borrowed? Is it possible that Latin borrowed the verb from Greek, and the “Germans” borrowed it from Latin? Yes, indeed. In the Romance-speaking world, we find the verbs grigner, grinar, and their likes meaning “to grunt, growl, snarl.” Not only Oehl but also the great German philologist Wilhelm Braune has been mentioned more than once in this blog. He was the author of the main textbooks of Gothic and Old High German and the coeditor of a deservedly famous journal. His given names were Wilhelm Theodor, and, amusingly, he published all his Germanic works under the name Wilhelm and a whole series of etymological papers about the Germanic etymology of Romance words under the name Theodor. Our gr– words belong here: from Germanic to Romance.

Braune (in this case, Theodor) reconstructed the initial meaning of gr-n words as “gnash one’s teeth, crack.” This protomeaning looks realistic. After all, crack begins with kr-, and in the situation that interests us not much difference can be found between gr– and kr-. Braune also offered a detailed essay on the origin of the word grimace, which traveled from Germanic to Romance and back to Germanic. My impression is that Braune’s contributions to etymology have not been noticed. In any case, I never see references to them. I discovered the entire series only in the process of compiling my database for a new etymological dictionary of English. It was clear that Romance periodicals would contain numerous works on Germanic words, but I did not expect to discover a veritable treasure house of etymological musings by someone who is remembered as one of the founders of Germanic comparative grammar. As regards today’s topic, Braune’s essay on grimace deserves special mention, but we have to go on. 

It seems that gr is just a typical onomatopoeic sound complex. However, this complex suddenly begins to offer other possibilities. Gr-gr fills us with fear, and we are ready to add gruesome to our list. Gruesome is a northern word in English, but German grausam “cruel” and the impersonal verb grauen “to fill with horror” show that the word was also known in West Germanic. In its wanderings, it crossed the path of the color name gray/grey. Grimalkin means “cat” (-malkin goes back to a female personal name, originally from Mathilda, but later, typical of lower classes; hence Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders) and is understood as “grey Malkin,” but the sense “frightening, terrible” is behind it. Gray-Malkin is one of many names Shakespeare used for “Devil.” Though the most belligerent cats were also called grey in Old Norse myths, the adjective’s original sense was as in German grausam and English gruesome. This is the way of all things: you grin, and your grin inspires people with awe or fear.

When we grin, the mouth opens and a space is formed. Several words in Scandinavian owe their origin to this situation. One of them is “branch” (compare “a branch of knowledge,” that is, a separate area). Such are Swedish gren and its cognates. A branch separates itself from the trunk! This is how language works. A sound complex is produced, and its message is unmistakable. For instance, gr-gr (noise). Then more abstract senses begin to weave around it (fear, fright). Still later, people remember that to produce a grunt, the mouth should open (grins and grimaces appear), and the lips separate (branches join the crowd). For some reason, at some time, the sound complex goes abroad, and the same words begin to wander from Greece to Germany, and from the Germanic world to France and Italy. To add insult to injury, the word meets its twin (this happened with gray), and more confusion is the result. Grimalkins begin to jump all over the place. I doubt that AI will beat humans at this game. In my opinion, historical linguists, though largely unemployed, will always have something to do. On another note, my home team has just lost the home opener, and I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the title of the newspaper article about this disaster: “Home…Groan.” Most certainly, the editor of the sports section will not read this post.ave an exchange of comments. Exchange, let it be remembered, is the root of societal life, be it the Stock Exchange, suffering, or love.

_{Featured image: Illustration of the Cheshire Cat, a character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1916) by Arthur Rackham. Public domain via rawpixel.}

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From <em>meaning</em> to <em>moaning</em>

Few people realize how troublesome the word mean is. We have mean as in meaning (“what do you mean?”); mean “ignoble, base” (as in such a mean fellow), and mean, as in the meantime and meanwhile. The last of those three mentioned has a Romance root, related to median and medium, and need not bother us. But the first two seem to be related, though it is not clear how. We may argue that they are. Yet we should remember that as a famous linguist said a century or so ago, a connection can be found between any two concepts, even between an inkwell and freedom of will. He was right. Semantic bridges are easy to reconstruct and equally easy to demolish.

From the phonetic point of view, the verb mean and the adjective mean go back to identical forms. As just stated, it is hard to decide whether we are dealing with the same word or with two homonyms. I will join the majority of today’s etymologists and try to explain why the sought-for connection may and perhaps does exist. The situation in English is the same as elsewhere in Germanic: Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. For instance, in German, we find a similarly incongruous combination: meinen “to mean,” gemein (ge– is a prefix) “shared, common,” and “base, perfidious.” Even the German noun Meineid “perjury” (that is, “a false oath”; Eid “oath”) turns up. If we accept the hypothesis that “common,” “base, abject,” and “to mean, signify” are connected, we should try to find some explanation for this union in the customs of old communities and then move from some concrete sense to the most abstract one. “To mean, signify” is, of course, an abstract concept.

As usual, we should look for the cognates (related forms) of the verb mean in other Indo-European languages. They turn up in Slavic and Baltic, where the sought-for verbs mean “to change, exchange, barter.” (Take note!) For instance, we find the Russian verb meniat (stress on the second syllable; the vowel was once long) “to (ex)change,” but the gloss for a closely related form in Sanskrit is “to barter” and (!) “deception.” No surprise: trade is impossible without occasional fraud.

I would like to add a detail not mentioned in dictionaries. The famous French scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss based his model of old societies on the idea of exchange. In the remote past (in medieval Europe, until approximately the fifteenth century), money did not exist. People did not buy or sell things: they exchanged them. Hence the culture of reciprocal gift giving and the curse laid on a buried treasure (a motif known from the mythology and folklore of all Eurasia). This is the point: treasure should move from hand to hand, rather than lying intact. Consequently, at one time, exchange was more than a detail of societal life: it determined life’s entire structure. Today, it often remains unclear how far historians should go in ascribing the events of the past to the system of exchange. Lévi-Strauss tended to make too much of it, but no one will probably doubt that trade (exchange, barter) presupposed both honest dealers and swindlers.

The most ancient Germanic form of the adjective mean was main-, as in Gothic ga-main-s “common” and (!) “unclean.” Was the implication “pawed over”? (Gothic, a Germanic language, is known to us from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek.) The sense “unclean” also comes to the fore in the Gothic verb –mainjan “to defile.” All kinds of unexpected references in the words that interest us did not bother Old Germanic speakers. Nor do they bother us. We say: “what do you mean?” and “such a mean person”—and experience no discomfort. This is the same thing with all homonyms: unless a pun is intended, the context makes everything clear.

Of some interest is also Latin mūnus “duty, public office,” familiar to us from commune and also related to the root of English mean. As explained long ago, the semantic development of the Latin word is based on the institution of hospitality, because a public official had the responsibility, in exchange for his honored position, to give games and public spectacles. Whenever we look, we find the root of mean with positive connotations (as in “duty”) and their opposite, often submerged in generalities (“to transform; exchange”) or appearing in words of negative semantics (“to falsify”; so again, in Gothic). “Change” is a broad concept: its reference may be neutral, but it need not be. We have witnessed a striking development from “change, exchange” to “declare; have an opinion,” and finally, to “intend” and “signify.”

This essay has two messages. First, we observed a close connection between language history and the history of society. Words name things, and no one doubts that the connection exists, and that is why historical linguists study material culture. Last week, I referred to the old periodical Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). Obviously, one cannot discover the etymology of the word plow, without knowing what plow means and what one looks like. Yet time and again, we run into the most ridiculous etymologies of fish names by the people who have never seen the fish in question.

Second, language develops according to its own capricious laws. Any action may be beneficial or detrimental, and the result of the sematic development of words cannot be predicted. “Trade” and “exchange” did not have to produce so many offshoots, but they turned up, and we do our best to account for them. In German, one of the offshoots of meinen “to mean” probably gave birth to the old word for “love.” Of course, why not? If “exchange” can produce “perfidy” and “fraud,” why cannot it produce “love”? Medieval German literature is famous (among other things) for its love poetry, known as Minnesang. German meinen has survived with the sense “to mean,” but at one time it was also a synonym of “to love.” We began our journey with a word for “exchange.” Isn’t love (Minne) an exchange of feelings between the one who loves and the one loved?

The most bizarre possible cognate of mean is English moan, which at one time even existed in the form mean. From a phonetic point of view, the match is perfect. It is the senses that again look incompatible. Yet by this time, it must have become clear that given freedom of will, a semantic bridge can always be constructed between almost any two points. If “exchange” can beget “love,” why not “suffering and grief”? We don’t moan when we are happy. Opinions on the etymology of moan are divided, and I have touched on it, mainly to emphasize how intricate and interesting the study of historical semantics is. Our colleges have all but abolished courses like Old English and Old Norse. No one loves us, specialists in such areas, except the public. Why then doesn’t the public fight for the restitution of historical linguistics?

It would be interesting to hear what our readers think about such things. Perhaps between the two Wednesdays, we will have an exchange of comments. Exchange, let it be remembered, is the root of societal life, be it the Stock Exchange, suffering, or love.

_{Featured image: Orr, John William, Engraver. Indian princess presenting a necklace of pearls to de Soto / J.W. Orr, N.Y. [Published] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. No known restrictions.}

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